James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
349
That’s because you don’t have media that doesn’t fit the artist-album paradigm. Not all music collections fit into that paradigm.
Some folks just use folders as playlists. They have a folder of “summer hits 2008” and want to play it that way. What Roon would do with properly tagged tracks in a folder structure like this would be to strip it down and put every track in as an incomplete album. That’s no good.
What Roon shouldn’t be doing is insisting on a major restructuring of how people have organized their music in order to use it. Sure, where a tool like DB Poweramp can add metadata that can be a partial resolution, but it does not resolve the case I describe above.
Then, as above, you have DJ sets, other things that don’t easily fit “artist-album.”
Finally, what if someone just brings a song over on a USB key or emails it to me and I just want to listen to it once through Roon’s RAAT transport without adding it to the library? So just stick in the key, navigate to the folder and play it once. These are simple acts that work with any media player but Roon. And since I’ve structured my playback configuration based on RAAT, it’s hard to use other software now.
Whilst folder browsing would be of limited utility to me, I can’t say I have never stepped outside of Roon to check something in my local folder structure - usually related to how a classical album has been identified, or to fix a dreaded box set ID issue.
So for those with much more of that kind of focus in their library it’s a valuable sticking plaster while Roon refocuses efforts back on to difficult curation and metadata issues which have taken a back seat to ARC and suchlike. If those issues ever get properly nailed, folder browsing will just wither on the vine naturally.
Ok, good points. Looks like these can be solved with folder play/browse without polluting the Roon database / paradigm, and this is totally fine for me.
Well, folder browsing is an easy fix for that well known shortcoming.
Now that you got me started.
Metadata in general and for classical specifically is a mess in roon. Metadata retrieval is set up to take information from allmusic, which would be fine if the data in allmusic were consistent AND if there were a reliable and efficient way to correct faulty metadata at the source (allmusic).
Second thing would need some finishing touches is the per se wonderful composition repository. In order for roon to reliably identify a composition, either the album has to be identified by roon or WORK tags have to be added manually (which is cumbersome to say the least). If there were some sort of a “work identifier”, which would simply let me mark a set of tracks and then select a work that they should be identified as, things would start to work.
Maybe with Harman resources it will finally be possible to close the loops of these two fundamentally broken processes and finally start leveraging roon’s potential for classical.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
353
I agree I would not want that to change. I have become very dependent on Roon’s navigating.
But I think folder browsing will just make Roon easier to use for folks with complicated libraries. I know for example it will help me with listening to my captures of old mix tapes. (Which will probably sound pretty bad compared to CD quality FLAC!).
Roon uses MusicBrainz as well, here you can edit and add to their database any release it’s missing. I have just done it to get all but a few albums identified correctly. Allmusic is just one provider of metadata. I will add the remaining in due course. If you start with MusicBrainz Picard you can then push this to MusicBrainz site to carry on and edit fully and submit it.
I understand the wish. Just saying, don’t be surprised if in the future you get a lot of „this is not high priority to fix because you can use folder browsing“ answers to many things
Roon is 9 years old. It’s never had folder browsing and they’ve never fixed the issues behind why people want folder browsing. I don’t think incentivisation is really on the table as an argument against.
Recorded at the 2012 concert where my then 15yr old son was playing clarinet. This will never be an identified album - but using the Roon Filter it is easy to find in my local library.
Folder browsing can work for me with small collections - but becomes more and more unwieldy as your library grows.
I still have a USB stick with a subset of my local library on for use in the car when mobile internet is not good enough. I don’t have masses of storage on my phone so ARC is not always adequate either. The in-car media player has a folder based view and it is workable - but, IMO, that is only because I only have a couple of hundred albums to navigate.
I much prefer a flat view of albums (and even, sometimes, tracks) filtered by my own criteria and, ideally, sorted by a further criteria of my choosing. Additional (and mutli-level) sorting criteria for Albums is one thing I would like to see improved - but that is me.
Having said that, if Roon want to provide a ‘sort by path’ view of albums, I would not object (although I would not use it). The issue remains as to how to present online content (sorting tracks by path, currently puts tracks on streaming services at the end of the list grouped by album (track order within the album) which, to me, is not particularly helpful.
Sure. They never had and will never have time to do everything they want - a reality of any software development. So it is always necessary to prioritize.
Well, not as much of as mess as ex- Can’s Damo Suzuki’s page (whom I was listening to this weekend, RIP). Roon has him playing guitar on Simply Red records (it’s Kenji Suzuki who was in SR)! Had me really confused there for a minute…
The handling of folders doesn’t have to be (and I would argue shouldn’t be) a literal recreation of a Windows 95 folder navigator (shudder ).
Instead of dogmatically saying no, stepping back and thinking about the actual underlying user needs here and how the current tag management in Roon breaks down in some scenarios (for example where a child only makes sense within the context of it’s parent) you may come up with a solution that not only solves the filesystem folder issue, but also improves the handling of nested tagging, playlists and browsing across Roon.
As you suggest, maybe automatic placement wizards that could map a folder path to a special kind of tag (with a stronger notion of child/parent; maybe not displayed in normal tag views), the stronger use of breadcrumbs could allow movement though those strongly nested kinds of tags, recommendations of ‘traditional’ Roon tags and metadata based on those folders names could be suggested. If this was thought about and designed well there is no reason it couldn’t fit into Roon’s design ethic without looking like Frankenstein throwback to a mid 90s PC desktop.
While literally implementing what the customer wants (a ‘faster horse’) is normally a bad idea. It’s always worth stepping back and asking "do people want a faster horse " or do they actually want “a faster way to get from a to b and why might that be a legitimate issue for them?” and while doing that, can I make it more convenient and comfortable and maybe add a few extra improvements that the customer might not have thought of themselves, like adding a car stereo.
Sounds interesting but I would rather they fix the long standing broken things before developing new stuff. You only ‘need’ local folder browsing because search sucks. Tidal/Spotify etc don’t have folder browsing because they have a fully working search engine.
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