Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Hardware with Roon Application Roon Metadata Management

I read that as Roon is only concerned with metadata and not the media itself.

Software engineers will be asking questions like:

1 - How would that metadata "in databases tied to the Roon app install" (i.e. with a different proprietary schema) be initially populated? From the user's personalised and groomed Sooloos metadata or elsewhere (e.g. Roon-supplied value-added track-level metadata)?

2 - If elsewhere, how would Roon resolve differences between the two sources and can the user configure which one takes priority?

3 - If one changes the Sooloos metadata, how does Roon respond/resolve changes/differences?

4 - How are backups of personalised Roon metadata synched to Sooloos back-ups?

5 - How is software version control managed between Sooloos and Roon (possibly relevant if metadata schemas change but network share - either Pub/Sub or Fetch on Demand or etc. - should handle that)

6 - Etc.

I can see benefits in separating metadata from media data but the engineering to make the solution integration as described seemless without the need for any user intervention (an essential requirement IMHO - the world is not full of music/software geeks) will be potentially challenging.

I think that perhaps a Free Trial with Roon may be required to see what happens and if you like it.

I can't see any other way these Metadata questions can be answered should you have a highly groomed library you wish to preserve in native form.

We may all be very pleasantly surprised... Or not?

Thoughts, Chris

Hi,

I questions 1 and 2 are very important for us Sooloos users and it will be interesting to get further comment from the Roon guys. I think there is already a discussion on their forum where some of this is touched.

Questions 3, 4, 5: I suspect the short answer is they won't. I don't foresee any metadata "synchronisation" happening post the initial "import" into to Roon.

There was some talk (on Roon) of just pointing Roon at a Sooloos lib, however there is also talk of exporting the Sooloos lib first and then using that export as the base for the Roon not.

As Chris says, unless the Roon guys clarify we will have to wait to see how it pans out.

Regards,
Carl

1 and 2 are answered in the forums already. Links below.

As for 3,4,5 Carl is correct. We won't have integration into 2.1 in any deeper manner. If Meridian chooses to do something deeper in the future, we welcome it.. but we cant do deep support of Sooloos without the blessing and support of Meridian.

This might help you understand the database structure and how we deal with our metadata and your metadata:

Importing Content from Meridian Sooloos Systems

Leveraging Existing Metadata In Audio Files

Customizing Metadata

If this doesn't fully answer your questions, I suggest you post in the Roon forums, as our team will be very happy to answer your metadata questions.

Chris, a free trial will be available. As will one time lifetime membership.

Thanks Danny

Hi All

Thought this might be of interest? a question came up on the Roon forum regarding how you could catalogue different versions of the same song? The song in question being 'Knockin on Heavens Door' Danny answered and posted some screen shots to clarify.

@Danny: Roon supports sort by track name in our track browser, but it's not how I recommend doing this. Roon can find a song to be an "interesting composition", whether that be Beethoven's F�r Elise, in this example, Bob Dylan's Knockin' on Heaven's Door. Many things can cause a composition to become interesting, but you can also edit them to be interesting (once we release full editing). Here is what happens when I see Knockin' on my Eric Clapton album:



and here is what I see when I click on "11 Performances":



there are some bugs involving some missing data as well as some duplicated performers that you might see in those images. I was running and older build for testing when I took these screenshots. Sorry!)

The result is much better than the tracks browser sorted by song name, and with a lot more information too. When was that performance? Who was that with? If it was classical, you'd see even more data. We are looking at sourcing song reviews and even more data about individual popular music songs. This would all be here, and your library's metadata will automatically update in the background (in our layer).

And finally this looks good for us who have multiple versions of albums eg high resolution, bonus track versions, etc.:

Not only will we automatically identify duplicate albums, along with a little "version note" (that we pull from your tags), but we stack them so you only see 1 album in the browser. From the album details, you can quickly see and navigate to the "other versions" using information like file formats and audio quality, that "version note", and any other relevant information is there.

If you don't like our duplicate detection, don't worry, just mark them as non-duplicates. If you find that we missed something, you can do manual marking of "another version". If you don't like the behaviour where we hide duplicates from the album browser, you can show hidden items too, or unmark them as "other versions".

Cheers

Russ