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iTunes and classical

watchnerd

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watchnerd

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If you have more than one complete collection of all 32 Beethoven Piano Sonatas (I have six) ... how well does Roon handle it?

Well, since I also have Tidal integrated with Roon, I end up with a lot more than 6.

It uses a search engine keyed to the meta data.

So if I search on "beethoven piano sonata", I get all the piano sonata albums -- in my case, 4 local copies off my NAS, plus another 52 off Tidal.
 

Keith_W

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Is the metadata on Tidal consistent? Would you be able to post a screen shot of your results if you type "Beethoven Piano Sonata" into Roon?
 

amirm

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I did that with my Tidal subscription included in Roon:

upload_2016-12-24_23-9-31.png
 

Keith_W

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That looks like a nightmare, Amir.

1. It doesn't look like it is organized in any logical sense. From top left to bottom right, it is not sorted alphabetically by artist, nor by album title, nor by the numbering of the individual sonata.

2. Those sonatas by "Nikolai" (Nikolai who?) are organized in a completely random order: 22, 32, 27, 11, 12, (then Kempff), then 8, and 28.

This is what I found when I had my trial of Roon. If I do a search for "Bach Cantata", I would get about 200 pages in random order. Sometimes the individual tracks in a Cantata are displayed as separate albums.

It looks as if Roon hasn't improved very much. I would find something like this completely unusable. Roon justifies its massive price by boasting it is better at finding your music than the competition. Except that it doesn't. It is far worse than the competition.
 

Keith_W

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Still no good, Amir.

1. What is that Brooks Williams Little Lion album doing there? That's country music, not Beethoven.

2. What happens if you have six complete collections of all the Piano Sonatas (32 of them), that would be 192 listings. Suppose you only wanted to listen to Schnabel performances. I can see there is no option to sort by performer?

3. Are you able to get rid of all that space wasting stuff about who Beethoven was, where and when he lived, and all that ... so that you can have more space to display albums? Why is it that those bars that describe the album includes useless information like, "Fidelio, Beethoven's only opera, takes its subject..." (etc) and "Classical Period, 1804-1806" but does not include USEFUL information like who performed it, or whether it was the first or second version of the performance? Which orchestra? Which soloist? Which conductor?

You know, I keep telling the Roon developers: just let me browse by folder. My music is already organized the way I want it. And I assure you, there is no random Brooks Williams album in my Beethoven folder. And this is YOUR NAS, I suppose you can edit the metadata on that Brooks Williams album to make sure it won't turn up in a search for Beethoven. But what about Tidal? You can't edit Tidal metadata, can you? Do you get a whole bunch of non-Beethoven stuff which clutters up your Beethoven search?
 

RayDunzl

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amirm

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Here is what I do in Roon which I think the reason it doesn't bother me in that regard. It is so fast that I can quickly scroll through search results and find what I want. Instead of orchestrating an accurate search and such, I just use my eyes and browse.
 

watchnerd

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Here is the other thing I would say about Roon:

My digital music comes from 4 places:

-iTunes directory, being the oldest source, where I originally put most of my rips. When I first got started, I ripped probably a 100 disks using iTunes built-in ripping. When I got more sophisticated, I started using XLD, ripped to ALAC, imported into iTunes.

-Uploads directory on NAS. FLACs I ripped to share with others.

-Downloads directory on NAS. FLACs others shared with me.

-Tidal. No directory structure.

Given this, a couple things come up:

-I have 50,000+ tracks, not including streaming stuff. Trying to keep them sorted in folders beyond simple Artist/Album/Year is hard.

-A tree structure ceases to be useful once you get to a certain size. Search is better.

-Since I listen to both streaming and local interchangeably, organizing by directory becomes rather pointless

Roon helps solve all this for me. It acts as an abstraction layer -- I don't have to care where the music is or where it is coming from.
 

MoeB

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Keith_W,

It sounds like you’ve taken a lot of time and care organizing your digital collection. Are you using JRiver, MusiCHI, or perhaps SongKong for your cataloging? Moving your library to some other software might be problematic. You might end up spending a lot of your time undoing what the software promised it could “automagically” do for you. (I’ve read pages of rants by forum users who were unhappy with the way Roon cataloged their collections.)

I saw a product at RMAF that might meet your needs: 3beez’s Wax Box. (I plan to buy the product, but I am waiting for a green light from She Who Must Be Obeyed for another audio purchase.) The Wax Box is an impressive piece of digital hardware: a purpose-built computer with passive cooling, a custom digital interface board, 2 TB internal storage and backup, and a linear power supply. Even more impressive than the hardware is the software which the developer built for managing his own very large classical music collection. I spent half an hour listening to music and learning about the product. The sound quality was impressive, esp. considering the poor acoustics in the hotel, and I was amazed at how easy it was to rip CDs and to add any metadata (even a pdf with liner notes) during the rip. The developer, a Mahler fanatic with a dozen versions of Mahler Sym 2, showed me how easy it was (3 clicks) to find a version of Sym 2 with Ivan Fisher conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra. It might be worth your time to have a look at the company’s web page to see if this product could meet your needs.

Cheers, - MoeB
 

amirm

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watchnerd

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The Wax Box is an impressive piece of digital hardware: a purpose-built computer with passive cooling, a custom digital interface board, 2 TB internal storage and backup, and a linear power supply.

What's not impressive:

-HW-based
-$4900 for what amounts to a PC with TOSLINK output
 
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