Folder Browsing [Never happening] 2016-03

No it really is not a miss, it is the exact opposite of the way Roon is designed to work. Why does everyone cling to the past and not embrace the future, the whole idea is to see you music via album cover not list.

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Really? Seriously? This illustrates the somewhat cultish nature of a portion of the Roon user base.

There is nothing “past” or “future” in requests for usability. Obviously by the volume of posts on this issue, there is a substantial portion of the user base that cannot actually get to the point of enjoying the “future” you posit until we can get our work from the “past” into the “future” format. This is what people are asking for. It is not some threat to your way of using Roon.

Also, who says that folder-based view has to be a list? It could easily be a set of album covers, or artist pictures, or what have you. The point is to be able to organize and sort by folder location so as to be able to tag better. Just because Roon did a good job recognizing your collection doesn’t mean it did a great job for everyone else.

This is from someone who would not really use folder view frequently. But I find the resistance to it to be astonishing and eccentric.

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Brian has explained that a folder view would be detrimental to Roon in the thread linked above on music file management.

As Brian also makes clear in that that Roon is not closed to user comments and is evolving the product to meet the use cases of those who would like a folder view and many other things. However they are not going to do things that will “break the product” or stop them doing other things they want to do in the future just to please some.

So there is little point in repeatedly requesting a folder view simply because I want it or because other products have it - it is very unlikely to come. However if you continue to explain what you are trying to do and what you use a folder view to do and why you think you need it then you will likely find that down the road Roon finds a better way to do what you did with a folder view and eventually you wont miss it at all.

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Sorry to upset you so much, but. When I started supporting and using Roon a long long time ago I did so because of the stated aim to “End the old way of looking at music with files folders and lists and start browsing the same way you do with your Vinyl albums using the great art on the covers”

Sorry but going back to files and folders is not the thing to do with Roon - there are plenty of file and folder based music systems, use one of them if it is that important to you.

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Nick, you’re not carefully reading the posts on what people are asking for or why. You’re just stating the same superficial position over and over. If you don’t care to take the time to understand, what is the point in just making dogmatic statements?

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The devs have made clear that folder browsing is not in Roon’s future. See Brian’s post here:

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Maybe this is yet another request for a simple folder view, sorry I haven’t searched.

My music is organized under normal Windows folder structure where I don’t care about tagging information. Using Logitech Media Server, if I want to see Miles Davis albums I go to the Miles Davis folder. I don’t have to ask “Hmm, who was tagged as the composer on this album?”

I know, a wild concept - I put my music in a folder and now I want to find my music in that folder. But this is beyond Roon somehow.

Roon however now breaks all of my Windows folders apart by artist, composer etc. making it very hard to find some things. Forget my previously much-used Various Artists folder which is now Spread all over the place in Roon…

Not asking for much, just a way to look for data under the familiar Windows folder structure, like every other interaction I have with my PC.

In 2019 Roon should not be missing a feature loved by users of Logitech Media Server.

Love Roon but it seems really silly that I can’t simply browse by folder.

Thanks for listening.

Mike,

There have been many threads on this topic and the case has been definitively answered below:

If have not read the FAQ, there is a lot of helpful information. Roon does things differently.

I tag all Various Artists albums as Various Artists for the album artist and then the individual track performer goes under the Artist field. And then use the Sort setting as described above.

Hello,
I have just started with Roon on my MusikServer MS II and Linn Klimax as the player. All works fine but I miss the “Folder View” during musik selection. Selection of views like “Artist” or “Alben” or … is fine but I really perfer the “Folder View”. With Folder view you can see and play music which is stored in a special folder.

What do you think about this and when will this folder view be possible in roon?

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Roon will never provide folder based browsing. You can use roonalbumtag and roontracktag to tag the underlying files in “special folders” and then access them via Roon’s Tags in the application.

Roon should provide the option for folder based browsing!

This sounds painful. Have you done this?

You don’t do it for every folder, because that is unnecessary. Album and Artist searching is well supported in Roon. Existing Folders based on Genre, Date, Format and other common criteria can be reproduced by dynamic Bookmarked Focus searches.

Idiosyncratic Folders such as “Albums Barry Likes” can be translated into Roon Tags and the new file tags described by @evand enable a method to easily migrate Folder contents to a Roon Tag by adding a file tag in a file tag app. A file tag can be applied to all the contents of a folder in a few clicks. I’ve done it and haven’t been able to break it.

It seems unlikely to me that users who are familiar with folder browsing would cavil at folder tagging.

Ultimately Roon has a strongly opinionated view that music should be categorised and searched by links between Tracks, Albums and Compositions, unconstrained by a local storage system hierarchy. This is an intrinsic part of making streaming content functionally equivalent to local content.

That is your opinion. But it is NEVER happening so please move on…

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I tend to buy one track at a time from beatport which goes to a folder that’s organized by “date modified”. Doing this allows me to see the newest stuff first. I cannot use roon to browse my newest music without doing some slow tagging process. It seems like I’ll have to use other programs for my new music folder playback and only rely on roon for my 2TB of old stuff which I also enjoy listening to. I’ll follow this thread in hopes that roon will someday become functional for listening to my new music folder before my lifetime membership expires.

Using ‘Overview’ ordered by ‘Date Added’ (which I think is the default sort order) would fit your requirements perfectly. Why wouldn’t this work for you?

I would think that this would work for you:

Go to the “Library” section and select “Tracks”

Choose “Date Added” for sorting.

Thank you guys… That is a good way to go for all future new music which was my main concern. The existing 500ish songs in that folder ill just batch tag. Good advice

You can focus on a top level folder with Tracks/Focus/Inspector/Storage Location. Bookmark that and no need for tags if you want to keep your folder method.

That is a complete solution. Now I can easily jump to that folder. Thanks for the advice

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What a pity, that it will never happen.
I have and listen to many Audiobooks. And as long as Roon labs does not support Audiobooks, it would be a great support within Roon to search for my Audiobooks by using my folder structure.