I have just started exploring the 14 day trial.
I have Roon core setup and running nicely on an i5 NUC. Playback to various Airplay devices including AudioPro C10, AudioPro Link1, Raspberry Pi with fancy DAC etc. So far so good.
I added my CD rips collection (all FLAC) from my NAS. That works OK.
But I am puzzled what to do with non-music stuff. I like to keep current podcasts, audiobooks, R4 plays etc on the server so I can play them the same way. When I was using a normal uPnP/DLNA server I would just browse the NAS by folder. All this stuff was below one or two folders that I could ignore the rest of the time and did not get in the way of browsing music.
But Roon doesn’t have a folder view and since I told Roon where to find the audiobooks it now insists on displaying them in the middle of any views of Albums, Composers, Artists etc and there are enough of them to really mess up any attempt to browse music.
What is the best way to keep them accessible but stop them getting in the way when I want to browse (music) albums and artists?
I’ve created a genre “Podcast” that I’ve assigned to all non-music stuff such as podcasts and drama. Then used the Focus feature in the Album browser to create two Bookmarks: “Podcasts” and “Music”. Then the “Music” bookmark displays all my music:
and the “Podcast” bookmark displays all my spoken word material:
I Tag all my Audiobooks so they are easily isolated.
Thanks guys. Had not seen the Focus feature yet. I’ll go sort out my podcast+audiobook etc tags and then give this a go.
Just to check… when you say “tag” or “genre”, you mean to set the genre/tags in the files for the source material. eg. using an external editor like (in my case) Mediamonkey?
ie. not something you need to do in roon?
(Impressed enough so far that I have just converted my trial to a lifetime sub).
I just Bookmark all the audio books. Then it’s quick to isolate them. I do all add genres but don’t seem to use them practically. BBC Radio Drama, Speech etc.
In the version screen I may add descriptions like ‘DAB Radio Grab’ or ‘Cassette Version’.
I still use an external editor to check and curate metadata for my ripped CDs or downloads. So metadata tags such as Genre are present.
I could also use Roon’s Tag and editors to achieve similar results, but having the metadata present in the tracks is my insurance policy for a possible future without Roon (heaven forbid).
I can’t seem to get this to work. Clearly I am doing something wrong but I just can’t see it.
I have set the Genre of all of my Podcasts and Audiobooks to “Podcast”. I can verify this has definitely happened from Windows explorer by looking at the file properties.
I then forced Roon to re-scan those folder (Settings/Storage/Force Rescan").
Then I tried using “Focus” but there is no sign of my “Podcast” genre at all. There is an “other” item in Genres and I can browse that but still no sign of Podcast in there.
Any idea what I am missing?
That’s not what I am doing. I Bookmark them all as Audiobooks. (You can call it anything) Then in one click I have them all available.
Sorry, I still don;t get it. How do you bookmark them? Don’t you have to set a tag (like “Genre” in the MP3 tags) or something to “Audiobook” first?
After that you just use focus? I can get Focus to work OK… showing me things by location or filetype for example. And I can make bookmarks from those OK.
Where I seem to be failing is using Focus to view my new Genre “Podcast”… it just doesn’t show up. Not even if I force rescan or disable and re-enable the storage.
Maybe I should just add another storage location for podcasts and set a bookmark focus on storage,
It’s easy to create a tag.
!
