Your genre system

Info files

The above link is to a discussion on a feature request for adding the ability to display info.txt files similar to way Roon handles/displays image and PDF files. Basically Roon has zero interest in letting Roon users view their own metadata, as in the massive amount of metadata users have in thousands of info files.

Although it may not seem like it from my posts but I do get it that metadata is often not available for many recordings but the metadata is already present in my library in the form of info.txt files, so why can’t these files be easily displayed? (Hint read the post by Brian Luczkiewicz).

Hey @evand. I could tell you countless stories about the lameness of labels – even though there were many great people who I greatly admired. I do agree that if more metadata was captured at the source it would be more complete and you’d hopefully get accurate and complete credits and much better classical data. The link you sent about the new startup “Session” and their focus is very interesting and encouraging. That would be a big step forward. AI and machine learning would certainly help but what we learned at Gracenote is sometimes the most popular and most used metadata for a particular release was actually wrong. You also still have to figure out what genre standard to hook the music too and everyone has their own view of the world and this is akin to religion with many. So it’s very difficult to ever get completely away from some editorial touches and getting consistency across all the players is almost impossible.

And on your last question, no I’m not responsible for killing MusicIP although while at Gracenote I was not sad to see them go…:slight_smile:

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Agreed re Genres. Being that it is akin to religion there’s never going to be a single answer. The trick is for software like Roon to allow users to apply whatever genre schema they desire, but to apply its own behind the scenes where it may be needed for Roon Radio etc.

Hey - @Jazzfan_NJ

I don’t think it’s fair to say that Roon has zero interest in letting users display their own metadata – they allow you to use your tags versus their data if you choose, but do not read info.txt files which is your issue and is frustrating (and you’re not the only one). I understand that.

I also am a bit a metadata fanatic and hand edited (where needed) my entire 60K tracks of music. I adjusted metadata that was inconsistent (for instance where the name of the artist, album or tracks were all caps versus just the first letter of each word). I also organized them all into a consistent genre structure that I liked at the track level for most of the tracks. The latter was the prime value of what I had done with my collection IMHO.

When I went to Roon I gave all this up. It was not an easy decision. But I found that meta data inconsistencies (like the caps issue above) was less annoying to me in the Roon graphical experience vs the spreadsheet iTunes approach that I was ok with that part. I absolutely missed giving up my track based genres but did so because of the side effects of using them. To use them I’d have to map my genres to roon’s genres (and you can do this) but roon’s structure (AMG’s actually) was much deeper than mine so it wouldn’t map well and I actually like the deep structure. So I gave up track based genres for a deeper structure. I also gave up the work of having to continue to do all the work I was doing on meta data maintenance (or at least much of it) and I like that. I do hope Roon will get to track based genres some time – it would be a big step up.

So I get it’s disappointing that Roon doesn’t support the method you’d like to use to display your metadata but I do believe you may not be satisfied with the results even if you could. Of course this is just my opinion.

Agreed but very tricky…

There are things Roon could do to take things forward relatively easily. Add support for a review tag and review.txt and where it encounters one use that content as the album review by importing its contents into the user’s Roon DB.

In @Jazzfan_NJ’s case his problem is easily solved by running a txt2pdf tool through his music folders. Voila, he’ll immediately be able to view the contents through Roon.

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You’re right on both fronts.

I’m not a big fan of deep genres since I tend to enjoy lots of music that mixes/crosses genres. For example is electric Miles Davis jazz, rock, fusion, ???
And one off genres, like “symphonic Christian dark doom death speed metal” are pretty much useless.

As Duke Ellington liked to say there are only two types of music - good and bad

Back to the discussion at hand here is link to one of my posts which shows how Roon mishandles user metadata is favor of “provider” metadata: WTF

Ah but you do not know how big my music library is. Let’s just say it would be a lot of work and add a lot of files and is completely unnecessary since adding the ability for Roon to display info.txt is fairly trivial.

Like I said, genres are religion and to each his/her own…

And the topic of this post chain is “Your Genre System” not “How Roon mishandles user metadata” but you’ve made your opinion on roon’s user metadata handling very clear.

Duly noted. :grimacing:

Sorry if that came off cranky @Jazzfan_NJ , didn’t mean for it to. I do understand your frustration with this issue. :slight_smile:

I didn’t and don’t think that you were being cranky. And I should also state that in spite of my frustration with some aspects of Roon, I still really like Roon and enjoy using it immensely.

Until Roon came along there was no real way to manage a streaming local (meaning one’s own collection of music files) music library other than Logitech Media Server or, heaven forbid, iTunes, which are no where near as robust as Roon. Roon has almost single handily made music streaming a workable system for music lovers and audiophiles. Ah audiophiles, now that’s another area of extreme frustration :exploding_head:

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I had no idea this would be such a Pandora’s box of a topic. I would like to thank you all for teaching me such a lot, and attempt to return to basics.

What I take from this is that I can stick to my own system of tags but cannot expect the world to take any interest. I started with Roon because Spotify stopped me using my own tags and classification system. What would work better for me is for Roon radio (which I love) to use my own tags to generate a playlist instead of the Roon genres. That does not seem a lot to ask especially if the genres, as you experts tell me, are unlikely to be accurate.

Should you ever want to share your genre structure, I would like to hear about it. I haven’t gotten much further than assigning “Rock” or “Classical” tags. That’s because I don’t want to build this edifice and later discover it can’t do X. So I’m a bit stymied.

Good comments all, BTW.

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@Dick_Cooper – It’s true that your tags won’t be exposed to the rest of the world so they are indeed just for you. If you want to use your own tags in Roon, give it a whirl. You have to go through Settings/Library/Import Settings and make the choices of what to use from your tags versus roon. If you use your genres then you should look at Settings/Library/Genre Mappings and try to map yours to Roons. See how it works for you. In this and almost everything in this crazy audiophile world YMMV and to each their own… You can always undo and go back if you don’t like it …

Yes!!!

This has been a long time request. At this point I’m willing to bet it ain’t happening.

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Mine is a bit quirky, in classical I define a bit as per Gramophone , 1 orchestral, 2 concerto 3 symphony etc

I then have a custom tag sub genre to split even further eg 5 keyboard _ variations

I use jriver to manage this and select music

It’s a bit like Craig’s genre by track. Of course totaly useless in Roon

It’s why I keep 2 systems live UGH …

Thanks Craig for the suggestions. Time will tell if idiocy is reduced (by which I mean a jazz record followed by George Formby, Kurt Weill and Tchaikovsky)

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