It would be nice to be able to add / edit text in the album view. I have many bootlegs with very little information tags on the songs. Many of these downloads have a text info file that give some or a lot of information about that bootleg. It would be nice to be able to read those text files in roon.
Can you make a PDF of the text? Then you should be able to view it.
How do I view a pdf on roon?
Iâve been asking for text fields all over Roon forever, but there are reasons this is not so straightforward.
Currently I use Tags for adding text to things, but that justifiably made @danny and @brian wince when I told them⌠And now that Tags have been turned into an imprecise and unpredictable thing (I think that was in 1.1 or 1.2) my precisely added texts are appearing where they shouldnât⌠Grrrr. (Moody.)
Iâd love this also. We record all our live shows and Iâd love to add my reviews and thoughts into Roon to accompany these private recordings.
I second this, as I also have a lot of text info, for example the write-ups on each Bandcamp album I got etc. It would be extremely easy to add a built-in window that displays text files, with a scroll bar, available in the Desktop and tablet versions. At the very minimum it should see the text files and send the intent to any outside editor.
I whole heartily agree! A simple txt file viewer (similar to the jpg/image file viewer) built into the main album info screen would be a very nice feature.
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this would be very nice for people that download a lot of unofficial recordings.
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After I discovered the pdf file reader option I take my text files and convert them to pdf (I use the free libre office but there are lots of programs that convert) just have to save the pdf in the same folder as the music files.
A bit an awkward work around. I mean what could easier than adding a little code to add the ability to view simple txt (text) files? Canât possibly be all that difficult.
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+1(000,000)
I have hundreds (likely thousands) of info.txt files. Wouldnât think it would be hard for Roon to implement/merge with the pdf viewer.
converting them all would be beyond tedious.
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So Roon 1.6 has arrived and the big reveal is the updated Roon Radio, which is a wonderful bit of coding using all the latest AI techniques and lots of WOW! and How cool!.
Great! Iâm so glad that Roon team gets to show off their advanced coding skillsâŚ
However how hard could it be to add a little bit code so that simple *.txt files can be displayed on the main album screen along with the image and pdf files? While this request is probably just a little too simple and boring in comparison to the fancy coding needed for Roon Radio it still would be a very useful and extremely helpful feature, especially for all those albums in my collection that remain âunidentifiedâ and therefore have no real credits or recording information available other than what is in the simple text file that I canât easily see.
Really â how hard could this be to do? And the use case is obvious. I get that Roon is focused on âcore stuffâ now, but to ignore simple & easily implemented requests that would obviously rectify crippling situations for a notable sub-set of users isâŚ
I have ~15,000 local library albums â about a third of those are live gigs. All of those have .txt files in the folder that I cannot see easily while using Roon. This is common for fans of live music. Does this make me a file-hoarder? 
Does it make me a bad person, orâŚan adversarial client?
What about the classical fan with several massive box sets of [insert appropriate composer & work here]
What about Miles Davis completists?
Look â some companies are able to advance steadily on their core issues while allocating maybe 15-20% of their resources to fix broken or orphaned problem stuff, issue interesting missives every now & then, introduce new employees, do minor cosmetic refurbishing of ancient stale aspects of Roon such as the introductory quote screen, etc.
You know why brick & mortar chains hire shoppers? Because itâs so easy when youâre the store mgr & youâve been there forever to forget to rotate your displays, vacuum your welcome mat, update your signage, dust, etc.
Please Roon â It doesnât have to be all or nothing â allocating this 15-20% would generate a lot of good will and PR among the (probably primarily local-library) user base; although many of the fixes would please others as well.
Although I know itâll be annoying to them, I might as well tag @mike @danny and @brian on this â I really think this topic should be bounced around inside Roon for at least a brief discussion & reflection.
My unsolicited $0.02
Itâs not as if we are asking for Roon to have the ability to actually parse the text files and then add the data from the text files (such as personnel, recording info, etc.) to Roonâs metadata. Now that would be a really, really nice and very useful feature. All we are asking for is the ability to easily view the text files while in Roon.
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Many, many of my albums have txt files in the directories. I do not care at all about them, and neither do most people. They are rip logs or some other nonsense. I never look at them, and muddying up my user experience with that junk would make Roon worse for me.
We have a collection of âreal lifeâ librariesâsort of like case studiesâthat we check stuff against when making these judgementsâmany of them have useless txt files all over the place. This is not just me.
If we import them like PDFs, Roon would start surfacing icons that tempt me to think that the album has interesting text content for me to read. And then after I put in the effort to click, bamâŚjust another rip log. Lame.
Features that tempt with the idea of greatness then dead-end are really bad product design! Those albums show up in focus as having extra text content, tooâmore temptation/disappointment cycles. Itâs much better to just not have the feature at all than to do it in a way that causes collateral damage.
I think our first cut of the PDFs feature actually brought in .txt like .pdf (released either internally or in alpha, not to the public) and we learned empirically that it makes a huge mess before deciding not to do it. We found that almost all of the time PDFs are useful and almost all of the time TXT files contain junkâat least in an aggregate sense. Iâm sure you are the guy who has valuable content in TXT files, but please understand that you are one of the few people who does, and that making product decisions based on an outlier without considering the big picture would be a disaster.
Anyways, if we do the âeasyâ thing that you assumed was a good idea, we wreck the experience for a lot of people. Not having a feature that some want is not a wrecked experience for anyoneâit is just a missed opportunity for a few people who want something unusual.
Finally-if you feel that you have to advocate for a feature by dictating to us that itâs easy or by imploring us to âthrow a boneâ to you or set aside 15-20% of our time or something, you are in the wrong mind space for making a feature request. Itâs such an un-constructive and rude way to approach a feature request.
The way to convince us about this stuff is to establish clear use cases and show us that they are relevant to a lot of people (or can be made relevant to a lot of people if we sell our work properly), not to propose a shortcut approach that comes with collateral damage and then implore us to do the work for you out of charitable motivations.
If I back up to the top of the thread, itâs not actually about .txt files at allâitâs about a much easier to justify use case: user-defined notes for albums/artists/etc. This is a reasonable idea. Itâs not particularly simple because it touches nearly every screen in the UI somehow, but it is relatively straightforward and does not make a mess of the experience of people who donât use it.
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Thanks for your very thoughtful response. I now understand the problem that you and the Roon team often face when it comes to feature requests. It never gets easy.
May I propose a compromise? How about a way to ONLY view text files that are named âinfo.txtâ and not other *.txt files? This would solve the problem you outlined above and make me very happy.
I just did a quick search of my library and it has hundreds of irrelevant info.txt files. Iâm afraid that file name is not as reliable an indicator of relevance as you are thinking.
If we do anything like this, it has to be opt-in. Either by making the note-taking explicit (more along the lines of @Ludwigâs use cases) or by making the file slurping an explicit choice.
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Can one not use a file based tag for this kind of thing? I know Roon doesnât want to turn its users into curators but this kind of request is easily catered for using a file based tag that Roon defines and users that wish to leverage it can populate. Saves an opt-in configurable option within Roon.
The solution was presented much earlier in the thread; just batch convert your txt files. No need to modify Roon.
No idea if this is suitable but it is freeâŚ
https://www.pdfzilla.com/zilla_txt_to_pdf_converter.html
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