Despite being an early buyer of Roon I am only now beginning to use it, which is revealing more issues than I had expected.
Roon shows an album cover that is not in the tag of the album tracks so far as I can tell using Roon, J River, TagScanner and Mp3tag.
Roon shows:
Thanks, John.
I looked in the Album Editor and it seems that the setting is Prefer Roon rather than Prefer File for all data tag fields
In fact, this is the case for all albums while my Settings shows preference for file tags.
In most cases the results are the same, but in many world music albums the art and artist name are not from my tags.
I thought the global Settings was there for a reason, but instead it seems that another level of settings is determining what Roon uses.
I will wait for a response from Roon because maybe something went wrong in my install. If not, I will uninstall Roon and keep waiting until they figure how to give me the tags that I have created on a consistent basis.
It’s not intuitive but of you choose albums and have no focus so you are seeing them all and select all (Ctrl-A) and then choose edit from the top right hand corner and choose Metadata preference.
This lets you choose “prefer file” for album artwork which will then default to all your own saved covers.
I do not fully understand, John.
Are you saying that to make Roon use of my tags and only my tags, including album art, I have to select all these settings for all albums and every time I add a new album? There is no default behaviour? How does that work with 6,000 albums?
If this is true (Roon?) then it is clear to me that Roon still is not ready for users who wish to control their own metadata.
I had rather presumed that you have your collection ripped and need to change some aspects of the metadata in it. In this case -
the setting for genre tags is indeed global and done from the main setting menu.
You can change all the album art for all albums as I have shown above.
If you are currently ripping Roon I’d imagine will get over 80% of cover art correct, so yes perhaps in 1 in 5 rips you will have to select the album art from your file or other source.
I hope I’m not making this more complicated than it is @andybob@Carl@mike ?
No, John - you have been very helpful.
I do have Genre configured to use my Genres in the Settings. For some reason that does not seem to work as expected when picking a Genre and playing shuffled tracks. That was the subject of an earlier post.
Now I found that album art is not being taken from my files and you have given me a way to do that. I find that I can select all albums in a Genre and edit the metadata preferences there so I do not need to go album by album.
When I complete that I will try to have Roon refresh all its metadata and I hope that will take care of the problem - so long as I remember to take recently added new albums and make sure they also read from the files.
In practice, if this is where Roon is as in managing metadata, then I would prefer to use other solutions. I do not rip in Roon and I do not manage metadata in Roon, nor will I. It seems that Roon is based on the fundamental premise that they know how to manage metadata better than the user. I do not believe that is true (for me) at the level of track tags, album art etc. They do a better job of presented linkages, album reviews, secondary artists etc. - the rich wrapper to my library. I am just not willing to be in a struggle for control over the core metadata tagging of my library.
Roon is far from perfect but what I find reassuring is that the developers are well aware of the deficiencies and strategies to correct them are on the roadmap. Ability to edit and improve meta-data is definitely one of these issues.
Roon doesn’t change any of your meta-data so I’d imagine if you come back in 6 months time and rescan your music files you’ll find a big difference.