Well, not as much of as mess as ex- Canâs Damo Suzukiâs page (whom I was listening to this weekend, RIP). Roon has him playing guitar on Simply Red records (itâs Kenji Suzuki who was in SR)! Had me really confused there for a minuteâŚ
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This⌠
The handling of folders doesnât have to be (and I would argue shouldnât 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 itâs 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 âtraditionalâ 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 couldnât fit into Roonâs design ethic without looking like Frankenstein throwback to a mid 90s PC desktop.
While literally implementing what the customer wants (a âfaster horseâ) is normally a bad idea. Itâs always worth stepping back and asking "do people want a faster horse " or do they actually want âa faster way to get from a to b and why might that be a legitimate issue for them?â 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.
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Sounds interesting but I would rather they fix the long standing broken things before developing new stuff. You only âneedâ local folder browsing because search sucks. Tidal/Spotify etc donât have folder browsing because they have a fully working search engine.
Sometimes people working on large, complex software system, which Roon certainly qualifies as, use the term âorthogonality matrixâ to describe how product features interact with one another.
The idea is pretty straightforward - you create a list of all of the ânameableâ features in a product. Then you create a grid in which both the column titles and the row titles are the names of the features. If you have 50 features, your grid is 50x50.
Next, you fill in the cells of the grid to describe the interactions, dependencies, and implications of every feature of every other feature. Itâs a helpful and durable exercise. When a new feature is proposed, you add a row and column for that feature, and work through the implications. Probably the most interesting thing about doing this is that it helps clarify that adding any new feature doesnât just increase the complexity of the product linearly, it increases it multiplicatively.
It is very easy to think about this issue as simply
- Put a link in the left nav bar that says âFoldersâ
- Click on that to peruse your folder structure
- Click on a file to queue it, a folder to queue it (and probably its subfolders)
Itâs also easy to guess at the complexity of the above. Doesnât sound all that hard. Whatâs a lot harder is for anyone who isnât deep in the code to even guess at the implications across all existing features. Could be trivial, could be far, far harder than anyone guesses.
On top of that, itâs a divergence from what the creators of the product intended. You may not like what they intended, but they conceptualized a metadata driven product with a knowledge graph (or at least the perception of a knowledge graph) at the heart of the thing.
I get your point about steering wheels and things not working. Itâs legitimate. But it makes me wonder if a better solution for people with the kinds of collections youâre describing is to just run something in parallel that solves for those problems. There are options. Every tool doesnât need to solve every problem. And if someoneâs collection pivots so hard to not being functional in a metadata-driven world, then maybe Roon just isnât the right product.
This is now becoming academic because Roonâs new owners have said âgo do thisâ. That seems like a big bummer to me for the Roon guys. It almost feels like the decision of one influential person at Samsung/HK who had an initial bad experience after the acquisition and then said âThis didnât work for me. Go put a file browser inâ without giving it some time and figuring out why that might not be the best idea long term.
Roon can and, I hope, will, surive this. It really sucks to be told to do something by a manager when you feel strongly that itâs the wrong thing. Especially with a new manager when you have pride of ownership and a strong grounding in the direction of the thing youâre working on. Iâve been on the receiving end of that sort of behavior and Iâve also been guilty of being that manager. I hope they work through it - this whole thing is very possibly bigger than just a feature discussion, though.
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They donât have folder browsing because there are no folders (for users) to browse until they are purchased and downloaded. Two entirely different things are being talked about here - folder browsing in Roon would be for your local files, nothing from streaming services. My guess is that if one doesnât actually know what it is or need it, then thereâs nothing to worry about. Just donât go there.
Personally Iâd like to see a folder view combined with a robust, quick and easy to use metadata editor (one where you donât have to jump back and forth between windows and menus and then scroll to see all of the fields). But that may be a bridge too farâŚ
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Like âasymmetric isolation feetâ! 
Yes. That was the example I had in mind as I was writing. 
Thatâs probably impossible, and I donât think itâs a good approach. Itâs like saying we should cure cancer before creating digital audio technology.
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Not really true. If youâve read the thread, youâll see there are use cases that have nothing to do with search. Itâs about opening Roon up to users whose collections donât readily fit the artist-album paradigm alone. You canât tag what Roon canât find but that doesnât necessarily mean search.
Tidal and Spotify donât have folder browsing because they are streaming services. Apples to oranges.
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Exactly. Also worth mentioning is that most younger listeners donât care about albums at all. The streaming playlist paradigm has incentivized hopscotching from track to track, with no regard to album, artist, or even genre.
Many of these listeners (myself included) have accumulated significant numbers of individual tracks, divorced from the album they originally came from (if there ever was one). I have thousands of tracks from old Paste compilation CDs, DJ mixes, SoundCloud and MP3 blog downloads, bootlegs, Razormaid and other remix servicesâŚ
They all have in common sketchy metadata, and it would be ridiculous to have them stored in individual artist-album-date file structure. Instead I have them loosely aggregated in folders that are meaningful to me, and which will never work well with search functions, absent a gigantic amount of effort and time I will probably never undertake. But they do work perfectly well with every other media player that lets me browse and filter by file location.
Again, this is about options for the many people here who have repeatedly asked for this functionality. Obviously Harman sees value in increasing Roonâs user base, and not artificially limiting it out of fear of offending the purists.
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We used to call these âmix tapes.â I actually miss that cultural phenomenon - it was a gesture that just isnât the same as âtry this playlist.â
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Seems like good news, especially for power users and those with large libraries. Nice to see ARC getting attention. Hope the next ARC problem you address is the inconsistent reliability of ARC seemingly correlated with extra large libraries. I really miss Roon features and functionality on the road.
Thanks for listening.
Iâve never understood why a license check is needed at all for those with a lifetime license. Certainly when one purchases a lifetime license something could be put on their core that completely disables the periodic license check.
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Maybe so that an offline server can be deauthorised when a login is performed on another server?
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From the post I linked above:
In addition, Iâd guess also so that you canât run two servers concurrently with one Roon license in two different networks. (Edit: Or unlimited ones in different networks)
I never quite understood that statement from @danny about lyrics.
I guess it means that lyrics for library albums are stored (or at least cached) in the database.
If not, there would be no need to disable lyrics if the internet is off because ⌠the internet is off.
Good point. Maybe, I canât remember what happens without internet. He said âfor exampleâ so I guess there might be more than this that makes an occasional online connection necessary even for lifers.
Maybe they report only every 30 days, so if you are online for 29 days and go online, they need to report at most 30 days later. Maybe they also need to report that you didnât read any lyrics in the past 30 days, but for that youâd need to go online as well.
Wow, me too! I remember the hours spent, not only in recording them, but doing all of the art and song listings by hand. I continued giving them out even into the CDR era, long past when people began to question my priorities! 
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