Roon absolutely sucks for classical

adyc · Apr 7, 2016

You need Custom Scan, Custom Browse and Multi Library. It takes some efforts to set up. It is not Plug and Play. But it is worth the effort. So far, these are the best for classical music browsing.

For plug and play, I would suggest Minimserver. It has much less efforts and also great for classical music browsing.

flyer · Apr 8, 2016

Thanks!

FrantzM · Apr 8, 2016

adyc said:
You need Custom Scan, Custom Browse and Multi Library. It takes some efforts to set up. It is not Plug and Play. But it is worth the effort. So far, these are the best for classical music browsing.

For plug and play, I would suggest Minimserver. It has much less efforts and also great for classical music browsing.

adyc

Could you tell us a little more about these. I will certainly google these but in the meantime your perspectives, tricks, experiences will be much appreciated. I am hooked to ROON and bemoan its Classical failure but it has been for the past few months I was made aware of it, courtesy of WBF I must add, it has been the goto music player for me. I have never enjoyed a piece of music playing software so much , my music listening enjoyment has been heightened manyfold by ROON.

adyc · Apr 8, 2016

FrantzM said:
adyc

Could you tell us a little more about these. I will certainly google these but in the meantime your perspectives, tricks, experiences will be much appreciated. I am hooked to ROON and bemoan its Classical failure but it has been for the past few months I was made aware of it, courtesy of WBF I must add, it has been the goto music player for me. I have never enjoyed a piece of music playing software so much , my music listening enjoyment has been heightened manyfold by ROON.

Erland has produced some great plugins for LMS which expand LMS capabilities greatly. Multi library plugin allow you to create different libraries for browsing. For example, you can create library for classical music, non-classical music, high resolution library and DSD library. One can then use Custom Browse to create different menus for different libraries. Classical music demands a much richer set of metadata than non-classical music. One can create customise tags like conductor, orchestra, work, composer, label, ...etc. Custom scan plugin allows LMS to recognise these customised tags.

With these three plugins, I can do a query to find out which composers Alfred Brendel performed or which orchestras Karajan conducted in my classical music library. The drawback is that it definitely take some efforts to learn.

Minimserver takes much less learning. Minimserver which scan all customised tags automatically. One can then use smart browsing in Minimserver to locate any work easily. The drawback is that the interface is less advanced than LMS.

ROON is great for non-classical music as the metadata for non-classical music is much simpler. But ROON promises to improve on classical music browsing. Hopefully, they can succeed as their interface is the best.

flyer · Apr 8, 2016

I am about to purchase the plugins you mentioned (actually getting the whole host at once for 50$). But having tried to tweak LMS before, i understand why you say it is hard to get to the result you got.
Now, to avoid me (and others?) having to go through the same 'pain'. Are there maybe some print screens of the relevant configuration pages you could share with us?
Just an idea.

I also got in touch some time ago with Roon and they told me that with their version 1.2, that is supposed to be released any time soon, there will be a lot more features for the classical music listener but I grew fond of LMS by now and it is definitely a lot cheaper than Roon!

adyc · Apr 8, 2016

I guess the first step is to create different libraries according to your requirement. I create the Classical Music Library based on Genre. You can create different libraries based on different criteria.

adyc · Apr 8, 2016

Next step is to define customised tags which you want LMS to scan. This can be done in Custom Scan. Natively, LMS supports tags Composer, Conductor and Label. I just need Orchestra and Work tags. You can define more tags to classify your music further like tag Period. Please note that this is your job to fill these customised tag in your music files.

adyc · Apr 8, 2016

The last step is the hardest. We need to define customised menus in Custom Browse. Level tag is like filters. Level 1 tag is the top filter and you can add more Level tags to filter your music more. You can think of Level tag as folder structure. For example, Level 1 tag is Composer, Level 2 tag is Genre and Level 3 tag is Work. So under the Custom Browse menu, LMS will show you music in your top level by list of Composers in your music Library. And the sub-folder is Genre and sub-sub folder is Work.

The beauty is that you can add as many custom Browse menus as you want how your music library being displayed.

flyer · Apr 9, 2016

awesome!!

Sincere thanks.

FrantzM · Apr 9, 2016

adyc

Thanks for taking your time to show these screenshots. I thought those were ROON-compatible plug-ins. May have to wait for them to come up with something truly different for Classical Music.

Thanks so very much

Fitzcaraldo215 · Apr 9, 2016

Adyc - yes, excellent. Thanks for all the work on the screen shots, etc.

Your scheme is conceptually almost identical to my own using JRiver, which also allows extensive customization of tag fields and views of the library. But, I added only two custom tag fields to JRiver's standard scheme to get what I needed for my very large library. My views of my library echo yours, and they were straightforwardly set up.

My tags are also automatically contained in the media files themselves in industry standard format, in addition to being in the library directory. If some day I wish to migrate to a different library tool, that should pose no problem.

adyc · Apr 9, 2016

FrantzM said:
adyc

Thanks for taking your time to show these screenshots. I thought those were ROON-compatible plug-ins. May have to wait for them to come up with something truly different for Classical Music.

Thanks so very much

I hope they succeed. Last time I heard that they plan to provide libretto for opera. This feature alone is well worth the subscription.

Fitzcaraldo215 · Apr 10, 2016

adyc said:
I hope they succeed. Last time I heard that they plan to provide libretto for opera. This feature alone is well worth the subscription.

Maybe so, but BD-V already has this in the subtitles, with English translation if you prefer. I, for one, consider that medium the very best for the enjoyment of opera. It looks great in hi def, and it sounds great in hi Rez Mch, better than your typical seat in the opera hall.

Live from the Met at local theaters does not compare, at least with my system. And, frankly, though I love live music above all else, the quality of HT viewing of BD opera plus Met ticket prices caused me to just drop my Met subscription and stay home, rather than driving for 2 hours to NYC. Peter Gelb, GM of the Met and a former VP at Sony, knows this quite well, I am sure, which is why there are relatively few Met performances on BD.

In some ways, I hate this state of affairs, because I am not supporting the opera by my attendandance, only by lesser royalties on the discs. Yes, I can always contribute. If there were enough similar thinkers, there might be no live performances at all, anywhere. Like all artistic productions these days, we need to get this figured out in our modern world of hi quality media in the home so that live performance, the source of all good music, can thrive.

The Met on the radio since the 1930's has not killed it. DVD did not. There must be a way to coexist with Blu-Ray, UHD Blu-ray and high quality sound. I do not know the answer.

Keith_W · Apr 19, 2016

Roon version 1.2 is out. Changelog is here: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-2-is-live/9458

I looked through the changelog carefully to see if they have fixed my complaints. Nope, still no directory view.

I have deleted Roon from my PC. Does anybody who uses Roon know if it is still awful for classical?

Geardaddy · Apr 22, 2016

I use Roon with HQPlayer and its the bomb. I have not navigated through classical per say but will have to fiddle with it. I am sure they will remedy it at some point.

zydeco · Apr 27, 2016

Keith_W said:
Thank you for your reply adyc. I would have tried it ... except that I downloaded a trial version of jriver. So far it's working for me.

I have two questions about jriver, though. I was wondering if any of you can help:

1. Is it able to function as a digital crossover? For it to do this, it needs to be able to use Acourate files and have multi-channel output.

Yes, Keith, JRiver can act as a digital cross-over. You can either do this via the inbuilt parametric EQ or via convolution of filters such as those from Acourate (done either via the native JRiver convolution engine or a VST plug-in). I've used - with good success - the native convolution of Acourate filters to manage 2-way cross-over in a main speaker, low-pass to distributed subwoofers and overall room correction. All this works seamlessly. The only real headache is that for A/V the delay from audio processing is problematic if one is processing the audio in JRiver but video direct to TV / monitor. If you're interested then I can figure out some links to relevant information.

Keith_W said:
2. Is there any way to integrate it with HQPlayer?

Why would you want to do this? I've also used HQ Player - similar set-up as above with native convolution of Acourate filters - and again it works well. The distinction between the two is that JRiver excels in terms of overall usability etc. whereas HQ Player allow detailed control of the audio processing with an emphasis on DSD.

EuroDriver · May 14, 2016

I had a 30 minute breakfast last week with Enno Vandemeer and Rob Darling and talked about Roon's roadmap for the future.

A big development that is coming, is a completely reworked database, which will be "extensible".

What this means is that in the future Roon will be able to add additional fields for meta data, fields for user information to hold information such as HQ Player filter settings for each track !

Roon are very aware that their current database structure does not handle classical music well. The new database structure will allow Roon to be one of the best classical music managers, sooner or later, and I would predict sooner

FrantzM · May 14, 2016

EuroDriver said:
I had a 30 minute breakfast last week with Enno Vandemeer and Rob Darling and talked about Roon's roadmap for the future.

A big development that is coming, is a completely reworked database, which will be "extensible".

What this means is that in the future Roon will be able to add additional fields for meta data, fields for user information to hold information such as HQ Player filter settings for each track !

Roon are very aware that their current database structure does not handle classical music well. The new database structure will allow Roon to be one of the best classical music managers, sooner or later, and I would predict sooner

Great news! Waiting patiently while enjoying what ROON presently offers. On that I was looking at my Roon Library album count and noticed that I had perhaps 800 less albums than I thought .. Reasons is that Roon doesn't seem to "see" .ape files. Is there a way to force it to do so? I am not too excited about having to perform batch conversion from .ape to ,flac with all errors that sometimes occurs on .cue files and metadata.

EuroDriver · May 14, 2016

FrantzM said:
Great news! Waiting patiently while enjoying what ROON presently offers. On that I was looking at my Roon Library album count and noticed that I had perhaps 800 less albums than I thought .. Reasons is that Roon doesn't seem to "see" .ape files. Is there a way to force it to do so? I am not too excited about having to perform batch conversion from .ape to ,flac with all errors that sometimes occurs on .cue files and metadata.

Put this request on the Roon community website.

Roon has no VC funding behind it, it's a group of guys who get their buzz from delivering the best digital musical enjoyment experience possible. They are not obsessing about burn rate, but about delivering the best experience

MadFloyd · May 14, 2016

Great news, thanks for sharing!

Roon absolutely sucks for classical

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