As the attached screen capture shows, the works under J.S. Bach is shown in a pretty meaningless jumble. And there are far too many entries: I have 91 works, and I am by no means a Bach enthusiast, only 23 Bach-related albums.
The Bouree appears with various jazz and rock musicians (including Jethro Tull!) because it is popular.
Jacques Loussier’s jazzy Bach interpretations lists each track as a work, because formally speaking it is but I’m not sure I want Loussier with such a large presence in the list. In contrast, the B Minor mass is only one work.
Then I have dozens of individual cantatas – that makes more sense, a cantata is a work, but there are so many of them…
And a single album of motets creates a bunch of entries.
Mercifully the Goldberg Variations is only one work, not 32.
I have raised the problems with the works concept for jazz and rock. But it is really designed for classical and doesn’t work too well here either.
The work is a brilliant idea. Just needs some work.
I’m hoping that “Bach Bouree”, “Bouree”, and “Bach Prelude” are the result of munging that we will someday eliminate or replace with something better.
As for the other cases–I think this is mostly a presentation issue.
We pretty much have to break works on the same boundaries that music historians do. Generally, this follows catalog numbers (typically BWV numbers for Bach), which are canonical and generally well agreed upon within each numbering system.
Whether or not we will ever provide a hierarchical presentation (e.g. grouping Cantatas so you don’t end up with a list dominated by 30+ of them) is an open question. I would like to come up with a better way to present the information on this page. When you put the composer screen next to the artist screen…the composer screen looks pretty disappointing.
@brian Hierarchical presentation would be a great improvement. (Could use the inline expansion model that I proposed for the modal dialog boxes like Credits and Review, like theguardian.com .)
Tricky, though. You have to figure out which categories are really independent. Toccata and fugue usually go together. Partitas are sometimes independent, but Back paired violin sonatas and partitas. So what is the unit?
Good stuff. Keeps you off the streets, building stuff like that.
Want to bump this as a reminder that Works is still a mess, I have over 7,000 works listed and most are just songs. This would be most useful for classical music with multiple movements, but each movement is currently listed as a separate work. I send the vote for Composer > Works > Movements presented as a hierarchy rather than as now:
I did actually go through my classical music a few years back adding a Works tag and creating Composer>Works>Movement hierarchy in Logitech Media Server which was great, I’d love to have that functionality again.
I still don’t understand Works and why I’ve got hundreds of single songs (example; Air by Talking Heads from Fear of Music) labelled as Works.
I’ve asked before for the ability to turn off the concept of Works so that I can play all tracks randomly. As it stands, when I’m working at home during the day and wanting to be reminded of stuff I haven’t heard for awhile I’m subconsciously waiting for those albums that won’t play the way I want them to such as ‘Tommy’, ‘The Mission’ soundtrack, ‘Juliet Letters’ etc. (And why isn’t The Wall a ‘work’?) All of those require input from me to avoid playing the whole album. I know classical buffs would scoff at playing parts of symphonies etc in a random order but if I hear something lovely unexpectedly then I’ll listen to the whole work when I’m listening seriously later that day.
Unless I’m missing something, Works just prevents those that wish to listen in a different way (random). Those that would never listen in that way (even if it’s the vast majority) can and will just play the whole album they are listening to.
Aaargh – yes to both of the above. Roon’s apparent desire to optimize the product for classical fans really messes with fans of pop-rock. This is a perfect (and really annoying) example…
I don’t understand “turn off the concept of works”. What’s preventing you from listening to all your tracks at random now?
I can see my whole collection sorted by “composers”, “works”, “albums”, “artists”, or “tracks”. Are you asking simply not to see the “works”? I’m pretty sure there’s a random play option for all these sortings (although you’re right, I would never use it).
I have to say we classical buffs have been trying to fit that genre into the Procrustean bed of “artist/album/song” for a very long time. The ability to take a wider view was a huge selling point of Roon for me.
It’s true that “composers/works” is intended primarily for classical music. Technically all music has one or more “composes” even if it’s improvised on the spot. If Corea arranges a tune that was written ages ago, and he and Burton play a heavily embellished version at a particular performance, who’s the composer? It’s definitely primarily a classical concept. But we’ve been dealing with concepts primarily intended for other genres for ages.
I ran into a similar situation with the works of Bach. I started ripping one of my collections of organ music and every choral prelude has a separate BWV listing, which now completely dominates the listings under “Bach” the composer. It’s partly the fault of the music historians, who assign each individual prelude and fugue from the Well-tempered Clavier a number (though WTC does appear as a “work” in my collection), the same as a huge work like “Mass in B Minor” or “Matthew Passion”–these are hierarchically equivalent. It would be nifty if I could sort them manually into categories like “vocal” or “keyboard” or “Clavieruebung III”.
When I get to ripping my cantata collection that will create a couple hundred more “work” listings, though in that case a “work” is a thing you might actually sit down and listen to one of for a while. But if I wanted to listen to, say, Marie-Claire Alain playing the complete Schubler chorales (each one as a “work” showing 2, 3, or more “performances”) I can see I could get into trouble, unless it happened to be a single “album”.
Roon has designated albums such as ‘Tommy’, ‘The Juliet Letters’, ‘The Mission’ soundtrack and many others as a Work. This means, as far as I can see, that I’m being dictated to by Roon how I listen to those albums, which is the whole album in order. (I know, small problems.)
During the day I like to listen randomly to my collection by track. But when it hits one of the ‘works’ it means breaking off whatever I’m doing to skip however many tracks there are to get back to random play.
It would seem logical for the user to designate the ‘works’ status to an album that you only want to listen from start to finish and vice versa. But no-one has, as yet, pointed out how.
Really? I haven’t seen that behavior.
Artists, Albums, Works, Tracks – you can browse or play by any of them.
Setting up random play by tracks doesn’t get derailed by works, does it?
yes it does – look at my post from April 16 above.
This behavior is exactly what Graeme described earlier today ^^^
@AndersVinberg if you’re not a big fan of pop/rock (i.e. if you don’t have a lot of it on your local NAS/HD) then you may never have seen this behavior.
fyi I should clarify that I’m not referring to Tidal content. I am referring only to local music library.
