I am currently listening to Mitsuko Uchida plays Schubert on Qobuz:
The track list on the Qobuz website looks as follows:
Continued in next post, as I can only put one image in a post, because I am a new user
However in the Mosaic Android app, I only get the movement names, without the Sonata titles:
Some metadata seems to get lost between Qobuz and Mosaic.
This is a limitation in the metadata that we get from Qobuz. We request a track listing for an album and Qobuz returns the list along with the associated track metadata. The issue here is that they are not providing track-level metadata that includes the work title along with the movement title. Their apps are pulling additional non-track items which show as the work name and disc number. Unfortunately, we don’t have access to this information.
Classical is one of those areas where typical tagging falls down and the generally accepted method is to include work names with the track names. In your example it would be much better for them to provide the following metadata with the tracks:
1 Piano Sonata No. 7 in E Flat: Allegro moderato
What you’re seeing in their interface appears to stem from their efforts to make their apps more Roon-like in the way that metadata is presented. Unfortunately, there’s no standard for that type of interface.
Thanks @Andrew
Roon work with Rovi / Allmusic and use their metadata. In consequence they group classical tracks into compositions (Sonata Nr 4, Symphony Nr 3) and Qobuz seem to be doing the same thing, I guess to be compatible with Roon.
Looks like the solution would be for Qobuz to deliver two variants of classical metadata, depending on who asks:
- What they deliver today for Roon and themselves
- A concatenation of composition and track names for everyone else
I am happy to suggest this to them, but I think it would be more effective if it came from you / dCS
Hi @Andrew
An update on this issue. Interestingly, the Qobuz iOS and Android apps showed the same issue until last week. This is a screenshot from an iPad 2018 running iOS 12 I took a few days ago:
The issue has now been resolved by Qobuz and the tablet apps now show the groupings correctly. When I made them aware of this issue, I mentioned that most Qobuz partners (with the exception of Roon) do not reflect the groupings correctly. I suggested to Qobuz that they contact their partners and make sure the data flows through the API correctly.
Maybe it would help if you reached out to Qobuz as well, please. They are obviously aware of the issue, as it was only just resolved in their tablet apps.
Qobuz didn’t make any changes to their metadata, instead they just changed their apps to show in the same format as the web / desktop apps.
Ultimately we’re still getting the same data that we always have been and the API that we use has no way of identifying and showing those header values.
" Qobuz didn’t make any changes to their metadata, instead they just changed their apps to show in the same format as the web / desktop apps."
Andrew I don’t think that is correct. The metadata at work level for classical music in standard view is a very recent addition to the desktop version of Qobuz and has not been available before. I first noticed its inclusion in their desktop app as recently as last week though it may have existed for a few weeks before. In fact I had written to Qobuz’ customer service about the need for it earlier in the year. As far as I can see it is only available for newly released items and not back catalogue.
I had been preparing a similar question to jacobacci albeit featuring a different example recording( I had already prepared the screenshots etc).
As far as I can see the format of Mosaic seems not to provide a field for this essential ( for classical music listeners). I cannot tell if Qobuz are including it in the API made available to you but it is a really important new addition. If you have any spare time to spend reading, Audiophile Style ( ex-Computer Audiophile) has a thread including requests for it where David Craff ( Qobuz USA) responds at one point predicting its future inclusion. This has now taken place.
While I understand that this is a useful feature, it’s currently limited to Qobuz’s own apps and website. Implementing this goes way beyond them providing access to the metadata as it’s a completely new data type that needs to be accounted for and handled properly. As it stands right now this simply doesn’t exist outside of the Qobuz app ecosystem.
The reason that this doesn’t impact Roon is the fact that Roon only uses the Qobuz dataset to map the Qobuz catalog to Roon’s own metadata database. After that they layer their own content model on top which has included composition-based grouping for years.
Should Qobuz make this label available outside of their ecosystem there’s still a 3rd party data broker sitting in the middle that needs to update their interface as well. Until that’s done there’s nothing that we can do here. We simply don’t see this information nor do we have a spec that we can use to properly account for it and display it.
I’ll be perfectly honest with all of you, this was a very short-sighted change on the part of Qobuz. While I appreciate the feature adds value it also ends up alienating their customers who do not use their apps to access content. If their original intent was to make this feature available to partners then they should have engaged with their partners before rolling the change out in their own apps.
Thanks Andrew. That is a nice solution, concatenating the work and track. I have only tried it with one stream so far ( Vivaldi: Concerti per violino VI " La Bohemia"; Fabio Biondi) and it works a treat.