Folder Browsing [Never happening] 2016-03

Having just started with Roon, I will support the wish for developing a kind of file structure input. When I shifted from Squeezebox to Roon yesterday my wife was - as well as me - very happy about the info we now have access to - including the Tidal approach. And the setup with five music players was amazingly easy. However when she today should find the audiobook she asked for the old squeezebox, since we had to find the book almost randomly among all the other albums. I can see in the thread that the answer is to re-tag a lot of files ( it did not turn up as an audiobook), but I am not sure that I am ready for that. Instead of me re-tagging quite a lot of files, I would be very happy with a simple way to navigate into folder contents. Alternatively, a simple instruction into how I can see this in a different way.
So please bear with us who are new to Roon, and who over many years have insisted to (also) find our files through an old fashioned structure. I would not want to give up all the new opportunities this brings.

I also have a lot of audiobooks and tag them all Audiobook.
Initially I plouhged through, then I added them as I discovered them and now I add the Tag on import.
Now if I want Audiobooks, I just hit the Tag. If I want to exclude audiobooks I hit the tag twice.
It’s just so easy, jump in. Don’t leave your feet in the old camp.
Top pic, audiobooks excluded. Bottom pic, Audiobooks

s

Hi and welcome to Roon,

The reality is that tagging is available now, but browse by file structure is not and may never ever happen in Roon.

Assuming the audiobooks files are grouped under their own folder structure, they could be tagged quite quickly in one go using a tag editor of your choice (I use the one with dBpoweramp).

Roon would then be able to use this genres from the file, say “AudioBook”.

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While folder browsing isn’t something we’re planning to add to the Roon interface right now, Roon 1.3 does have some expanded capabilities in this area.

Our new track browser will let you Focus by Path, so it’s easy find all the tracks in your /Music/Audiobooks folder, for example.

Once you’ve identified all the files in that folder, there are a few ways to easily locate that content in the future, including Bookmarks, Playlists, or Tags.

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Thank you to you all for the quick answers. I might go for tagging all the audiobooks. Mike, I cannot see how I can focus by path. I should go under tracks, and use focus, right? And then what?

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This is coming in Roon 1.3 – just wanted to mention that it’s something we’re working on.

More information here.

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Thank you. I will be looking forward to that :slight_smile:

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Not sure if there is a technical reason for not supporting folder browsing but there is a metadata reason to support it. A large number of my Canadian and European releases are not identified by Roon. I would much rather just go to where I know they are rather than go through the tagging exercise for 500+ albums… Just saying.

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@pwright92

Just curious, do your unidentified albums not already have any tag data ? If not, then (sort it out Guv !!) you can easily run a bulk “file to tag” action to add tags using your chosen tag app.

If they did, then Roon will show that even if there is no matching ID. So, using Roon is the same as any album.

In a folder driven world you must scroll in a directory by either artist or album ? Ditto Roon.

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Nope, no tags. They were imported from iTunes and also from DNLA. It would be rather a bother to redo work that has already been done in the DNLA file system and would also let me find albums that did import into Roon (about 500 tracks).

I’m not sure why there is a hesitation to support folder browsing. It does take away anything and allows another way to get at the music.

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When I was saying tags, I believe I should have been saying Bookmark.

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I have split some files into a few different shares but no easy way to browse the shares to see what’s there. With 4000+ albums it’s not easy to keep track of things which is further compounded by the lower availability of non-US Roon metadata.

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Just have to pick you up on the “non US data” comment.

I have a large library and am pretty sure you would never describe it as US centric. I get about 95% ID matching over approx 30k albums. I have spent a chunk of my hobby time tidying up meta tag data (usually adding correct disc number, track number and album titles) to give Roon a good chance to find the right ID. Also, even if using just folder path info, have you confirmed that multi-CD sets follow the right artist/album (disc x) naming convention?

The reason, I suspect, you perceive the lack of database coverage is that you have no tags. So, Roon has a much harder time trying to match. It may not be that your albums aren’t in the database just that they cannot be matched as they are.

You could take a few unidentified albums and use the edit function to manually find a match. Just to test that idea.

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I’ve been doing that but there are no matches. Artists like Barbra Lica in Canada and most of the DSD files from NativeDSD do not match, not to mention older ripped Canadian CDs…

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One more vote for some kind of folder browsing. I don’t need a windows explorer or mac finder like interface but at least some way to find my music by folder. I know where everything is. On top of that what I’m really missing is the ability to call everything in one folder an album. If that’s an album to me it’s an album. I have all kinds of reasons for it, for one that Roon is as bad as almost all other player to indentify various artist albums, specially when they are not complete. I also have old mix-tapes, demo’s, samplers, work related compilations etc. All are scattered out in Roon now. The simple ability to define everything in one folder as being an album would fix this inmediatly. I don’t like working with playlists, that works different.

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If you tag the mess of tracks in a folder with a consistent album tag then Roon will see them as an album.

Same applies to VA albums with missing tracks. As long as they actually look like an album with the same album tag then they should appear as an album.

Simply sitting in a folder with any assortment of tracks and mixed album tags is not going to cut it as far as saying what an album is.

For old tape mixes (I have those too) same applies. Use a tag editor and 30s of your time to tag the files as “Sjef’s old mix tape vol I” and they will appear in Roon as exactly that.

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Nearly all of this can be done in the Tracks browser now – just add the Path column and then filter.[quote=“Sjef_van_de_Ven, post:84, topic:8728”]
Roon is as bad as almost all other player to indentify various artist albums, specially when they are not complete.
[/quote]

If they’re in a folder on their own, and have common tags for Album and Album Artist (typically Various Artists) we should be doing pretty well – I’m a big collector of compilations, so I’ve banged on this quite a bit over the years.

If you have content that follows those rules and still isn’t automatically grouped into an album, let me know – I’d like to take a look.

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Are there plans for a visual file browser? I’ve tried the tracks/filter and it is not entirely useful for traversing my directory structure to see what’s there. Sometimes I forget what I have or can’t remember a name and being able to explore the file system is the only way to find what I am looking for.

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@mike

I’d be happy to work with you to see how my folder structure would be supported.
Let me know if you have any questions.