100% that’s the value of folder information - getting personal categorisation data into Roon, with the potential to browse in far better ways than text tree structures, visually, and of course multiple ways of grouping the same music. Folders are simply a way to start, and means to an end (a better one).
That big broad categorisation is necessary to conceptualise what you have, then introduce your more granular groupings (small enough to get your head around and pick from).
I’m looking in front of me, and I can tell you quite accurately where every record I own is. They’re in groups, and groups inside groups. I can gravitate towards those I feel like (without having an artist/album in mind), and I’ll discover similar others through proximity.
I’ve set up folder structures in similar groupings. Also new/recent/to tidy folders. Colour tags indicate in ‘physical collection’ or ‘personal encoding’. Groups I’d love to browse in Roon without massive setup hurdles. There’s 5,351 albums in the Independents folder, and I want to start sub-grouping to make it more digestable.
I’ve tried to do similar in Roon using Bookmarks created by Focusing on multiple Storage Folders, but since Roon gets unstable with >25K albums, they’re never all available at one time, so I never use them. And seriously, tags/bookmarks/etc are such a cludge. The emotional disconnect sends me running the other way.
The limitations of folder structures is evident here where all the releases under Techno Labels could also be listed alphabetically as Artists, and some of them also under Singles, either by label or by artist. So I don’t want to just replicate or browse my folder structure in Roon.
I want to slice and dice and be at one with my collection, better than real life, better than folders. I don’t want to feel like I’ve been dropped in the middle of a vast ocean, where the little I see isn’t that interesting, and so I doom scroll.
