Any thoughts of adding a Podcast section?

[j_a_m_i_e]

@amg

Better fitting with Roon may be a minimalist approach that simply recognizes podcasts as a top-level type of content (like Albums and Internet Radio streams), establishes a top-level section for podcasts, organizes them in some sensible fashion based on folders/tags (e.g., by podcast and then by date) with an album-like interface, and removes them entirely from the track, album, and artist views. In other words, the user would still be responsible for getting podcast files onto Roon-accessible storage (whether via iTunes, a command-line downloader, etc.), and Roon would simply catalogue them appropriately. For me, at least, this would be a great feature and perfectly sufficient. As it is not, podcasts are mixed in with everything else, which is rather less than ideal, and it takes a fair bit of effort to organize them.

This seems like a wholly sensible approach that doesn’t require Roon to immediately get bogged down with building tools to handle the downloading and management of podcasts.

In fact it might make sense to step back and generalise podcasts out to encompass other forms of grouped content like archived radio shows or even a selection of recordings or mixes that could be nicely grouped together. Maybe Series or Sets (as in a set or grouping of content).

This would probably be the minimum feature set needed to get it working:

• Create a new top level in Roon (called something like Series, Sets or Podcasts)
• Create a new object type similar to Album (called something like Show, Podcast or Set as an underlying type, but that could be labelled by a user as XYZ Podcast, ZYZ Radio Show, Mellow Mixes, Party Mixes, Bob’s Collection of Live Recordings) that would sit in the above section and act as a container for individual audio tracks.
• Define a tagging schema/rule that allowed individual audio tracks (Episode 3, XYZ Radio Show - 07 May 2021, Mellow Mix 1, Party Mix 1, Bob’s First Live Recording) to be attached to the above container.

Ideally the Series, Set or Podcast folder would allow a title, image and a description to be manually assigned.

In addition each individual item of content ie. a Show, Episode or Mix would ideally display it’s own thumbnail (rather than the parent/album thumbnail) when listed under the parent and also when played (see image below).

For podcasts and archived radio shows it would be really useful to be able to order them by date.

This would open up a lot of flexibility and allow users to mange a wide range of audio content that doesn’t fall under Roon current (very analog CD/LP centric) structure. Management, downloading and tagging of content could be managed separately with existing tools.