@danny @brian @mike
Roon has taken care of most of the issues I have raised previously about the metadata leverage and navigation in Sooloos. So now I am thinking about what is missing, what are the most important places to go.
And I stated clearly my bias towards serendipitous discovery, about ad hoc navigation of the relationship graph.
So my attention focused on tags. The user interface for tags is weak, indicating that they are not really a first-class citizen in Roon. They are first-class entities in the database, but not in the experience.
The user interface is poor: selecting tags in the browser is a simple textual list, it doesn’t fit in its popup so you have to scroll, and sort order appears to be based on creation date which is not meaningful for long-term tags because I don’t remember the order they were created. And tagging albums is equally awkward, the available tags show up in a similar too-small dialog box, but the arrangement is different (two columns) and the sort order is different. And even though selecting a tag in the browser creates a focus, tags are not available in the focus editor.
Needs fixing, but fixing them requires understanding the use cases. Here is my view:
It is certainly possible to use tags to mark attributes. I could create tags like Rowdy and Contemplative. But I don’t use them like that. I could tag both Rite of Spring and Exile on Main Streat as Rowdy. But that’s not a very useful idea.
I find that I don’t navigate by attributes much. That’s the old Sooloos demo, finding Miles Davis albums that are not funk. Not what I do. I either go to something I know I want (browse or search) and then follow relationships, such as appearances by artists – all taken care of. Or I look at groups. This is the key to this discussion.
There are many forms of groups Genres are industry groups. An album is a label-defined group: Telarc was pleased to combine the Rite of Spring with Nielsen’s 5th symphony, which is very annoying in Sooloos: I listen to the Firebird, see other albums by Stravinsky, click on Rite of Spring and Nielsen’s symphony starts playing. (Roon has taken care of this by understanding works.)
But I also create my own groups. And these are often idiosyncratic. I define albums that I think are similar for whatever reason. I read an article about an artist or a review of an album, such as a discussion of the Italian jazz scene around Enrico Rava, and it triggers some discovery of related music, not all of which Italian, and I think of that grouping as my Italian jazz group.
And the mechanism for creating such groups is tagging.
And I think this is the only interesting use of tagging. I may make a group called party music. It has a purpose. But “Rowdy”?
So if tags really define groups, then I think they should have a user interface similar to Genres. Because Genres are groupings.
I was a little worried about having a Tag browser and also have tags as a filter (focus), you could go into one Tag group and then filter by another group and end up with nothing. But this is taken care of for Genres: you can navigate down into a Genre and then Focus or Tag filtering are not available, or you can use Genre in a Focus; both are meaningful, but they don’t interfere because you can’t use them together.
So that’s my proposal.
And as a consequence of this, I withdraw my previous proposals to sort the album browser by Genre or Tag. Brian raised the concern that doing this would make albums appear multiple times, which is also true if you sort Albums by Credits, not just the main artist. I think that is ok, but Brian was worried what users would think. Ok, don’t do that in the album browser. But this multiple ownership (diamond shapes in the graph) are ok in the Genre browser, and in the Artist and Composer browsers, would be ok in the Tag browser as well.