Folder Browsing [Never happening] 2016-03

Hello there,

I just recently purchased the lifetime license.

About 1/4 of my collections are in Chinese, I understand Roon doesn’t currently support that and I understand.

However, is there a way to browse using folder structure? This way,

  1. I can go to the original folder structures to browse albums that I know where they are located.
  2. Before Chinese support is there, at least I don’t need to use other software to listen to music.

Thanks,
Peter

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Roon doesn’t have a folder browser. One of the design aims is to enable a user to browse a music library in an intuitive way by reference to Artist, Album, Work or Track, regardless of the underlying file structure or location.

Localisation is coming, but even without full localisation you can currently prefer your own metadata where you have Chinese file tags.

Select the albums that you wish to prefer (it can be easiest to extract them to a separate watched folder and then use Focus/Inspector/Location), using right click (or long press) and Select All, then Edit, Prefer File.

Thanks Andy,

I certainly appreciate Roon’s capability to browse by Artist, album, work, or track. This is why I purchased the lifetime license.

I started listening to music on hard drives years ago, they were organized in such a way that sometimes it’s easy for me to browse by folders, instead of the above mentioned nice features.

At least would consider this option for music that currently cannot be categorized your way? This is especially true when I have lots of Chinese music, and some are in Traditional Chinese, some in Simplified Chinese, even with the same Chinese conductor/performer.

Thanks.

It’s not my call (I’m just a user like you) :blush:

There is a feature request thread here for a folder view and another here for a Focus filter based on file structure.

I could see the latter occurring before the former as it would not involve a revamped UI.

Feel free to add your views and reasons to either of those threads. The devs do read the Feature Requests but don’t always comment on each thread.

Thanks Andy.

Hey @Peter_Hsieh – thanks for the feedback here.

Right now, we don’t have a simple way to just expose a file browser in Roon. It could happen in the future, but it would require some architectural changes, since you’re not simply browsing files in Roon – you’re browsing a rich, linked graph of all the connections Roon retrieves when it identifies each file.

That representation would need to be linked back to the folder structure of each file, in each folder, on however many storage devices you have configured – not impossible, but not a quick change. As @andybob mentioned, definitely make sure to add your input to the Feature request threads.

As for the other issues you mention here, Roon should be displaying Chinese characters properly, and while our extended metadata is probably going to be patchy for a lot of your content, your file tags should work fine. If you have some examples where this isn’t happening, let me know and we’ll get some files from you to analyze.

Thanks again @Peter_Hsieh!

I love Roon now (just trying it) and would love to use it, but having a folder structure/view is a must for me.
If not, I could not pay the rather expensive fee…

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Hi Rune,

One of Roon design goals is to abstract the UI from the physical location of where the audio files are stored; be that locally on the device, on a NAS or streamed from Tidal.

Roon can display the physical location of a file when required, but for playing music and exploration I don’t feel knowing where the file’s stored is that relevant.

Personally when I need to do this I just use the OS’ file browser, but this tends to be quite infrequent and it’s for maintenance and taking backups rather than browsing my collection.

I’m curious why you feel having a folder/file view is Roon is so important?

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Why anyone would want folder structure view in Roon is beyond me, it’s the complete opposite of everything roon is about? Foobar2000 is free and does folder structure view.

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Folder view when you have 200.000+ files and there is a lot of thought and work behind making those folders and that system is priceless!

It doesn’t necessary mean that it’s the physical location I need, I just need that structure. Is there a way of using that structure to build a kind of explorer?

3 Likes

I have 140,000 files and meticulously named my artist and album folders and tagged all my files. Still don’t see how folder view is something that is needed? What is Roon doing wrong for you that you would need to resort to folder view?

"there is a lot of thought and work behind making those folders"
I don’t see how I can describe it any better.

Well you could describe exactly how your folder system works. It doesn’t strike me from your description that it is a simple Artist/Album structure.

You may well be able to use Roon’s tag system to label any album in a particular folder location with a specific tag that you can then focus on.

I understand the work you put into it. I just don’t think you realize that for Roon to 100% follow your folder structure and abide by it when displaying artists and albums, it also has to quit showing that awesome metadata it pulls from its providers. At that point it’s no different than JRiver or Foobar.

Hey @Rune_Bakke – thanks for the feedback here. As mentioned, one of the major goals of Roon is seeing your collection as artists, albums, composers, and works (which help us understand the context of our favorite songs) as opposed to folders and files, which simply tell us how our music is stored on a hard drive.

That said, we have heard this request from a number of people, and we take this kind of feedback pretty seriously. While folders and files won’t be the main focus of Roon, we are considering how we could add this type of view somewhere. I discussed some of the challenges of implementing this kind of view here – it’s not easy, but it’s also not impossible.

Finally, I should mention that folder structure is probably the most important indicator Roon uses when identifying the music in your collection and retrieving all the metadata that makes Roon different.

If you have files in a folder that are numbered sequentially (either in the file names or track number tags), Roon will group those files together as an album, and try to identify it. So while browsing by folder structure isn’t possible yet, know that the folder structure you’ve put together is going to be a big part of how Roon identifies and displays your collection.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the feedback.

May I suggest something.
When importing a folder structure, could it be possible to first get the structure up in a viewer (by choice), then marking those folders you want to TAG the music in and chosing what TAG that music should have? Tagging AFTER import is so much work and all my previous work is redunant.

For instance; I have a folder with music that I think has a hifi quality, but it’s not all in the same folder. So I would tag them like this; HIFI and then perhaps SACD/Telarc/Stockfish/SHM and so on…

I currently use Foobar2000, but it’s not really user friendly and I love the look and way Roon works.

Hi, are you aware that Roon can display the tags that you have already created within the files?
There’s an option in settings to enable it.

Also Roon’s focus, allows one to focus on the format of the audio files, i.e. 44k1, 192K, DSD etc. etc.
Thus there is no need to have separate tags representing AQ.
(One could of course focus on a specific AQ and then tag, should one wish to).

OK, I see that this is futile. There is no point discussing something no one understands or want to understand.
It’s like discussing the fascination of sci-fi to with someone who thinks Star Wars is the stupidest movie(s) in the world.

Most hifi/music interested using a computer, are also used to having a system built up around and dependent on folders, the end! For some folders/music the genre tag is enough, for others it’s not. A folder structure is therefore the only way of making a system easy to navigate in.

Again, it’s not the physical folders I need; as such, only the folder-system I built up over many years. A system that could be replaced with tags or something similar? But I’m not a programmer, so I have no idea how to.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Roon, but it just doesn’t have it all for me!

Thanks for the replies and good luck. I’m out!

[quote=“Rune_Bakke, post:19, topic:8728, full:true”]
Again, it’s not the physical folders I need; as such, only the folder-system I built up over many years.[/quote]
The point is, we have no idea what you are talking about when you make statements such as the one above. I see that folks are trying to help here, but first we need to understand what it is you are asking for.

However, you’ve gone, so we can all go back to what we were doing beforehand.

No, this isn’t the case at all.

Assuming you do stick around a bit longer, could you use some screenshots to illustrate your point because it feel like we’re not getting the true meaning of your request.