Yahoo listened to their customers…while Google resisted the urgings of theirs
And look who’s left standing now??
Sometimes the answer is “A Car…and not a Faster Horse”
2 Likes
A motor trade analogy…
If you sell Synthetic Oil and then a customer comes along and says, I like your Synthetic Oil but I want Mineral Oil? You don’t have to listen.
Yes there is a use case for Mineral oils in old classic cars but the world has moved on. There are many suppliers of the Mineral Oil but we are not one of them.
That doesn’t make the potential customer a bad person, it just means we don’t have what they require and it may not make a business sense to be all things to all people.
CAt least your analogy makes sense to some degree. Some folks have asked for use cases to illustrate and those of us who are interested in a file browser have given some examples. As I have said earlier in the thread, I don’t understand why some people take the request as an affront. If you are not interested in the browser, move on. Some of would find as a useful add-on the already great Roon functionality. Just remember no tool solves all problems.
To add my own analogy, Unix is more robust than Windows in large system because everything is in files which you can read, no hocus pokus in a registery. Likewise, there are times with Roon that peaking at the files will make somethings easier.
Your words Peter are my words , kind regards from Lisbon, Pedro
It would be very interesting then to find out 3 things.
-
How much work it would involve to give folder view that was exactly the same on all platform versions that Roon is used on.
-
Which of the current Roon workflows you would interrupt to allow the time to do it.
-
How many people want a folder search structure.
Happy Easter from Ottawa Canada!
The only time I can think that a folder search may be useful is if something isn’t tagged and Roon hasn’t been able to identify it. Perhaps all worlds could be served if there were an option to include folder names in search results.
All worlds can be served , if Roon has the willnigness to modify their busines plan , they have a survey which tells them , how many people gave up Roon bcz of folder issue, how many actual customers want it as an Option and how many how are 100% happy with current Roon structure can accept folder option if no bother their current way to deal with Roon.
Matter of dollars counting…
Happy Easter to Ottava and all others, time here for beach time without folders… just suntan and towels…Roon free , folders free…
I totaly agree with you.
I have Orfeo from Monteverdi in three CDs . As this opera by Medlam is unregnozed by Roon, it tooks the tags I founded whenI I riped the CDs, tags which where not very well done (different from one cd to the other) so, whatever I searched (name of the composer, the conductor whatsoever) it is impossible for me to find the entire opera at one time.
Moreover, as it has been said earlier, if I want to listen a music from a usb key, I have to import it, tag it and then liste to it.
So, it would be, for me, a great advantage to have an entry thru folders.
As I said above, I find Roon very pleasant to look at, but, maybe du to my age (71) it’s easier for me to be sure that I can listen to ALL the music I have realy in my Antipodes server.
When I said above I had to seach for the name of orchestra to find the 9 symphony , it was in my folders, not in google
I find it strange that people discuss not to include folder structure browsing since no one is arguing to replace any options available today. If you don’t want it why not let other who want it argue to use it. I would find it positive to have the option of browsing a folder structure. I have a rather huge library and for instance I might add a test tone CD in my folder “Test records” that might not have any tags. I would love to easily browse to that folder and be able to jump in to the right record I would like to use for the moment. Browsing the folder visually is much faster for me since I know the records.
/Harry
It’s not a problem to discuss it and Roon may even do it but is it a priority for the majority right now? I don’t know.
If it is then it may go up the list of jobs to do.
There is a lot of work being done anyway that would have to be sidelined if this was done now. (I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, I want Roon perfect for all)
As for your test tone CD or any other, you can just tag it yourself as you Rip it and Roon will display it.
I do this all the time with Bootleg CD’s we record (with permissions), often they are WA s and sometimes FLACs. dBpoweramp copes very well. Call them what you like.
Now if you Tag it in Roon as well as ‘Maintainance’ or something, all such Tools will be instantly available.
I have never found a case I need folders. I hear reports of poor data which is out of Roons control. The databases can be poor with classical music especially. I check my data at the time of ripping and put it right there. This is time consuming and tedious, but once done correctly just works.
How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time.
Yes. But there is a lot of talk here of tagging, which means you go outside of Roon, to some sort of tag editor. In my experience, with a poor user interface.
When I added some audio test tracks (or my son demonstrating his new bass, or other oddball stuff), I added it to Roon, it shows up first in the Albums sorted by Date Added, I click on it, select Edit, Edit Fields, and annotate it as I want. Much quicker and easier than a tag editor.
this is a problem that has nothing to do with Roon and everything with tagging, in my opinion. I would expect if the tags are uneven among the 3 CD’s and then most likely the folder structure is too.
Assuming you are applying a kind of standard workflow to get your CD’s ripped, of course. If you use a ripping software it usually automatically applies tags from variuos sources and also saves the rip in folders which are often created from those tags, unless you already intervene there.
So you end up with three folders depicting the 3 different CD’s. What do you do next? You either combine those files manually into a folder structure of your liking or you adjust at least the album tags of the three CD’s in a consistent way.
Each of these steps is manual work and there is no Roon in sight, yet. Now you let Roon do its magic and you’ll end up with two possibilities:
- Roon is able to identify the album
- Roon is not able to identify the album.
Case 1 is great, because you’ll normally get enriched metadata from Roon that you can search for.
Case 2 is great if you have tagged you album proerly, because Roon will pick up your tags
If you don’t apply tags - then you may be lost in case 2. So I’m back to square one with my general question: why do people venturing into computer audio stay away from tagging?
I’ve read many different posts trying to explain the rationale behind Roon’s way and also have seen many requests for use cases.
All use cases I’ve seen so far can be solved by the use of tags instead of putting metadata in folder names and file names.
I really just don’t get it why you’d use a computer like you filing cabinet.
1 Like
Ok.
You are running the Roon app on some Windows or Mac computer somewhere in the house. It could be the machine running the Roon core, but it doesn’t have to be. I will describe Windows, it works similarly on Mac and probably Linux too but I don’t use those.
But note that it doesn’t work on an iPad because the iPad doesn’t have a folder browser, doesn’t have a file system, doesn’t have drag and drop. When they designed the iPad they were free not to make an old-fashioned computer, they made a new device type.
Your friend shows up with a USB stick with music, or a CD. You pop it into the laptop, and open Windows Explorer so you see the new content. (My Windows laptop opens Explorer automatically when I plug in a USB stick.)
You drag the main folder you want onto the Roon user interface, one or more albums or tracks. Just anywhere on top of the page.
Roon asks you to confirm you want to import the file. (Then it copies the file to the Core. This is because Roon always plays things from the core, even if you want to listen on the same laptop, that’s the Roon architecture, it does a lot of work on the core. There is no purely local playback. But you don’t have be involved with that. You don’t have to see that. If you stop thinking about conputers and drives and folders, it becomes obvious, you drag the music into Roon.)
Roon now adds the new content. (It may identify it so it shows up with Album and Track names, Artists etc. But it may not, if this is some oddball content. Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to do anything to “index” the music, it either is identified or it is not, all automatic.)
You then look in the Album browser, sorted by Date Added. (This is certain to work. Other browsers like Artist and Genre may not work if the content is not identified. I never use Tracks so I don’t know, probably works there.)
You click on the album and hit play, in the normal way.
This is an important point, Because it works this way, you can play this new content the same way you listen to any other content: on Your main speakers or on some small desktop speakers or on headphones. It can even play in the laptop you are using. But with Roon, it isn’t limited to the local computer, unlike a typical folder-based player. And it can play with DSP or anything you have set up.
If it did identify the album, you can also see the artists (Credits) and see what else they have done. “Who is this bassist, he is great, aha, it is Bob Smith, he also played with Fred Jones and Sally Robinson.”
Then if you want to get rid of it, you right click on the album or albums, click Edit, scroll down and click Delete Album.
I rip a file, dBpoweramp and ensure my data is consistent. Attention to spelling, disc number, composer, dates etc. The resulting file is easy to check prior to import into Roon.
Do it once and do it right.
A lot can be done once in Roon but this data is not added to your files. It’s all in your Roon database hence the availability of database back up.
There are no wrong ways, just your preferred way but you cannot escape the work involved.
You are right, it’s a problem with tags.
But if I have an option “folder”, I don’t care about Tags and I just to put the record in the right place.
Obviously I loose a part (even a large part) of the Roon possibilities, but that is my problem.
Fair enough.
But then why should Roon care about folder browsing?
Yes, that kind of meticulous work eliminates many problems, but as I have said many times, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to be a librarian.
And Roon allows me not to, at least mostly.
A typical dBPoweramp rip or HDTracks download lands with enough metadata tags so that Roon can identify it, and it then supplements the metadata from its sources. So I can be a slob, let it get assigned to whatever artist dBPoweramp chooses, and dump that folder in the Music folder and ignore it. Sure, Roon is not perfect, but it is successful enough that I am satisfied to manually annotate the failures rather than pre-emptively annotate them all.
And when I do need to fix the failures, I do it in Roon rather than in a tag editor or by creating folder structures.
This is not laziness or religion. It’s about directness. If I want Roon to know that this album is by Furtwängler and at Bayreuth, I want to directly tell Roon the conductor and venue. I don’t want to indirectly hint at this by creating a naming structure that only I can decode.
I do understand that Roon’s automatic identification works less well for classical music. But is it so bad that it invalidates the approach of relying on atomatics first, and dealing with exceptions as needed?
Large classical collection here (about 9000 albums). Only 75% of albums are identified by Roon. I would be completely lost without my tags.
And btw I can correct a lot of things using tags much easier that within Roon. I can even correct wrong metadata from Roon’s providers.
Merging compositions or correcting artists come to mind. This works much faster for me outside Roon than within Roon. Roon is not designed to be a metadata editor for batch editing and that’s what I normally need for classical music.
In some cases I even deliberately “un-identify” my albums in order to get my metadata back.
So I can feel the pain of people relying on a folder structure only - I just think they could make their life much easier using tags. But changing habits can be hard, for sure.
I also do understand why you do not want to be a librarian. As far as I am concerned I have had used quite a lot of different library managers in the past but I always tried to keep my tags properly maintained. I know it is a lot of work but at least for classical music I don’t see any agreement on how to use tags consistently on the horizon, so I have a natural mistrust towards 3rd party metadata. It’s not very consistent among donwloads from major labels, let alone from other sources.
I will keep maintaining my tags, because you never know what’ll happen with Roon in the future. By doing this even without Roon I can still find my stuff based on my tags. I am aware that this is not the path for everyone.