Why it's so important to be able to edit/write additional Bio's and Reviews

Hi, this really is to put a new slant on why it’s so important to be able to write our own editorials for albums and artist or edit the ones that are there.

Most of us today suffer from the very 1st world problem of simply having too much music. Period.

Now Roon has made this even “worse” by allowing us to add almost infinite amounts of more music to our collection via integration with Tidal. So we can merrily add potentially 100’s of albums a week to our collections, reading editorials left right and centre or getting recommends by word of mouth and following this up by plucking albums out of the ether and adding to our virtual libraries.

Whilst this is all well and good, I defy anyone who has a collection of more than perhaps a thousand albums to tell me that they know it particularly intimately.

For the most part, it seems Roon is designed for collectors with many many 1000’s of albums.

So I come to the crux of this post…How can we even begin to keep a tab on what’s what in our mega-collections other than by making personal notes?

Say we listen to a hitherto unlistened album at random, invariably it gets listened to and then forgotten about even if it’s brilliant simply because there’s so much more to listen to which is also great.

With the ability to write our own comments, it attaches us emotionally to our albums than simply tagging or “hearting” or “starring” them will do. It would be so great to be able to link those listening memories to our personal thoughts and words, and anecdotes perhaps about who intro’d it to us or who we were with when we listened to it, who liked it other than us. Perhaps later on in life those memories may be all we have left to remember certain people who are no longer with us or with whom we have lost contact. So important.

Following on from this, we could allow the option to share our comments in Roon itself to see what other members have written about an album, like micro-communities within albums or artists themselves.

On a business level it makes sense too… the more Roon encourages us to participate and invest time in tailoring our Roons, inputting data, and such, the more chance clients will return year after year paying their subs, eh?

So please, the gods of Roon, hear my plea and allow us to add notes or comments of our own to albums and artists?

Oh, and have it as a Focus option, to be able to search for “Albums with personal comments” so we can find them again later.

Cheers!

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I love this idea! I am always aggravated to see a “review” that rips an album I love. I enjoy the info, facts, details, etc, but reviews are annoying. Community comments would hopefully be more about sharing our love of artists, albums, songs, rather than “reviews”. Could be pretty cool, or a disaster :grinning:

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I think it’s a cool idea. I’m not sure I would necessarily want others’ content to show up in my Roon (great way to start an argument about an album; too much opportunity for trolling), but our own notes about an artist, album, or track could be pretty useful. I doubt a ton of users would use it, but I do think it’s cool.

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@Kenneth_Price too, Thanks. It could be an option to publish or not our personal notes. Have the published notes featured with the album/artist, as another option, with comments section following each published note to start discussions. Like you say there are downsides but overall I think it would be a great way to enhance the Roon experience.

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It would be a way to make Roon more of a community experience, with, of course, the ability to turn off community comments/discussions…or block certain commenters…report abusive commenters…argh, it could get complicated, but could still be potentially great.

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Yes! After all, it’s all about the music isn’t it?

Look at how many replies and views there are to the “what are you listening to now” thread in this community for proof of the potential interest in such a feature.

It’s interesting that I was talking on this subject with Artist Carter Sampson and her guitarist B-JBaartmans at breakfast following a gig we hosted.
B-J was concerned about the longevity of the physical discs and this talk led to Roon and MQA.

Also we remembered that back in the day we could only afford a few albums and so we played them thoroughly digesting every sleeve note and really paid attention to the artwork. We had a real grounding in the music we owned.
We would dream in our wildest fantasies of what is reality today but now we have it; something is lost.

So the OP makes a very good point and a strong reason behind it.

Give Carter Sampson’s Wilder side CD spin whilst your on Tidal if you like some contemporary Americana and if you like it, make some notes about this thread when we have the capacity to do so in Roon.

Chris

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Spot on Chris. We gained so much and lost something too. I find I do listen primarily to the oldies in my collection and the nostalgia is overwhelming. Stuff I listened to in my tweens still makes up the core of my listening. It’s so important to start to take stock of this new vast sea of music we have and to be able to deal with it in new and exciting ways.

For those of us in middle age it’s a confusing time as we have experienced both worlds. For those entering the music enjoyment arena now it’s an ephemeral thing, there’s no real attachment to music any more and we do need to provide anchors for the young to personalise their virtual collections for the decades to come.

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Yeah requested this almost 2 years ago:

Am keen to be able to edit reviews, and add further reviews, either my own or from other sources.

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Yes. I was a bit naughty, I almost replied off the back of your old request, but thought a new thread might excite more response :slight_smile:

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No worries :slight_smile: I’m always keen to keep requests together as then the numbers build up - but what I end up doing is linking them together like this!

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A workaround I have used, adding relevant text but not removing the existing review:

I liked a review I found on Amazon, copied-and-pasted it into an editor (Notepad, Word, whatever formatting you want) and printed it to a PDF (Windows function), and moved PDF to the Roon library folder. Reading a PDF is not well integrated in Roon, not like the review, but usable.

EDIT: But this PDF doesn’t replace the review and therefore doesn’t show in the Sharing image. The OP is right.

However, @Mike, a found a bug: I first selected the relevant text on the Amazon page and printed, but I was careless and the browser printed the entire Amazon page, so the PDF contained stuff I didn’t want. I then copied and printed from another app and copied over, but Roon didn’t see the update. Bug-ish, but ok. So I deleted that PDF, and copied the new one under a different name. The old one still shows - ok, Roon copied it into the database, perhaps? But it didn’t see the new one at all, even though it has a new name. Need some management functions…

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Yeah, I thought of this too, Anders. Or also to write the text and make a screen dump to JPG or screen dump text found on websites, etc. But Roon can do a lot better, I am sure :slight_smile:

I have a lot of music that has no reviews at all and I can’t even imagine how hard it is to keep on top of the volume of new music & old not in the Roon’s review library section. I’ve seen many good independent reviews on albums I have and would like to be able to add them in to my library myself giving credit to the source. Roon could then vet to see if they wanted it to be made public. A bit like Wikipedia but with the control of public release up to Roon and/or user/me that added it. I would have a review in my library for my benefit especially on albums that may not ever get reviewed in Room. If there was a Roon review that I didn’t find appropriate I could hide it in preference. For my own review and/or online review or you could set one out of several reviews saved as primary and toggle though to read others & Roon’s.

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Pierre

I think all the reviews of albums I have seen in Roon are directly taken from Allmusic.com - I am not sure if they have an agreement or not in this regard. I like your idea of having the option of Roon deciding whether our locally added content becomes public; and this should go both ways if we add local/edited content then we should have the right to share it or not. It would be a great step forward in my opinion. So much potential!!

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The ONLY thing I don’t like about Roon is the album “reviews” from AllMusic. Again, I don’t care to see a negative review of music I love by someone I don’t know and who probably doesn’t even like the genre in question. Instead of album reviews, I would love to see the details behind the album, maybe old school liner notes, etc. That being said, I realize Roon can’t hire thousands of people to start writing all this…but wait…Roon has thousands (I assume) of customers, many of which would love to write their thoughts on their favorite music for free! I would certainly do my part! This would really take Roon beyond an advanced music playback system to something much better, and kind of what the promise of Roon is: a more immersive music experience. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, opening up the metadata to the masses could also be a BIG MESS if people, well, act like people seem to online (ie YouTube commenters). It really would require some monitoring.

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Agree.

I think some sort of optional community sharing of our own thoughts and comments on albums and artists would be an incredible step forward. Connecting on a peer-peer basis like face book, ie with our “friends within Roon” on an album to album or artist to artist basis. How cool would that be?

That would overcome the issue you mention of opening up personal metadate to the masses; micro-communities would evolve through the love of our fave albums and artists.

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There is an up and coming company TuneMap supplying Liner notes, Photography and a whole lot more on artists. I have posted this in another topic post.

This may not be the answer to us being able to edit & customise Bio’s & Reviews but it could be used under license by Roon and this may be a more complete solution for mainstream or well known music & artists but when coupled with “Editable Bio’s & Reviews” which would be for the lesser known and obscure Artists & Music would be nirvana and solidly builds what Roon bio’s & review part of the app started.

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Completely agree with this. I would love nothing more than to read MY OWN metadata for the music in my library. How difficult would it be to have an xml formatted text file in the directory of an album that gets read along with the tracks? How cool would it be to share that with other users?

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As this topic seems to be getting bumped… bump!