Why Roon discography can't be trusted when searching for an album [with Roon explanation]

Thanks so much for your detailed reply @jamie, and thanks for explaining how Roon is doing what should be the streaming services job really in sorting (when it can) the wheat from the chaff!

Perhaps you could tweak the algorithm to include Fresh Sounds as a ‘good guy’ reissue specialist as the album I was originally looking for (that didn’t appear in discography but did appear in generic search) is a legitimate attempt by a recognised company to make available original albums (usually remastered to a high standard) with sometimes extra material from the same sessions so far not published - such as The Art of Pepper - Complete Master Takes of Omega Sessions. Also the actual original release of The Art of Pepper was for some reason on my system relegated to the ‘Appears In’ section - who knows why?

I have often thought how great it would be if Roon WAS a streaming service, then you would be totally responsible for the metadata - but if that can’t happen then being the gatekeeper (when you eventually get the gates working as well as you would like) is certainly the next best thing!

PS. That idea for showing the label on the ‘versions’ screen would I still think help enormously when we users need to perform our own mining operations looking for the good stuff :blush:

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Impressed by Roon’s effort to protect legitimate players!

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Thanks, @jamie . But any explanation for this?

Fascinating and informative thread. Just one question. You found what you wanted. Why not just listen to it?

I eventually found two versions, the original album and Fresh Sounds reissue with all the sessions… brilliant music and I AM listing to it and loving it! :blush:

PS. I’m surprised someone hasn’t said “I’ve got that on vinyl”! :rofl:

Just a thought I had this morning (it was late last night when I saw @jamie’s post) how you ‘see’ Roon might depend on when you came to Roon and what for. I think in my case I came to Roon after years of already listening exclusively to streamed music. I think I was probably the third UK customer of Spotify, a very early adopter with my trusty Logitech Squeezebox, then I migrated to WiMP and then Tidal and eventually Qobuz.

Yes I did eventually rip down most of my CD’s, but they were hardly ever accessed (they were buried in iTunes if I remember right) as I had by then replicated my physical library in the cloud.

So when I came to Roon it was as a ‘front end’ for my streaming service, that’s all, a front end with amazing features and wonderful metadata, but a front end nevertheless. So I think I have always wondered why Roon can’t simply BE a front end to Qobuz, use Qobuz discographies, artists biographies, tags, genres and give access to their excellent ‘Panoramas’ and so on, Why doesn’t it just default to what Qobuz says like a good ‘skin’ should and only reach out into the internet for metadata when that metadata isn’t available in the streaming service feed. I now know better than that!

Over the years of course I am being educated into just what Roon is (and I still think that needs further explanation in marketing and social media) and it is something new, there hasn’t been a Roon before and no one else to my knowledge is planning to make one. Why? Because the streaming services are mostly enough, for most people.

Anyway Roon is slowly educating me to fully understand what it is, and I only hope we can encourage the team and management without it appearing like caustic criticism (it often does seem to take that form and I am a guilty as anyone). Even the title of my post is a clear example of that (and I like the addition in brackets @jamie!). User groups and forums often take this confrontational tone and this Roon community is the least offensive of any I belong to. So I stand corrected in my attitude and I now understand the reasoning behind the effect I am seeing - there is work to be done still, but I better understand what has been done so far and why.

I would just say one thing… education is the better route to building loyalty I think. Why not take the Roon message out into the blog arena more often than you do. Blog entries could answer criticisms before they actually happen, by taking the grumbles on here as incentive for extensive feature explanations and tasters of what will be coming in the future? I’ve seen a couple recently and I must say they have been very useful in helping me understand the issues involved and what’s happening behind the scenes.

That sort of conversation is more helpful I think than a place like this where moans get responses and a sort of gladiatorial atmosphere becomes the norm. Blog posts could nip under the radar of hard core criticism and address the subjects Roon know cause the most activity in an educational and inclusive manner.

Nuff said… :smile:

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I don’t have it, but for titles I care about I try to buy the “ideal” physical copies and whatever hardware is needed to play them back well. If this means ripping an LP into Roon, then that’s the final step of course.

It’s just about the only direct control we have, because if the ideal copy happens to be a digital-only version, you either have to buy it/download it to keep it available or hope the subscription service + Roon always has it.

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It’s really good to learn about Roon’s efforts in this arena. A suggestion here (and not a criticism) would be to make record label information a little more front and centre when looking at versions of an album. I have a devil of a time finding (say) the Capitol Records issue of Nat King Cole albums from the grey-market editions from Revola, Hallmark etc. many of which are taken from vinyl copies with minimal restoration efforts. (Sometimes I don’t thiink they’ve even cleaned the LPs.) I think this is especially true as well in classical where you may want to listen to a carefully restored Naxos Historical issue over (perhaps) an ‘original’ label release from a degraded master.

I think all the streaming services have an issue with provenance (i.e., showing the provenance of an issue). Looking at publishing / copyright and release dates can help determine which issue / mastering / release you’re looking at. They and the labels could be more upfront on these things. That said, the detective work can be a lot of fun.

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ime, the "dodgy release issue is worse in Qobuz than it is with Tidal, and particularly effects Jazz and Classical, two areas in which Qobuz generally has a stronger catalog than Tidal. I subscribe to both, but it’s bad enough that I sometimes consider dropping the Q.

@jamie could you comment on why the definitive release seems to appear only under “Appearances”?

For classical releases, particularly operas, or anything than has a soloist, there often seems to be little distinction between where a recording shows up, discography, appearances, etc.

Interesting comment from Jamie. Leads me to wonder how much censoring Roon will do of local libraries. Will it come to a point where they won’t allow needledrops to be played.

I’m still very disappointed with the determination to equally weight library and streaming results. I care a lot less about streaming results than I do about my own library and Roon fails time after time to find stuff in my library.

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I am not sure it helps you very much but my experience is that forcing some kind of consistency would require a great deal of manual editing.

This seems to be controlled by who has been tagged as “primary artist”. Primary artists get listed as “main albums” in the discography. Other credits become “appearances”. In my Qobuz copy of the “orange” Art of Pepper, the “Art Pepper Quintet” is credited as primary artist, not Art Pepper. So Art Pepper gets only a confusing “album appearance” for the definitive version of the album.

This is a particularly odd one as the album looks like a quartet, not a quintet to me? Maybe others are experts on this release? Most jazz artists with long careers go through all sorts of trios, quartets, quintets with all sorts of lineups and the tagging can be a right mess accordingly. So unless you are prepared to do a lot of manual editing it is virtually random where artists are ending up in terms of main albums and appearances as you have noticed. Generally I delete all the primary links except the frontman with jazz to force some kind of consistency. I take a similar approach with Classical but the pruning is a little less brutal.

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Absolutely none.

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I’m pleased to hear it but I’ve lost a lot of confidence in Roon as a company so it will take a while before I believe again.

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I had a similar experience searching for some titles, and now I understand why. Thank you for the thorough explanation and protecting the rights holders and our expectation of a quality experience on Roon. :slight_smile:

Via primary artist does not work at all. Filtering with The Art of Pepper has no result.

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Try using the filter “Art of Pepper” instead…

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Hey @Arthur_Gonzales,

Maybe, but I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Can you tell me a bit more about the albums you circled? I’d be happy to help if I can.

Hey @Tim_Woodward

Thank you for receiving my response in the spirit that was written, as helpful, illuminating insight into what’s happening and why. Thanks also for your suggestion regarding a series of blog posts of this kind, we agree wholeheartedly that they could go a long way to educating our customers on the thought process behind some of the functionality that is seen in Roon, but not frequently explained.

I’m aiming to start doing more of this in the near future. I’ll drop a heads up here in Community. It would be good to get recommendations from you lot on topics and features you’d like to know more about.

Thank you for your suggestion here, @Malcolm_Percival! I’ll forward this as a possibility.

Happily, @woodford! This is something I probably need to go into greater depth about soon, but for now, briefy… Tim searched for Art Pepper and then filtered by Art of Pepper but the album in question is actually by The Art Pepper Quintet, not Art Pepper.

Now, Roon recognizes that the Art Pepper Quintet, Art Pepper Quartet, and some others are reliable aliases of Art Pepper. BUT, Tim didn’t search specifically for Art Pepper Quintet, he searched for Art Pepper, therefore it falls under the appearances tab. This is the dual-edged sword of metadata specificity displayed in action.

Hey @Andy_Jones

As @joel mentioned earlier, none. If you aren’t seeing some of your local library albums in Roon there’s other causes at work. I generally go to My Library>Albums and use the Filter function on that page to locate titles that I know are in my Library. I find what I’m looking for pretty easily that way.

Also I want to clarify that we’re not censoring the albums I discussed in my post above. We’re filtering them, there’s an important difference. If we were censoring them there’d be no way to see them in Roon. That’s not the case. As I explained, simply add them on the streaming platform and they’ll appear in your Roon library. It’s a middle ground between the efforts detailed above and respecting your right to hear them anyway if you choose.

We’re sorry to hear that Andy and we’d like to fix that if we can. Please send me a PM and let me know what’s happened and how we can make it right. I’ll do what I can to help. :v:t2:

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Hi @jamie . Sorry for the confusion. The problem is those two albums I encircled are not by the Jose Gonzalez pictured above. And they are even in the top row of his discography page. From the other posts above, it could be a metadata problem. You talked about providing the correct releases when we do search. I think this should be a part of what you’re looking at in your search algorithm.

Thanks.

thanks @jamie for the detail, but frankly, as an end user, this is a level of metadata cleverness that I just don’t want. rather than clarity, it adds fussiness and frustration to the UI.