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Having had a bad experience with the metadata that came with a download I bought today, I started wondering if there is anything that I can use that would not involve me in hours of painstaking manual input and searching on the web for cover art etc.
When Roon started up one of their selling points was something like " Classical done right". So I am thinking of giving it a whirl.
However looking at the "problems with metadata " section on their community forum it looks as if Roon is actually not very good at classical metadata. Even recently there seems to still be a huge discussion on what it should consist of and the priorities. Behind all seems to be the usual problem of trying to fit classical music into a metadata format primarily designed for rock/pop music. I also note with surprise that Roon appears to populate its metadata for classical music ( or metadata suggestions) from a third party database. I thought that they had their own discographers. Maybe I have misunderstood.
So it appears that, given my needs, subscribing to Roon would be a waste of money and that continuing to use dbpoweramp with Perfect Tunes to populate JRiver ( with some corrections and work arounds) for my rips remains my best bet. Unsure on how to correct supplied metadata for downloads when the usual "edit ID-Tag" facility seems not to exist for some of the FLAC files downloaded.
Has anyone with experience of Roon and a predilection for classical music an opinion on this? Is it as poor as the forum seems to suggest?
Follow Ups:
Thanks to everyone for your comments and suggestions.
My preference is for an application that will rip a disc and automatically tag it correctly including cover art. Further, that the resulting rip and metadata format can be understood by any (or most) players.
My current regime of ripping using the standard combination of dbpoweramp with Pure Tunes almost meets that criterion. In fact as time has gone by its accuracy has improved so that now the required manual interventions have reduced aside from where my own preferences talke precednce e.g. selection of appropriate genre. Pure Tunes also gives me the ability to amend metadata files away from the ripping process e.g for FLAC downloads.
The resulting FLAC data file is more or less what is required. However, even though all of the data is there and all is in a standard format, media players either do not display it all (or at least the relevant fields) or use elements in a way that is not great from a classical music enthusiast's viewpoint . In fact I believe that players really need a selectable classical music view rather than attempting to fit everything into an Artist/Album/Track format only suitable for popular genres.
Anyway I will stick with JR MC unless I find something better. It still seems the most flexible in regard to playing different audio formats.
Meanwhile I will continue to visit Roon's community forum from time to time to see how it is progressing and if it reaches a point where I want to investigate further. It still seems that you need to be a Tidal subscriber to get most value from it and I don't expect any similar relationship with Qobuz for us Europeans.
"The resulting FLAC data file is more or less what is required. However, even though all of the data is there and all is in a standard format, media players either do not display it all (or at least the relevant fields) or use elements in a way that is not great from a classical music enthusiast's viewpoint . In fact I believe that players really need a selectable classical music view rather than attempting to fit everything into an Artist/Album/Track format only suitable for popular genres.
Anyway I will stick with JR MC unless I find something better. It still seems the most flexible in regard to playing different audio formats."
As the screenshot shows, you can create a custom view that is quite well suited to browsing classical music.
With some changes to the way I populated tags and another change, I got a satisfactory way to browse classical music on an 80Gb iPod.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
Many thanks. Interesting. What JR MC version are you using? I have 22 which doesn't resemble your GUI but perhaps there is a skin that does?
Anyway I will have a play around with it tomorrow although most of my interfacing with JR MC is via Gizmo but I don't think that is customisable. Too late to do anything today as I am just off to go to a concert at the RFH (Paavo Jarvi/LPO in Neilsen).
Create a new view, use "Panes" and you get indeed this iTunes style layout
The Well Tempered Computer
"What JR MC version are you using?
MC 21. I also have mc 22 installed but I usually wait until JRiver finishes development of a version before I use it for real. The screenshot was taken years ago when I was using an earlier version of JRiver.
"I have 22 which doesn't resemble your GUI but perhaps there is a skin that does?"
The skin is called iTunes. I added a stop button.
The view shown is a panes view. Each pane initially lists the values of one tag. When you click on a value for a tag like Sub_genre, the other panes are updated to show only the tags that occur in files that have the value you selected (for Sub_genre for example.) You can select values for panes in any order. The list of files in the lower part of the window are those that meet all the selection criteria you have chosen in the panes above.
"Anyway I will have a play around with it tomorrow although most of my interfacing with JR MC is via Gizmo but I don't think that is customisable."
You can define views specifically for Gizmo (and the other Android devices) in Tools/Options/Media Network/Advanced. Click on "Customize views for...".
When you start Gizmo, you should see a list of the views you have created displayed.
You can also use any of the views you create in Standard view. When I start Gizmo, I see the word "Audio" as the first in the list of views. I don't remember when it is in that list by default or whether I added Audio in the "Customize view dialog. in Gizmo. When I tab the symbol above "Audio", I see a list of the views I crewwated in standard view.
Of course, Gizmo can't display the panes view as on the screenshot. Not enough screen space on a tablet or smartphone. So it displays lists one at a time.
There is a lot of very useful functionality in JRiver. Don't assume that what you see by default is all there is.
my blog: http://carsmusicandnature.blogspot.com/
I have not used Roon, but all user experiences I have read agree with your conclusions for classical music. Since I believe any scheme would require a greater or lesser degree of manual editing of classical tag metadata, my concern is how and where does Roon store these manual edits? Would my metadata be recoverable to use with a different tool if I should ever decide to abandon Roon? Maybe I missed it, but I have been unable to find out. I would not want my data and edits to be "locked in" forever in Roon.
Andy Quint of TAS is a close friend of mine. He has evaluated numerous classical tagging schemes and systems, though not Roon for the reasons above. His choice? Actually, two of them: MusiChi and JRiver. MusiChi is best for classical tagging in his view due to its extensive database. But, it is restricted in media formats to mainly RBCD, FLAC, etc. in stereo only. Since, like me, Andy prefers playback of Mch from DSD files and MusiChi does not handle those, JRiver becomes the tool of choice for tagging DSF files extracted from SACDs. Tagging is much more tedious in JRiver than in MusiChi, however.
Questions about how and where metadata is stored with these tools is clear. Andy has converted his CD library, which was MusiChi tagged, to JRiver with no problems. Both can store the metadata in the media files in industry standard file formats. He prefers a single library/player interface, which is JRiver. That is why he converted all his media files to JRiver.
I myself maintain a library of just predominantly classical, Mch SACD rips, some BD-A rips, FLAC and DSD downloads, videos, etc. (no CDs). JRiver appears to be the only library tool able to handle that diversity of media with acceptable tagging of classical albums.
I believe the Roon library is stored on your Core computer. I am backing it up now before I install the 1.3 update.
Edits: 02/01/17
Yeah, that figures. But, in what format, and is the data exportable in some standard format? One key feature of JRiver is that the tags are stored BOTH in its internal "library" file for efficient searching AND in the media files themselves in the standard tagging format widely used for that format, including any custom fields I might have defined. JRiver also allows for export of tag data in several standard formats, like XML, text, etc.
So, I was able to establish these essential facts about JRiver, its structure and how it worked well before I committed to it years ago. With Roon, none of these questions have been answered to my satisfaction. It is much more of a proprietary set of secrets. Apparently, I need to make a leap of faith to get on the Roon bandwagon and believe they will handle all my problems for me. But, clearly, they don't.
I am not doubting that Roon makes terrific sense for many pop/rock listeners and handles tagging issues automatically with an excellent GUI for search and playback. But, for me, it does not come close to providing what I need at a minimum for my hi rez Mch classical library.
If you are happy with JRiver stick with it. I have both Roon and JRiver.
Roon does a pretty good job with classical music, but not perfect. Roon does not write their own discography info.They are continuously improving and a major new update will be coming very soon.
The RAAT technology they have is another big selling point.
Edits: 02/01/17
I tried Songkong.
It is a nice tool.
As it uses acoustic finger printing it can find tracks regardless of the meta data.
However, both databases used (MusicBrainz, Discogs) are a bit poor in case of classical.
Half of the time it won't find the recording.
I use Musichi for tagging.
It supports GD3 and the usual suspects (Amazon, FreeDB).
Its stronghold is its own database.
Alsmost any composer, performers and a lot of compositions.
Most of the time I have my tagging done (inclusing custom tags like Composition and Opus) in a couple of minutes.
The Well Tempered Computer
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