Add "randomize" sorting to album view

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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What I find puzzling is that, to my knowledge, none whatsoever of the feature requests I know about - and I follow this forum - has ever been implemented.

It’s almost as if the Roon team has some sort of “we know better and you’re all idiots” stance.

Also, I know software, and unless the Roon code is a complete disaster architecturally (which I am starting to think it is) this one feature asked here should be a triviality.

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Roon uses Mono for cross-system compatibility. During the 13 years I was a Linux user (from 2002 to 2015) I never met an app with Mono that worked well, had advanced features and optimised resource usage.

By the way, when you create an application based on open source software you are obliged to make the code public. However, Roon not only does not release it, but it is the most expensive consumer app for the home user that I know of.

In any case, I think that for what we have paid a hundred thousand customers, we would deserve a complete rewrite with a native programming language for each system. And tons of new features.

Look at this thread:

It’s regarding what finally became the “ROONRADIOBAN” tag.

Creative Cloud. Even the cheapest subscription plan is more expensive than Roon. The most expensive is at least five times as much.

Nope. At least not for PC or Linux, and the ARM native version for Mac, when it arrives, will also be running on .NET.

I don’t need sterile polemics that detract from the true meaning of a message. There are more expensive subscriptions than Creative Cloud. I said that there is no consumer and home app more expensive than Roon. In other words, there are no $700 apps on the market that have no business use. And any thirty or fifty dollar app is constantly improving, adding new features and listening to its customers.

It’s a step forward.

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As are Roon. Requests for greater stability, requests for an ARM native version, requests for better integration with streaming providers (Tidal, Qobuz). And if you take a look at the software release notes you’ll find a whole bunch more. Roon 1.5 added MQA decoding and Linn DS Support, 1.6 added Qobuz support and Roon Radio, 1.7 added Valence, 1.8 added better support for Classical music and a whole bunch of other stuff.

You mentioned that you think you deserve tons of new features. What would you like? I did try to check which feature suggestions you’ve posted, but your public profile is hidden.

This is incorrect. You are obliged to comply with the license of the free / open source code you are using. Some licenses, like GPL, require that you make your own code public. Some licenses, like LGPL, require only that you make changes public that you make to the licensed code. Some licenses, like the BSD or MIT licenses, don’t require to make anything public at all. Mono is MIT-licensed specifically because they want to encourage proprietary projects to use it.

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I have supported quite a few suggestions. This one about shuffle albums is not the first time it has come up. I read the forum more than participate in it. But I’ve seen virtually no suggestions that have come to fruition. I think it’s just what some of the Roon community says that suggestions go unheeded.

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I didn’t know that Mono used MIT. You are right.

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Honestly… The instability of the iphone app lasted, what? TWO YEARS? It seems to be better now but frankly my muscle memory is NOT to use it at this point so I wouldn’t know! ARM-native? Is that a thing for Roon? TIDAL and Qobuz issues? I subscribe to both and there are glitches all the time… None of which happen on Audirvana…

So if the argument is that no user request are honored cuz the team spends their time making the ecosystem top notch… NO SIR! NOT TRUE!

It isn’t. If you read my post again you’ll see that I listed quite a lot of the user requests that were added with each new point release.

Agreed, as can be easily seen when taking the time to check out the new features.

It seems to me that some users severely underestimate the difficulties in honoring user requests. I work in a software company quite comparable to Roon - privately owned, solves a specialist need, and just a bit older and larger than Roon (20 years, a million customers).

In the 20 years, we have accumulated a few thousand user requests. They are immensely helpful and we think about every one of them, but it’s completely impossible to implement them all. Resources are one thing (and it’s common that something looks simple to the user but is actually very complex to do), but 80% of requests have one or very few people asking for it, individual requests are often contradictory, and blindly implementing whatever users ask for without having a larger vision would create an unholy, unusable mess that nobody would like.

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And to be clear, I don’t want the filtered list of albums to play in random order. What I want is for the list displayed to be randomized. I have tons of albums and I would like to have some oddities pop up to the beginning of the list so I can more readily see them.

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Love this idea

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Bumping this cuz I still WANT IT!!!

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Also, go to the top of this post and VOTE please.

If you want oddities….invert the show album by “most played” list….

I know, it’s not what you are asking for but it will actually find more “oddities” than a random list of albums.