That’s exactly the thing that is not possible at the moment. At least not in a simple, reliable, convenient way. Yes there are workarounds but they are all pretty awkward.
Yes @Nyquist you are right. I missed out several steps. Most of the process happens outside roon exploiting the windows 10 folder view. I have absolutely no idea how I could do this entirely within roon so I am open to suggestion.
Normally what I do is one of two things:
Small folder:
- Navigate in windows to the folder containing the CD’s
- Select all sub-directories
- Right click to bring up the dbPowerAmp edit view
- Change one of the fields that roon knows about to some arbitrary string like “temptag”. Normally I use the “label” field
- Go back into roon
- Focus on “temptag”
- Select all
- Create and assign the tag “The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time”
- Go back into windows
- Navigate to the relevant folder and revert the “temptag” edit back to its original (label) value (assuming I haven’t forgotten the label and don’t have to look it up discogs or musicbrainz).
- Done
Large Folder
I just do the same thing with mp3tag instead because it is quicker but I cannot be bothered to list out the tedious steps.
This is a very messy error prone example and I initially had ambitions to do something similar for all my box sets, series, singles directories, DJ themed directories etc. I’ve done it for a few but mostly I just use Windows explorer and right click to foobar when I want to directly explore a box set or singles directory. I still put the effort into the tagging as the contents of these directories will show up indirectly in searches, focus, compositions, radio, discovery etc.
The point is that there is no such thing as a stand-alone roon. There are all sorts of use cases where there is no avoiding folder views but roon often makes that interoperability maximally awkward.
Yeah totally, wanting the design team to hold onto their vision of a modern music player is totally selfish, whereas wanting them do discard their design philosophy because you’re accustomed to old way of browsing is totally for the common good.
I know Roon does many things well and that’s why I like it. I don’t want it to become one of those “lets do a little bit of everything” apps that end up disappointing.
Btw. I’m sure you’re bothering the makers of file based browsing players to implement the features you love in Roon, right? Even if that is totally not what they intended to do with the app? Kinda selfish of them not to do the same things Roon does.
Album browsing has nothing to do with file based browsing. You can browse by album with metadata. Using the file system to sort albums is the way of the past. I don’t mind if someone really wants to hold onto it, but demanding that metadata based players go back in time to satisfy their quirks is not a good thing.
I do believe that what is good for Roon’s survival is doing what they do best and separating from the crowd. Not doing a bit of everything. That’s the only way go make something great. Same goes for music. Bands that try to please everyone end up mediocre and the ones that have vision and are not afraid to follow through end up making something great, even if they rub some people the wrong way.
But that’s just me. I don’t want a just another player, I want something great and I feel Roon is going to the right direction.
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That’s absolutly NOT what this is all about. Total misinterpretation. It’s about providing some tools to convert a database to the Roon way for all the cases where the automated Roon function simply failed. By the time Roon gets perfect all of this is not needed but Roon is not perfect, not at this moment in time. A folder viewer, access tool (I intentionall do not call it a file browser) does not have to be in the user interface but they have a place in the editing tools.
This is of course the primary reason why progress is held back, in the computer field, and in many others. The flaws of the folder approach have been written up and widely recognized in the computer industry since the previous century. Similarly, why is there a Save button in Word?
But slowly but surely we are moving on, and Roon is in fact not idiosyncratic in offering a different perspective. Below is just a partial list of systems that are not folder based — you will note that these are not just fairly successful, but dominant in their fields.
- iOS (they recently added the first steps toward a file system, very tentatively and very poorly, but this does not affect the built-in apps like photos and mail and music and App Store and ibooks)
- Amazon
- Adobe Lightroom (it is strongly metadata based, although it does provide a folder based view, with all the limitations necessary)
- Tidal, Spotify…
Some hybrids:
- Within Office, the newer apps like OneNote do not use a folder view; Outlook is itself a hybrid; Word and Excel are stuck with folders
What about others like Android and Facebook? I don’t know, don’t use them, but I can guess…
The result for me is that folders play no role in any of my daily life. No content I use or create is folder based.
Folders do appear frequently when I have to drop down to a lower level of abstraction and deal with things at the OS level, such as backup. But even there, I specify only root locations, not the detailed folder structure: \music, \photo negatives, \photo catalogs, \photo published, \documents. (Why do I have those three separate photo locations, why not just \photo? Because the implementation details shine through the abstraction: the photo “negatives”, RAW files coming from the camera, are large and never modified so they sit on a cheaper spinning disk, the metadata databases that Lightroom works with sit on an SSD. Just like Roon.)
And in fact, sometimes I even have to drop down one more level below the OS and deal with physical stuff, like when a hard drive fails. But even there, modern technology hides it: Windows Storage Spaces allows me to just throw hard drives into a pool as more space is needed, and define abstract storage locations on top,
The world is moving on. In fits and starts. But to our great benefit.
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That would be quite reasonable, and I have written about my sympathy for these large migration scenarios. But I don’t think you speak for everybody. Many of the voices here argue for folder-based as more convenient, or more natural, even in the long run.
EDIT: I made a migration suggestion in the new thread here
Yeah read that before. That’s excactly what I mean by an unnecesary complex “workaround”
Lovely straw man argument. The file based browsing players are not taking my money every month. Plus, as many have mentioned, this is not about just being able to browse by folder. It is about interoperability with existing curated libraries to allow for much easier porting.
And, for me although I haven’t seen a lot of others mention it, being able to play a media file without adding to the library by accessing it in its folder based location. The fact that I have to add a file to the library just to see if I want to add it to the library is, well, silly.
I look forward to that. I just think it will take a lot longer than you think. Maybe generations. Roon or this community is not going to decide that debate. In the meantime no one is proposing to roll back the clock or call a halt on the roon “vision”. As far as I can see the folder requests fall into two main categories:
Pragmatic
Depending on the type of library you have you may have to do a lot of ripping, tagging and conversion mostly using a variety of relatively primitive open source folder based tools. I use 5 or 6 on a regular basis. They are not going to change how they work. With roon in the mix, I personally find the workflow to be very awkward as there is no common folder view. You may have a library that requires little or no pre/post processing and this is not a concern. I would have preferred that as well. But that is not the case with the current state of standards work on the metatdata of my musical tastes. This is not a philosophical position. It’s just a pragmatic reality check. I notice that the more efficiently I am able to groom my library the better the results I get from “radio” for example. That is the roon “magic” I am looking for and this feature request is for a little bit of help in making that happen.
Functionality Gaps
Several feature requests are now years old with little sign of immanent delivery. I have the sense that a folder view is often requested as a better than nothing work-around as most roon users would still prefer a “roon” solution if that were possible. One persistent years old request is box set handling which could benefit from a folder view in the absence of a more comprehensive solution. From roon comments about some of these long-standing requests I have the impression that a truly roon solution may simply not be feasible given the current state of standards and technology. I think others are getting that vibe as well and is at the root of at least some of these persistent requests for a folder view.
Having said all that, anything I have read indicates roon is not interested in a me-too folder view. Still, I live in hope.
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“Adding to the library” sounds like it is a large effort.
Drag it onto Roon. Click on it when it shows up. Play.
Similar to many other operations we do: drag a photo onto Lightroom, click on it when it shows up, Print.
Simply not true. There’s well more to it than that, and the process has to be reversed to keep the library clean if it’s not supposed to be there permanently.
Here’s what I just don’t get, although it’s been said before: other than the tug-of-war over scarce development resources / i.e. different priorities, why such a strong, almost religious objection to something that you don’t have to use, and that isn’t intended to change your Roon experience 1%, which others could really make use of? And many don’t even plan to use it to access media regularly, but rather as the easiest way to Tag something.
This isn’t my top priority either. I just find the resistance to be strange. What I’d really like is the ability to port in custom embedded metadata to convert that to Tags. I take it by the silence on that point that few others use custom metatags. Too bad, that is a great way to curate one’s collection without having to do too much when changing software.
My holding to this debate is that, in general, I believe Roon needs to be more inter-operable, and to allow access, and then Focus, by various standard means, including folders and including custom metadata.
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I’ve only managed to read about 100 messages in this long thread, so sorry if this is not an original suggestion.
I am one of the many that really want folder based browsing and playing. I can do that now in BubbleUPnP in Android (my previous app of ~2 years use). But now I am using Roon’s DSP and going over to BubbleUPnP would bypass this and affect sound quality.
Would it be feasible to allow BubbleUPnP (and any app that would be feasible) to play through Roon? Pick the file in Bubble and it routes through Roon to the player while keeping the interface in Bubble.
I’m not a dev, so I don’t know what’s involved but, intuitively it seems that it would be easier than programming a new folder access interface for all the different platforms when many such choices already exist.
Hi, have a look at this feature request topic
Apologies @11117 if you are surprised by this response. It is a repost of a split-post above. But it supports your point and it is close to where the original post was so there is less confusion.
The biggest gripe I have with the lack of a folder view is that everything else works by folders. Most of us live in a windows, IOS, android or linux universe. Not a roon universe. Roon is quite idiosyncratic in providing a quite proprietary navigation experience that has, I am sure, the unintended consequence that it is very awkward and slow when inter-operating with other, usually, folder based tools.
For example, I find I have to do a lot more tagging and conversion than I used to do to get the best out of roon. Radio, discovery, hyper-linking etc. really benefit if you go to the trouble and for me is the whole point of roon rather than multi-room, DSD, MQA or the nth degree of SQ. But this creates a workflow where I am usually first identifying in roon by some “focus” mechanism, an album that would benefit by tidying up the tags or converting (an unsupported cue for example). In the folder structure, which all my other tools use, these albums can be anywhere so then I have to identify the folder location using “view file info” in roon. That is usually some long indecipherable path which I then use in mp3tag, CueTools or iso2dsd to re-tag or convert.
The whole process is very tedious and tiring as it needs a lot of concentration swapping in and out of very different interfaces and philosophies of doing things. Personally I find the lack of folder support idiosyncratic to say the least but there is little prospect as it seems to be a red-line for roon that many of us, myself included, just don’t get.
As to your more fundamental question: it is not my job to decide whether Roon should do it. I’m glad it isn’t: I have had this debate dozens of times over the years when it was my responsibility. There is no universal answer: Microsoft was very focused on backward compatibility with Windows Phone and Windows 8 and failed, iOS broke with all conventions and succeeded. And the opposite case, failing by breaking with the norms, is of course common.
I’m mostly trying to help my fellow users to see the light. A new way of thinking if very difficult to adopt, but I know that this one is well worth it. Not just for music, but for all information (as I have said). So I’m trying to show people the benefits of the new model (have written at length about various scenarios, mostly about “serendipitous discovery”), and the ways to deal with common scenarios in this new world. And that the challenge is mental, but it isn’t such a great effort in most cases.
This is why I am more sympathetic to the migration cases. It is often difficult to migrate if you have a large investment in the existing way of doing things. Sometimes the effort is prohibitive: it grieves me to see (hospitals running Windows XP) but if we can’t, we can’t. Sometimes it is pretty tractable. And sometimes, it seems forbidding but we can find a clever way of doing it, and I have tried to suggest some.
But this is different from cases where people just don’t want to accept the new way. This is my argument about your case of playing the throwaway recording. I suggest a couple of clicks. The exact same way I print a photo. You objected
Do you clean up your disk? If you delete it on disk, it disappears from Roon. Or you can leave it be, why worry? Or if you dislike the idea of unidentified, unfindable stuff in Roon (as I do), give it a name, who knows, maybe you want to play it again next year. So I don’t buy this case. And there are others.
So it was a good idea to split off the migration case.
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Thanks. Just read that thread. There was no mention of the output channel implementation as a potential solution for access to folder view so I added it in a reply.
It sounds to me more and more that this is a viable approach to allowing folder view without offending the sensibilities of those who object to allowing this kind of thing for the many here that want it since it would provide flexibility and power far beyond folder viewing (as indicated by all the scenarios in that thread).
While you may want other users to see the light, what you write comes off as trolling. This is feature request and it is up to the developers to handle. All this noise from people who philosophically opposed to the idea should, frankly, stay out of the conversation. This thread has been going on for over a year and those who are interested in a folder view to find albums have needs that are different from those who like browsing from metadata.
Please stop debating what people request, frankly it has become rather offensive.
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Development resources are limited. Explaining why a particular request is not a priority for another user is a valid part of a Feature Request discussion.
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Agreed. Anders might be wrong but he’s not offensive 
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Maybe it’s just me, but I find this discussion surprisingly heated — at least in parts. I can only speak for myself: I ABSOLUTELY LOVE the manifold browsing options Roon offers me!!! In fact, I can’t say that I’ve ever been interested in going back to browsing my music by folder structure. Yet I can understand people who think differently.
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