Regarding “intuitive”. Here’s a story from the history of medical anesthesia. Anesthesia used to be way more dangerous than it is today, to the point where the anesthesiologists’ professional society decided to fix it. One of the ways they did was dials.
You see, anesthesia machines were made by different companies. Some companies decided that turning a knob clockwise meant “more gas”. Some decided “more gas” should come from turning the knob counterclockwise. (Which seems obviously wrong to me, but I suspect what their knob controlled was the amount of oxygen in the mix, so to them, clockwise meant “more oxygen” and consequently “less gas”.)
You can see the problem. The anesthesiologists decided they didn’t care about why one way made sense from some interpretation, and they had seen that “you just have to get used to it” wasn’t working. So they used market power and said “henceforth, clockwise will have the same effect on all machines. We won’t use any that do it differently.”
Anesthesiologists could do that because they had institutional power. We are mere customers, alas.
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And Roon is not complicated software. Reaper (an audio editor) is complicated software.
I’m just now learning it, after using GarageBand for editing. Reaper was driving me crazy because, during playback, [space] does something importantly different than it does on GarageBand. I needed to use [return] instead, which was going to require a lot of retraining of my muscle memory. Except it didn’t, because Reaper’s user interface is customizable. It took me a matter of minutes to switch the meanings of [space] and [return].
Retrofitting such customization into an app is usually hard, though, at least if you want to do it systematically.
I do notice that Roon has something of a programmer interface. If it’s capable enough, I hereby resolve to write an open source MacOS or browser interface for managing playlists. I need a post-retirement programming project.
Anyone have a feel for whether the Roon API can work for that?
Take a look at the projects in #tinkering:roonapi …
I am not sure if there are any generally enforced standards concerning UIX design but the big players like Windows, Mac and Android have reams of UIX design standards. I recall that a common recommendation is to grey out unused buttons rather than hide them as is the case here. Roon is going its own way in all sorts of UIX design areas. Where did the cursor arrows go in the navigation boxes? This is bound to cause usability problems when roon departs unexpectedly from host environment behaviour. But I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Well, I just transferred 56 hours of music from my 3-bouncier-working playlist to my Artists to Watch playlist when I’d intended to transfer two misclassified tracks. Again, it was because I clicked the wrong “…” button.
Fortunately, I realized what I’d just done so I could clean up.
I’m thinking I do not deserve to use Roon.
I guess the Roon app is intended for people who do not make user errors. Kind of like what we want in our nuclear power plant operators. (I know someone who babysat nuclear reactors on submarine. A person who could not get bored or careless. He is not me. He’d have no problems with Roon playlists.)
Are there good alternatives to Roon for distributing your library + a streaming library to multiple devices? Because I’ve been doing potentially dangerous things with computers for 40 years and even in the bad old days of “rm -rf /” there were more guardrails to protect you from yourself.
Doesn’t matter how many times you ask “are you sure” as the makers of hard drive recovery software would tell you when formatting floppy disks were a thing. Oops I meant A not C.
I think the interface is not well developed. I also use JRiver Media Center 30 to actually manage my music, it is MUCH, MUCH easier to do in MC 30 than Roon. I build and manage my playlist in MC 30 and then copy the files to a removeable SSD that I attach to Roon. You can try MC 30 for free and see what I’m talking about. The only thing Roon has going for it over MC 30 is metadata.
Thank you. My intention is to be listening to a playlist played through my BlueSound PowerNode (driven by Roon), notice that the song is in the wrong playlist and quickly and easily move it from the “bouncy working” playlist to the “vocal” playlist.
Does the JRiver Media Center help with that? I want to react to a playlist while it’s playing with the minimum muss and fuss.
