Add "randomize" sorting to album view

I am so tired of seeing “? And the Mysterians” every time I go into album view. Yes, I would love to see this feature too!!!

I come here also seeking a ‘Random’ sort option. I use this very frequently for views in JRiver and find it useful for rediscovering music I have not listened to in a while.

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+1 in hopes that this feature will become a reality. Similar to gkoop, 'Til Tuesday, “Weird Al” Yankovic, and 10,000 Maniacs are the first listings in album view. Every. Single. Time.

Dave

“+1” posts don’t sway things.

If you want to add your vote - click the Vote button at the top of the thread - that’s what counts as a vote…

Roon Labs very rarely comment on requests, all that is certain is that the development team of Roon Labs read all these Feature Requests and note them.

BTW, if you want to have randomised suggestions of what to play, the Discover panel on the Home page is still there…

Thanks for the reply, Geoff. I just saw it now.

I did actually vote, but sometimes it helps to make a comment as well to keep a topic alive and remind people of the issue. I do like “Discover” as well, but that requires me to navigate to Home etc. I’d much rather just see “random” as a sort option. Hopefully we’ll see it one day.

Thanks again!

Came here to make this same Feature Suggestion. Turns out it has been requested many times before.

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Just starting to use Roon and this is the most glaring omission I see from an interface perspective. Either visually randomizing or queueing a random album from the current view really helps with larger collections when you are overwhelmed with choices.

Yes, for sure I am one of the minority (?) random album listeners, but I have hundreds and hundreds of DJ mixes that I do not want to ‘shuffle tracks’ to listen to - I want to hear those tracks continuously as mixed (one might say the point IS the transitions), but I don’t want to have to pick one specifically.

Current workaround is to start shuffle and stop it immediately, take the first track and play that album. It’s hacky but it’s something.

Also, from a logic perspective: If the devs thought that ‘Shuffle’ was a good enough idea to include, ‘Shuffle Albums’ should logically follow. As a software developer, I know how easy-sounding things can in fact be very challenging to implement…this seems like a doable do tho.

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And of all the projects on their ‘Feature Suggestion’ list probably some of the easiest code to write … we’ll see how many years it takes.

Do they ever accept fester requests from the community? What does it take to get acknowledgement?

Roon Labs read every Feature Suggestion, but they very, very rarely comment directly on a request. If they do, it’s usually to say that they definitely won’t be implementing it - e.g. they won’t be implementing browsing by folders…

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Random shuffle of Album list would also be a welcomed addition to Roon’s features. When one has a large album collection one can sort or reverse sort but the albums stuck in the middle will always be buried.

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You might want to take a look at the Random Radio extension. It can shuffle based on tracks or albums.

Interesting extension. However, I don’t think it can be installed in a Nucleus or ROCK NUC. I wish they would simplify the addition of these. I have the “TV Remote” on AppleTV and it’s good and fairly easy to set up. Not this one though.

I believe you are correct…I tried to install and found it would not work on Rock.
Which is a real shame.
I have shouted from the rooftops since forever for a simple random album generator to deaf ears it appears.
For gawds sake, even Discogs can manage it from my collection!!

How did you even try to install it?

I have a rpi4 at home running some network management (unifi) and wondering if that can host an extension server that the NUC can use. But this is seriously NOT a feature if one needs to go to these extents.

I honestly don’t remember but it was probably more along the lines of “that’s a great idea, let’s try it but fell down at the first hurdle when I discovered Rock was a no-no”

However to get back to your feature request, I really don’t think it can truly be that hard if they already have track shuffle enabled.
But I’m not a programmer so what I think might be easy may not be so clear cut in reality.

Yes, I agree it shouldn’t be so complicated.

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In fact, I’ll give you one trivial implementation in one particular case:

In the “Albums” tab you can sort by Artist, Most Played, Date Added, Date, Album title. I imagine there’s something akin to a matrix or dataframe holding at least each one of these columns. Add a new column (call it say “my order”) and for each album this column is populated with a random number, one per album obviously. So when you choose “Shuffle” in the sorting, two things happen: the “my order” column gets repopulated with random numbers and then sorted by that. Simple.

Regarding the Roon Radio extension and Roon Extension Manager (specifically in the case of a Nucleus or ROCK NUC):

Ok that worked. I installed Docker on the rpi4 and then the Roon Extension Manager. Then from a Roon remote you can enable it - Roon Core sees it over the network, it does not need to be running on the same machine. I am not sure whether once an extension is loaded the rpi4 needs to be online to use it, but I presume this is the case.

What is unclear to me is how to use the Roon Radio extension other than it taking over from the standard Radio functionality when that one is off. But then it is not randomizing my set of albums which is kinda what I wanted.

Roon’s development is very desperate. You wonder what they’ve done with your five or seven hundred dollar license fee if $30 apps are able to incorporate tons of features every year that their customers have asked.

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