I’d like to see selection of items in the library views of Roon ARC work in the same way as It does in Roon remote. My interest is particularly for album view but it could also potentially apply to artists, tracks etc.
What I mean is the way in Roon Remote you can long-press on an item in a view (say album view) and a tick will appear to show it has been selected and you can then go and select multiple items or use the drop down menu to select all and then once you have selected everything you want you can the use the top menu to perform a permitted action on all of the albums selected e.g. play-now, queue, add-to-playlist etc.
The reason I would like to see this feature, apart from general convenience, is specifically for people like me who want to download a lot of content to Roon ARC for offline playback. Right now if someone wants to download their entire collection, as I have seen a few people on this forum saying that they want to do (I am one of them), for anyone with a few hundred albums or more that is pretty much impractical with the current interface as it would involve going individually to each album in one’s collection and selecting download to download just that album which would be tedious and take a very long time. If it was possible to do a select-all on the album view and then choose “Download” from a top menu to download all of the selected albums that would make things far more convenient.
As a side note, for many people this only makes sense if Roon also implements the feature request to be able to transcode files being downloaded into a more compact format in order to fit all of their desired offline content into the available storage space on their phone. For people who do also want the ability to download their files in compressed format and haven’t seen the feature request for that the post about it is here - Option to convert downloaded files - so please vote for that feature as well if you are interested in it as well.
Furthermore, I would like to suggest a few features for people that prefer to store songs locally on phones or tablets.
Add a button to download automatically all local audio files to ARC.
Add a function to synchronize files downloaded on ARC with the original library,
Allow to download local files via USB, since moving large sets of data by WiFi it is very slow.
At the moment I was able to set up a single playlist to download my local files in one go but the problem is that if I try to play the same songs from other playlists or from the album view ARC does not find the file I have downloaded into ARC itself. I hope this issue can be fixed in the future.
I completely agree. I travel to remote places where even the 3G coverage is flaky enough that I don’t think ARC connectivity will work, so started to download the local files to phone. However, as @Julian points out, this is impractical for anything more than just a few files. Ideally, I would tag the albums to download, then set the phone loose to download -it’ll take a while.
Seems like it wouldn’t be overly complicated to do, on the “home” wifi network in particular. Thank you Roon!!
Interested in learning more about this feature. I agree it’s super clunky to download a lot of stuff at once. Want to dig a bit deeper here.
Why is downloading important to you? What problems does it solve?
When do you download things?
How much stuff do you download?
Where do you store those things?
What format/quality do you prefer those things to be in?
Which things do you want to download to your device? Is it in one fell swoop or do you often update/change your downloads?
Thanks for your attention on this @michael, it’s really great to see such engagement by Roon staff - and I do realise that actually getting a good design and then implementing it takes time so I fully understand that this is just the first stage of (I hope) getting to a good solution.
My answers to your questions are as follows…
Why is downloading important to you? What problems does it solve?
I like to have a copy of all of the music I own (local files either ripped from CD or purchased downloads) stored on my phone so that I have access to my entire collection when I don’t have a network connection but also so that I can optimise battery life on my phone by playing local content rather than streaming data over a mobile network plus I have a limited monthly data allowance (3GB) on my mobile plan. A lot of my music listening is when I am out and about.
When do you download things?
One big download of everything whenever I upgrade to a new phone, and its OK if that takes hours or even overnight as long as it can be done unattended, and then incremental downloads whenever I buy a new album which now is always via purchasing a legal download typically from the Qobuz download store.
How much stuff do you download?
In total about 700 albums.
Where do you store those things?
Currently on an iPhone 14 Pro Max. I don’t store files anywhere else apart from on my iPhone and on my Roon server machine.
What format/quality do you prefer those things to be in?
I’m currently using 320kbs AAC CBR. I went for the maximum bitrate because it still creates small enough files for me to fit everything on my iPhone so I thought why not go for the maximum quality although on headphones I doubt that I could tell the difference between that and 256kbs AAC or equivalent so I would be OK with that. I would be unhappy if I had to go to any lower bitrate than 256kbs though.
Which things do you want to download to your device? Is it in one fell swoop or do you often update/change your downloads?
I think I’ve covered this already. One fell swoop to initially populat a new phone and then incremental updates whenever I buy a new album.
