Roon is software designed as an alternative to uPnP for playing music from your audio server or streamer to your player or Dac, usually used with a hi specification audio system, It looks and sounds nice and one major selling point is you can upload your music collection and Roon will automatically identify it and create an enriched metadata experience.
It works quite well, but the success it has with identifying your music can vary. If your songs have limited metadata then Roon is only likely to work with complete albums already organized by folder, even then many albums do get missed even if they are in the databases that Roon uses, MusicBrainz and AllMusic.
If your release is not within these databases then you are unlikley to get a match. Classical releases have their own special difficulties, because of the lack of standards for storing fields such as album artist, performers and composers it is very easy for existing metadata to prevent a match in Roon.
So how can SongKong help ?
- SongKong is much better at identifying partial or disorganized releases (acoustic fingerprinting),
- SongKong can reorganize files & folders based on metadata.
- SongKong can match to the Discogs database (this is larger than the MusicBrainz Database)
- SongKong understands Classical releases and adds the metadata in a standard way that Roon understands.
- SongKong can add metadata to WAV, DSF and AIF files, not well supported by other software
- SongKong can add detailed metadata such as performers and their roles, label and catalog information
This gives three main advantages if you process your files with SongKong before adding to Roon:
- If you pre-process with SongKong then Roon will successfully identify more releases.
- But it also means that Roon will display the releases it could not identify much better because it can use the information that SongKong adds.
- And in either case SongKong has extra information in its databases that Roon does not have that Roon can understand and display.