Brainstorming is all good and possibly useful. But when clearly inadequate solutions are being “brainstormed” it is less of a “brain” and more like a “storm” frankly.
we get it. Add “randomize” to album view. End of discussion.
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Look at his post history…it’s not good and does no good to disagree with miguelito…
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By all means of course! Please do look at my post history. You will find I ask questions, make suggestions, and consider the facts people raise carefully.
It should be possible to sort any view by any tag or combination of tags in any way any user finds useful. This is what flexible, empathic software is all about. You might want to sort your Dance music by BPM, I might want to sort my Classical by period. I should not have to justify my choices to you, or gain your approval for them. You should not have to justify your choices to me, or gain my approval for them. When you buy a bookshelf you are generally allowed to put your books wherever you like on them. Imagine buying a chest of drawers and then having people online shrieking at you that you had to put your socks in the top drawer.
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And no one is suggesting that “Random” should not be added to the list of sorting options…
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Bumping this. Can someone in the Roon team acknowledge you have seen this please?
Mostly they don’t, just to set expectations.
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He knows that…
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Unashamedly bumping this again… This would be a great feature to have!!!
Bumping in Feature Requests have no influence on the Roon staff and are discouraged.
Cheers, Greg
Fair enough. So here’s one important insight:
I have a few friends who essentially refuse to use file-based playback in their main system. Most are very long time physical media users, and so am I.
There are things the physical media provides (other than the obvious physicality of the media):
The good:
G1- It is visible in front of you - and it is always an “album view”
G2- You bump into things while looking for other things
G3- Groupings are just what you are used to - whatever that is
The bad:
B1- You can’t always find what you’re looking for
B2- There’s a certain clutter order that sometimes drives you to the same things over and over
B3- You can’t discover new things - such as streaming
Now, a tool like Roon + a streaming service (I use both TIDAL and Qobuz) addresses some of these issues. Specifically it solves B1, B2, and B3 in spades (more so with Valence). It is also pretty good at delivering G3 but does nothing to address G1 or G2. And the lack of G1 and G2 is what I hear over and over as why physical media is better - other than cover art, etc, but some of that can be addressed by better coverage in terms of leaflet pdfs (which Qobuz is better at).
Hence my simple feature request.
And BTW… I think there’s tremendous possibilities in the “randomization” using user information - and possibly the Valence engine. But starting with pure random albums makes a lot of sense to me.
I have nothing against Roon adding an album randomization. However, it’s not something I am interested in and not something I would ever use. To me, it makes little or no sense. If you want to dig deep into you library to rediscover stuff you may have forgotten is in there, randomization is not the best way to do that. This is just my opinion, so please no flames.
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Following your last post I’m really struggling to understand how a randomised view can address points B1 to B3. Furthermore I fail to understand how it betters Valence for music discovery.
IMO walking up to my CD or record collection and randomly selecting an album is unsatisfactory. That approach doesn’t understand my mood or current listening preference. So I take another pot luck selection … and another … and another. In contrast, Radio usually surfaces something interesting in a few tracks. I like those wow moments when I find something that’s extraordinary and new to me.
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I usually choose what to listen to by artist first. Then, I choose an album. Then, I choose Qobuz or Tidal MQA. If I had a huge library, I might start with date last played, in reverse order, then artist, etc. or artist, then date last played in reverse order. I agree with the previous poster that mood plays a large part in deciding what to listen to. There is nothing random about what I listen to.
It does nothing for B1-B3 of course. Those physical media drawbacks are solved by Roon itself.
Different people feel differently about this.
This is where Valence could possibly help by producing a combination of randomization and your latest 10 albums and/or tracks. But starting simple first makes sense to me. For example, consider picking an album and asking for a list of albums in the same mood. If this always comes up with the same ordered list, it’s kind of not as nice as having that list randomized.
Great. I usually don’t. I usually think of albums I want to listen. In my experience, there are very many people that think about it the same way I do. It’s great to have Roon deliver different experiences for different people, right?
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When I still owned vinyl and later CDs, I loved to flip through the collection and just let myself be inspired. Suddenly I discovered a cover of a band I hadn’t heard in a long time and listened to the album again.
Today I get sterile lists. Scrolling up and down is just no great fun.
Under the motto, “touch and discover your music collection”, I have a suggestion.
The principle is quite simple: The whole thing should work like a kind of word cloudl. I can swip endlessly in one direction or the other and I am constantly presented with new covers.
The covers are displayed in different sizes. The system decides continuously on his own (maybe with the KI from the discover tap).
If i find a cover exciting, I tap on it. Then I see the artist / name and the titles. I either tap on the album and the album is played, or I tap on a song or I swipe on.
Maybe sounds a little bit confusing 
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Interesting… But this is a massive UI change, and to be frank, of very little value add in my opinion.
The randomization ask in this thread is a relatively simple change that is (in some people’s opinion) a fairly useful feature. Complex UI changes are at a different level of complexity and frankly should be considered when the value-add is large.