When utilizing shuffle, classical compositions used to allow for the whole composition to be played as to retain the whole of that composition. But now it seems each movement is treated as its own track. There is no longer a drop down showing which movements are playing and how many movements remain within a composition.
When 1.8 was released and shuffle was broken because of it, I didn’t use the feature. But after build 763 was released today, I find that this piece of how Roon treats classical compositions is broken now.
A big draw for me with Roon was how classical compositions were treated with care in my library. But this just treats each movement now as its own track which is a significant step back for me. Please tell me it is not intentional and will be fixed.
I like this part-level shuffle. Is there a way to make it a simple switch so you can choose part-level or work-level shuffle for Classical?
There are circumstances when I want the movements to be kept together. But there are other circumstances when re-creating a radio or recital experience where you may want to shuffle at the part rather than the work level. I would like radio for Classical to optionally work that way as well. In fact most physical Classical radio stations and many compilation style disks work that way.
For example, I rarely use the shuffle or radio features for Classical although I would like to. Shuffling vocal music, for example, when you have a lot of 60-part operas or masses is not really a shuffle at all. It is just playing one or two 2-hour works sequentially one after the other. I don’t need shuffle to do that…
@ivan, I notice this behaviour on a “tags” page. Not a composition page. For example, I have tags for “Classical”, “Solo Piano (Classical)”, “Vocal Music” and many others. When I select a tag the only option I have is “Shuffle”. I seem to remember in 1.7 there were several other play options.
If I press Shuffle, then roon will currently shuffle at the part level, not the work multi-part level. But I like this behaviour. In this context it makes much more sense to me. If I choose my tag “Vocal Music” and press Shuffle and roon shuffles at the entire multi-part work level I have no idea why I would want to do that. Why does anyone want to shuffle entire 3 hour operas or 2 hour masses (in their proper sequence)? It makes no sense. I can randomly select 3 operas and put them on my queue to play them one after the other in their entirety and I will have music for the entire day. Why do I need a shuffle for that? What I want to do, for example, is set a ROONTRACKTAG=“Aria” for all my favorite Arias in my opera library and shuffle those single arias. That adds value. That is something I cannot do with the Qobuz app. But if the shuffling is at the entire work level (i.e. entire 3 hour opera level) then I do not get this effect at all.
I am experiencing it when I shuffle from the Tracks tab or when I shuffle from a bookmark only classical albums. Therefore it happens at the album or track level shuffle starting point:
In this case, the first track that played is a Haydn symphony, but it is just the first movement of a four movement symphony. Roon used to play all four movements before shuffle moved on to the next track in my shuffle.
I notice that the movements are no longer indented, but research on this forum informed me that the Roon team believes this is a cosmetic change and not structural…so it is not the cause of how my library operates.
This screenshot (above) of a shuffle queue allows you to see that some multi-part compositions are split up. See the Larsson Symphony 1 only plays movement 2 on this shuffle. You can’t see it in the cramped queue screen, so here is a screenshot of when I tap into what Roon has queued up:
One thing I will say is that shuffle now has an upcoming queue, and this is not something I noticed before. Not sure if it is related, but I want to give you a variable.
This is a significant way that I was able to listen to my library and now cannot. I can see benefits to having this “recital” approach as others have stated in this thread, but a big reason I came to Roon is because of how it treated my classical multi-part compositions in a holistic way. It kept them together!
Over the past years I have used Roon, while the composition was playing, a drop down on the Now Playing screen allowed me to see how many movements were in the composition playing. I could skip to any of those movements and play from there. This is gone in 1.8, so I cannot take a screenshot of that for you. It seemed to be a well thought out feature and really cannot imagine why it would be removed intentionally.
Hi, @TuliaNonTroppo , thank you for the info you provided. The thing here is that I’m not able to reproduce the behavior which you are describing on the latest Stable 764 build. In case I use “Shuffle” button in Tracks browser, multipart compositions are added to the queue and parts are now shuffled. The same applies to the case when I use “Shuffle” on album details page level. Is this issue still reproducible for you after an update to 764?
Thank you for reply. I believe 764 has resolved this issue! In the following screenshot, you can see what has been added that was missing from previous 1.8 builds:
