Thanks for the clarity and concision of your response on this, @jamie
Two thoughts, somewhat related:
First, I don’t think that there’s any evidence that expiring copyrights harm the creation of new music, and they certainly don’t harm the artists, now no longer alive. As copyrights keep getting extended, the beneficiaries aren’t the Gershwin brothers or Art Pepper. Creative work is part of our culture, and as someone who has created intellectual property for thirty years, I’m in favor of much shorter copyright protection. If there’s a problem with European “loophole” providers, it’s that the middlemen (Qobuz and you) don’t make it easy for listeners to share with each other which are the best options.
Second, perhaps it makes sense to give people a simple button they could hit for various filters Roon could offer. You could have one for “prefer the best sound quality” in searches, one for “filter out recordings from labels Roon screens for” etc. Doesn’t cost anything, improves transparency and serves different functions.
Anyone interested in copyright would really enjoy this book, by the extraordinary Lewis Hyde:
That still leaves many releases, versions, remasters, bit depths. There’s been eness debates on the forum over similar suggestions.
There is no single answer to “best”. Roon IMHO ate doing the best they can by removing obscuring dreck.
As much as I appreciate the offer to explain my difficulties with Roon again, let’s keep it simple.
Broken functionality. I have started support threads for issues with functionality that broke after years of working. The process of reporting problems in itself is painful, then the conversation happens in 8 day cycles. Is support so badly overwhelmed?
Bug fixing. When remote playlists stop ‘play from here’ behaviour the bug fix should take hours to arrive. That is core functionality broken by an update.
I have more but Roon the company is not delivering on basic functionality in my system right now. Support is so slow to respond, bug fixes taking way too long and updates breaking existing functionality.
Roon are currently the worst provider of software in my ecosystem measured by price/performance. That’s without even taking into account the problem with searches.
Thank you for the added detail. This situation is the result of equivalence issue. These are common when artists with similar names are lacking enough rich metadata to trigger distinction as two seperate artists. It looks like this could be caused by metadata from a streaming partner.
We’ll take a closer look at how the metadata is reflected on our metadata and partner side and see what can be done. Please understand that corrections of this kind are addressed as system wide fixes, we can’t make prescriptive adjustments on a case by case basis. Please continue to bring these reports to our attention as you find them. We appreciate your help with this. Thanks
Thank you for the kind words, I truly appreciate them.
I agree entirely. Copyright can be a very involved and sticky subject; but, it is important to remember that, in their original form, copyright protections were quite different than they are today. They were intended to protect creative works for a limited time - essentially just long enough to allow creators to enjoy the sole financial benefit of their efforts. Following that protection, works would enter the public domain. The idea being that these limited protections would help drive the creation of other works.
Now, Copyright Law is this behemoth blanket coverage that continues to grow and gets in the way of many activities that seek to serve and honor creative works. Even the Library of Congress, the administrator of Copyright, has seen it’s preservation efforts hampered by copyright wording involving reproduction and distribution.
I, personally, feel that a period 15 - 25 years would be balanced and fair duration, one that would restore the original intent of the law. However, there’s very little possibility of that coming to fruition in the U.S. No slight intended, but when it comes to music, Sonny Bono made a much bigger impact as a Congressman than he did as a singer!
Also, as previously mentioned, this filtering is equally about providing access to recordings with better quality control and greater fidelity in order to best showcase the artists’ work.
I can’t say much about this just yet; but, we have some features envisioned that are geared toward sharing and community building inside the product. Thank you as well for sharing your ideas for how Roon could approach this filtering in ways that increases transparency.
You are correct, copyright status isn’t the sole measure. There’s much more involved but I’m not able to share all the specifics of how this is done.
Turns out you’ve delved into a lot more idiosyncrasies of music documentaries than I ever thought. I have a ten year research background in the field and co-developed a catalog system for broadcasters 30 years ago. We were dealing with the same problems back then, but we still didn’t have a powerful real-world database system to map everything properly.
All the better that I can now sit back and enjoy music with a system that I would have liked to have had 30 years ago.
