I’m having trouble figuring out why ARC does not provide some way to get to artists quickly through the CarPlay interface. Apple and Plex both provide access to an A–Z alphabet, so finding Youssou N’Dour or Warren Zevon is a couple of quick presses, and maybe two of three swipes.
There are about 1800 artists in my library. With 4.5 artists displayed per screen, that’s 400 screens to get to the end of the alphabet — i.e., essentially impossible. The only workaround I see is to pick up my phone and execute a search that way — and eliminating the need to pick up my phone is pretty much the entire point of CarPlay, isn’t it?
This is not a bug. This is an essential but missing component of navigation in ARC. You could just relabel the “Artists” tab to “Artists Beginning With A.”
I’ve been wrong before, so If I’m missing something, by all means let me know. Otherwise, I’m really bewildered by this oversight or, worse, intentional omission. It renders CarPlay largely unusable for me.
I’ve made this request multiple times. I hope Roon is working on it, but IDK. We need A to Z for artist and albums. My albums sorted by artist only take me to the B’s and that’s after an unacceptable amount of scrolling.
I agree it would be nice. Hopefully it’s something they are working on for future updates.
I am happy about what we have so far but this would be a very welcome addition since it’s not possible to go through Siri either. I hate voice commands myself so having an option to select manually would be appreciated.
Thanks for the suggestions Both Siri and the alphabetical indexer would make things easier to navigate and we’re looking into building them. The alphabetical indexer was something that proved to be deceptively hard to build, so we opted to focus on other features, bug squashing, and getting this first Carplay iteration out the door.
We will be continuing to improve on both Carplay and Android Auto over time, and both of these features are high on our list of future improvements.
Wondering if any attention has been paid to this issue. It’s been five months, and Arc still doesn’t work for me, partly because of the issue here. Wondering if there’s more specificity on what “high on our list of future improvements” means.
We have been focused on a few other projects such as the development and testing of MUSE, and our current focus on general performance improvements.
We recognize Carplay is important and as soon as we have bandwidth, we will come back to it. I have a shortlist of several improvements I’d like to address, amongst them is this browsing issue. The thing is, it’s not super straightforward to resolve.
Carplay was designed to have chunky buttons and short menus so that drivers keep their eyes on the road and use the screen with minimal effort. To that end, Carplay deliberately limits the items which can be shown in a browser list, such as the “artists” browser. If you use Spotify or TIDALs Carplay app, they won’t be able to show you the full list either.
For now, I wanted to invest either a nested structure for this list to fit more into it, or basic voice controls to let you find something. There are still design/feasibility concerns here to be teased out.
Not forgotten, just not straightforward to fix so requires more design thinking. Thanks
It would be really great to have this feature. The A-Z search is offered in Apple’s own Music Carplay integration and it’s really useful. I don’t really use Arc much in the car because this feature is missing. I would suggest it’s more dangerous not to have this feature as it could tempt less responsible drivers to spend more time with their eyes off the road, scrolling endlessly.
Whatever reason you might have, Carplay with artists doesn’t work great. My list ends wit ‘E’ as the list is too long. Siri should be working but I dare you to get Siri to understand ‘Yello’. Just a simple keyboard button like i.e. Waze provides would be really helpfull.
Something has changed and now I see the option of choosing by alphabet. Great upgrade and also and extremely quick response
EDIT
Sorry I was wrong here because I mixed up the interface of the Music app (iTunes) with Roon-ARC. Apple Music does have a feature to search artist by alphabet.
Just copy this and make RoonARC more complete!
Both Siri and the alphabetical indexer would make things easier to navigate and we’re looking into building them. The alphabetical indexer was something that proved to be deceptively hard to build, so we opted to focus on other features, bug squashing, and getting this first Carplay iteration out the door.