Will Metadata Source issues ever get fixed?

That’s fair analysis and I agree but then at least tell us to quit wasting our time reporting issues in the forums. Some of the issue above were mentioned 6 months ago and I was expecting a fix.

If there isn’t time to handle fixing them put up a notice in the Metadata forum and we all move on. Personally I’ll live with it but some people paying yearly might expect fixes and thus reduce the value of the subscription for them.

The problem is that we through Roon are paying for a service from Rovi and they are not doing anything to fix issues with that service.

In all honesty we don’t know 100% for certain where the break down is as Roon staff haven’t replied.

+10000…and this is my issue. I paid yearly because frankly I am not sure if Roon will be around in 5 years and I did not yet have a feel for how active the development is. Whether I pay $100 again next year will depend completely on Roon’s continual improvement.

Metadata handling is due for a big upgrade in 1.3 – things have improved greatly over time and will continue to improve.

Let’s just say that in its first year, development of Roon has taken place at an astonishing rate and great strides have been made since 1.0 May last year. But it is anyone’s prerogative to evaluate Roon’s value proposition for themselves – and being on a yearly schedule allows for yearly review.

For me: I signed up for life on day one – and would have gladly paid a multiple of the cost of entry. Part of this was a leap of faith – and so far, I have been far from disappointed.

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[quote=“RBM, post:20, topic:12739”]
For me: I signed up for life on day one – and would have gladly paid a multiple of the cost of entry. Part of this was a leap of faith – and so far, I have been far from disappointed.
[/quote]agreed, I signed up for lifetime as soon as it was confirmed there’d be a Linux release. Never looked back. $120 for Roon is something that doesn’t even warrant a 2nd thought and a lifetime license is a no-brainer. People waste more than that on dubious audio upgrades without batting an eyelid or hanging their heads in shame.

Ok, I’ve added Source to the title of this thread as it clearly has people confused and thinking I’m talking about metadata handling within Roon.

I can appreciate the frustration here, and can assure everyone it’s not falling on deaf ears. We launched Roon roughly 14 months ago, and have worked day in and day out since to grow and improve the product. I won’t go into all the visible changes and improvements but I will mention that nearly all of this has been done by a team of 10 people, including business development and support staff.

This isn’t to give ourselves a pat on the back, but to make the point that anything which hasn’t been completed over the last 14 months isn’t for lack of trying – for fun, I just took a quick look in our bug tracker, and we’ve closed over 2000 issues since our launch, including hundreds of metadata fixes. :tada:

Passing on errors to our metadata providers is absolutely part of the gig and, on some of these issues, I think @DrTone’s frustration is justified – we can do better. But they’re not all that clean cut, and I’d ask everyone to keep in mind that when we fix metadata issues in our automated systems, not only do they fix hundreds of small errors, but the results are often transparent. We make a small change in our code, and the next day hundreds or thousands of albums get fixed, improved, or linked with additional data.

These small changes can pay huge dividends, so decisions about where to devote effort tilt towards fixes that impact large swaths of content. This is NOT to say we’re not interested or wiling to report isolated data errors back to our metadata providers – we absolutely are. The point is that our number one priority is always on improving our product and technology at its core, since that maximizes the return on our efforts.

We have spent some time in the past couple of months growing the team, since that is the only way for us to pick up the pace–this is always a trade-off, as ramping up new employees takes a ton of time and resources from everyone else. One of our recent hires is a developer who is fully dedicated to Roon’s metadata experience and data services–this is a rare luxury on a team where everyone wears many hats.

Immediately after 1.2 shipped we began laying groundwork for major improvements to our metadata system. We’ve built out new development, operational, and deployment infrastructure, including, most importantly, a system for putting sweeping metadata changes through extended testing. Much of this work was an exercise in paying off technical debt, but it’s a crucial step, and one that’s required for some of the larger-scale work that’s needed.

Many bugs were fixed as part of that work, and metadata rollouts are now happening in an automated fashion, on a reliable, schedule that matches the frequency at which we receive data from our sources

We have several more fixes in the pipeline. These changes relate to album-level equivalence, improving our automated equivalence determinations to link up tens of thousands of albums with higher quality metadata, and improving issues related to incorrect or missing album reviews. Careful validation and testing is currently underway, as over 100,000 albums will be positively impacted once these changes roll out.

One of the most frustrating parts of working on metadata is: when it’s working properly, it’s invisible. New users never see old problems, and existing users benefit from transparent background metadata updates. People notice when servers are unstable or slow, not when things are running smoothly. We only rarely announce fixes because they roll out to our users on a staggered basis, so there isn’t a good discrete point in time to make an announcement. That doesn’t mean that work isn’t happening.

You’re probably saying, great but none of that addresses Dr Tone’s specific issues. I can understand these are pretty easy to notice, especially if they appear to have gone unresolved for so long (and since there’s no way to resolve them in-app at the moment). While improving our metadata system as a whole is a higher priority than addressing isolated reports manually, you’re absolutely right that we should be able to report errors back to our metadata providers and get the fixes done in a timely manner.

I spent some time investigating the three issues referenced above, and here’s what I found:

This issue is still open in our bug tracker because it’s something that we know how to fix, but which requires some delicate architectural changes to ensure we get it right. This is a unique case in that two entries are marked equivalent in our system, but both are credited on the same album. We have some related work planned for the coming months, and all that work will happen together.

This issue was tracked in our equivalence fixes project, and a fix was checked a few months back. I downloaded a copy of this album today, and I’m not seeing this issue, so it’s possible some bad data is cached here. Have you tried to re-identify the album? If that doesn’t resolve it, let me know, and we’ll have a look at what’s going on in your library.

Finally, I have to offer a mea culpa on this one, as there seems to have been a miscommunication. The error was passed to a developer on our team when it was originally reported but unfortunately, it was passed back to me for a clarification and I missed it – no easy way to explain that other than to apologize for the oversight.

Our metadata providers do have a good record of getting these fixes implemented quickly, so I made sure this was reported to them today, and my hope is that we get corrected data in the near future.

So, to be clear – please continue to report the errors you see. Sometimes they’re our errors – equivalence issues we can fix now and use to improve Roon down the line, or small bugs that can be fixed quickly. Sometimes they are aggregated into larger issues that will be resolved when we have enough information to make a broad, sweeping fix. And sometimes they are errors in the data we get from our providers. We actually had a meeting earlier this week to ensure our new support and dev staff have a clear flow for this process, even before @DrTone’s post.

We are committed to improving this process, and we’re going to continue to try and resolve each report we get as quickly as transparently as possible. Thanks all!

fin

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Ok, clearly I didn’t go far enough on this one. I would try to identify the album occasionally and 2 Eric Johnson’s were listed on the match so I never moved forward completing the match. Doing so ends up with only one Eric Johnson in my artist list.

My obvious bad on that one.

And thanks for the response that’s what I was looking for. I knew the first issue was something that needed to be addressed in the software.

I assume when my 3rd case gets fixed it will still show Tragalith in the match but won’t actually create an artist for Tragalith?

Much appreciated @mike for the in-depth response.

In this case, I hope that Rovi will remove the reference to Tragalith altogether. It’s clearly some weird erroneous contraction of the artist and album which seems to have propagated around the Internet…

Any chance to provide an update on the 3 issues I’ve filed:

Thanks!!

Hey Mike,

Just took a quick look at these three, and all are in motion. As I mentioned above, we’ve done a lot of infrastructure work to ensure we can test and deploy big server-side metadata fixes safely after iteration, and the underlying issues causing the Specials and Velvet Underground issues have both been actively worked on in the last few weeks.

I don’t have a firm timeframe, but they’re both issues we’re focused on resolving in the near term (although reading the threads back, I recognize I’ve said that before… The difference is this time I have @joel!)

The Tommy Deluxe issue I need to investigate a little more, but I think I know the problem and I suspect the fix will require editing of works. We’ll be letting everyone know as that functionality comes together, but if you can post a screenshot (or PM me a dropbox link to the media) I can take a look and confirm.

Thanks for your patience on these @Mike_Pinkerton – we’re getting there!

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@DrTone – this correction went live in our metadata service today :tada:

If you click Edit > Re-Identify, you should see the correction immediately, or else wait a week and it should show up automatically.

Thanks again for your patience :smile:

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I can confirm this issue has been fixed on my end.

Worked for me as well.

But here’s a question: if these metadata fixes have to be user-triggered, how are we to know when to do it and on which albums? Or should it be a practice to re-identify every time we open an album?

Every album in your collection pulls updated metadata weekly.

Beautiful!

Just like to say that Roon really enhances / magnifies the music experience. This pertains to the actual playing side of the coin (bit perfect is the goal) BUT its real value is on the metadata side. Relationships mean everything! I discover a few things about my collection’s contents EVERY time I use Roon.

Job very well done and in just over a year…can’t imagine what is yet to come!

Thanks again

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Disk/Track issues with sets