Alternative hi-res products that support folder view navigation

Hello all!

I am (obviously) a Roon subscriber, and taken for what it is and how it integrates with HQPlayer in particular i appreciate it as it is. However i have been, and still am looking for a (hi-res capable) audio player software that supports some sort of folder view, with little success, in iOS preferably. My digital collection consists of all sorts of music collected and built up over more than 20 years, in a chaotic fashion with regards to file organisation unfortunately, not to mention tagging. I have however applied my own logic to the folder structure, and can enjoy listening to music based on the knowledge of this structure (in a way the folder organisation is a representation of the last 20 years of my music life). Therefore i feel kind of lost using Roon or for that matter any other hi-res capable player i have tried.

Having read about the seemingly unlikely possibility to implement some sort of folder view in Roon, i would like to ask if any of you know of some other player that supports this, and that you can recommend?

I forgot to mention i am looking more for a player/client with some sort of remote or controller app support (otherwise there is of course candidates like JRiver, foobar2k etc.). None of these seem to have apps available with support for folder view.

Thankful for any advise.
Regards
Robert

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This has been done to death on Roon and is completely at odds with the whole ethos of the software, a simple search reveals this small thread.

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Robert’s not asking for Roon to change though, he’s asking if we know of anything with folder view that has controller app support.

Would HQP itself fit the bill ? It is now capable of remote control (although I haven’t used it).

Interesting. I will investigate the HQP remote functionality. Thanks for the tips!

/Robert

As a new user I wish I had seen the thread referred to about Folder structure. There definitely appear to be at least several ways of approaching your music files. People who love Roon clearly can’t understand why those of us with a well organised file structure on a NAS, for instance, can’t see that structure in Roon. I thought it was just me, and that I had clearly not understood the process. I am afraid that when I listen I go first to the Genre structure I have set up. Despite setting up Roon to prefer my tabs, it doesn’t do it, and frankly the genre structure it has set up is chaotic to my mind. You guys clearly take a different view, which is fine. To answer the question of the original poster, Minimserver and Bubble do the job nicely.

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+1 for the free MinimServer (excellent lightweight but hugely powerful frontend). I use this with the android app HiFi Cast on my tablet for HiRes music streaming. It supports folder view navigation. Like many, sometimes I may not know the name of the album or track I want to play but I do know where I’ve put it…

DDJ

I use Audirvana navigating with Mac OS Finder and Good for this folders Roon doesn’t work good

Hello everybody, Roon is a great program, but to be honest, the genre is very messy for me. I would also like to show my folder structure. Before Roon I used the UPnP asset, where it is possible to show the folder structure for the existing genre.

I would like to ask you to check this in the future, technically this is not a problem. It could be interpreted and everyone can decide for themselves whether it is used or not. In my folder structure I have five folders … FLAC / DSD / MQA / DSD / 24 Bit … in the subfolder Artist / Album. Since I am not always aware of all the artists or albums I want to hear, a representation of the order structure would be great.

Thanks and best regards.

Roon is fairly emphatic that NO is the answer , it been stated repeatedly

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Hello Robert. I have both Minimserver (mentioned above) and Subsonic pointing at the same folders as Roon, to provide alternative playback (and browse) options.

My main use case for Subsonic is remote (out of home network / on-the-road ) access, where optional on-the -fly transcoding to MP3 comes in handy on slower or data limited connections. Possibly a bit different from your use case.

Conscious that many months have passed since the last comment, but anyway, just a few thoughts that occur:
You could technically do this using tags and bookmarks if you were prepared to put in some initial effort. How much effort will depend on your library size I guess. I think within Roon if you were to tag all your DSD albums as DSD and then use focus to arrive at that filter, you could then set a bookmark called DSD which would always take you to this view. Would this work, or am I being too simplistic?

Similarly with the original OP who says:

They don’t specify the folder structure, but if I imagine it is divided into chunks of his life, eg ‘College’ etc then again this could work if those albums within the ‘College’ folderf could all be tagged and then bookmarked as such.

There’s no need to tag anything with respect to folder location as this can be accessed through focus: Focus → Inspector → Storage Locations. Simply focus on a specific storage location and save that as a bookmark. This method has the benefit that any files added to the location in the future will automatically get added to the bookmark.

The same method works for file format: Focus → Format, then pick the particular format you’re interested in and add a bookmark.

Hello @DaveN,

Many thanks for the possible approach. I have already marked the formats DSD / MQA / 24Bit in the comment of the ID tag. The library has been completely edited and includes approx. 2600 albums. Nevertheless, direct access to the folder would be more interesting for me.

I come from Germany and have to work with a translator. The indicated way:

is partly not tangible for me in the translation. What do you mean by “focus” and “inspector”?
Regards … Thorsten

As above Roon have been extremely clear this will not happen, it goes against the entire design philosophy of Roon

There are ways around it as have explained

@Mike_O_Neill,

Hello, I have already taken note of that and it wasn’t my question either! My question only related to the translation of the help from David Nightingale … I am also well aware of the ways that were explained, only the conversion from English into German is not correct for me … there is no “focus” or in German-speaking Roon “Inspector”!

The answer received misses the question and does not reveal itself to me, either my translation into English was so poor or my question was simply ignored.

Regards … Thorsten

The Focus button is shown in the following screengrab:

If you click this you will find a range of options will appear at the bottom of your screen that will allow you to ‘focus’ on particular albums within your collection. ‘Inspector’ is one of the choices (bottom right). You can also narrow down your selection by rating, date added, genre, album type and so on.

Once you have narrowed down your collection by one of more criteria within ‘focus’ you can then create a bookmark to quickly recreate a specific set of focus criteria. For example, I have bookmarks for storage location, checking for duplicates, ratings, specific labels, and so on.

I hope the above clarifies my earlier comment.

Hello,
Very nice, thank you very much for the effort and constructive feedback. I can work with that too :-).
Please stay healthy, best regards.

Thanks David. I’m happy with using Focus to access Storage Location, but i’m not sure how you can drill down further within that storage location.
For me I am only presented with either Tidal or Nucleus as a storage location, which are, effectively, Top Level folders. I’m unsure how to focus deeper than that :man_shrugging:

I don’t think you can drill down any deeper than the folder (or folders) you specify as storage locations in Roon’s settings even though this would be quite useful.

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You can’t with streaming services. However, if you used an external drive rather than an internal drive with your Nucleus, then you could have added discrete folders as storage locations.

For example, main folder music, sub folder Hi Res, vinyl rip, Cd Rip, Holiday, Kids.
Instead of adding Music as the watched folder which auto grabs everything underneath, I can add the sub-folders as individual storage location. That lets me turn them on/off in the case of holiday and kids when I want the albums quickly in or out of the library. It also lets me use focus to narrow my search. You could get even more granular if you wanted.

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