- 10.000.000.000.000 for any kind of folder viewer. All the “workarounds” don’t work as good, simple, easy and convenient in many cases, period.
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I remember asking for that feature since June 2015.
Roon will not do it, because it is not consistent with their philosophy.
I think if you want Iso support or folder view you have to look for some other software.
But there might be MQA support sooner than later.
What does this have to do with MQA support? Two completely different things.
Some features are more important than others to the users.
A feature like MQA is more important than folder structure, so it gets more resources.
Folder structure has to wait till the important stuff is implemented.
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I doubt folder structure will ever be implemented, unless there is a huge groundswell movement that goes louder than the anti-crowd, which is pretty strong here.
No matter, I love Roon anyway. I just think of it as being a bit like my eccentric uncle who wears leather belts and shoes but won’t eat meat.
The older you get the more you appreciate that old eccentric uncle lol in fact, you become him and enjoy it…
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Imagine I have two tools in my kitchen drawer. One is a bottle opener, the other is a Swiss Army knife with a bottle opener. If I want to open a bottle, I’ll probably just grab the bottle opener rather than unfold the relevant blade on the knife. But my knife isn’t broken or badly designed. It’s just that for this particular use case I have a simpler tool.
Exactly! LOL I am that eccentric to my millennial nieces and nephews…
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Except there is only room for one tool in my kitchen drawer. I understand the point you are making - use VLC Player or some other media player to play that media file. EXCEPT I have converted my prior media PC into a headless Roonbridge because there is no need for that darned monitor, keyboard, or mouse near my stereo any longer. So I am committed to using Roon if I want to hear it out of my stereo.
If Roon appeared as its own sound driver that would also solve the problem - play VLC through Roon.
I am not blaming the Roon team for causing me to make my former media PC a headless Roonbridge. I’m just saying that is a valid use case.
Yes, I see what you mean in that situation. In that case you do have to move files in or out of the library. I use a separate folder called Temp in such cases and focus on it with Albums/Focus/Inspector/Storage Location.
Roon isn’t designed to quickly play any file on a computer. Do you think it should aim in that direction ?
All you have to do is drag-and-drop onto Roon, it appears in the upper left corner, click on it and play.
Remove it? Why? Doesn’t do any harm where it sits.
Don’t have to name it. I normally do so I can find it again (my kid plays the bass too, although he is 32).
I am more concerned about the uses cases of bringing in large quantities of existing content that is identified only through its location. No easy way to tag it. Once tagged, finding it through a tag is certainly easier than storage location. But how to tag it?
I don’t really look at it as being enough of a product decision to be a move in any direction. This is about like suggesting putting an eraser on the end of a pencil. It’s not a weighty product decision and would not represent some strategic market focus.
It’s a little more involved than that. You have to click through selections for storage locations for it to copy that media to that location. Then you have a bunch of no-metadata files somewhere on your storage network. Drag into Roon should, IMHO, simply commence playing without copying the media or adding it to the library.
Well this isn’t my use case but I think it’s a separate justification. I have a similar problem in that I have a large quantity of files with custom embedded metatags that are not common fields. I just wish there was a way for Roon to focus on these so I could apply Roon tags.
But that said I am listening to Roon right now, and enjoying it greatly, so its lack of folder access is really more theoretically than actually annoying. I just like bringing out the anti-folder crowd for a little dodge and parry every now and then. 
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I enjoy it too.
Having worked in the computer industry all my life, I find it fascinating with all the people who consider the file/folder storage structure a natural thing and the metadata based model an exotic deviation. That file system model was invented for the benefit of the computers, not humans. It’s a horrible abomination. Getting rid of it is an ongoing struggle.
I remember when I was the first guy to buy a digital watch, my friend said that seems inconvenient because I have to mentally translate the numbers into the position of the hands because that is what time really is.
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Actually the file system model was based on filing cabinets at first and then the table of contents of documents second. Both reasonably common for most people in office environments. It was a much better alternate to IBM’s MVS’s and Digital’s PDP-11’s & VMS’s use of file contexts which were really a flat file system patched up. The first iterations I saw were with Unix in the late 70’s.
I’ve been lobbying for a file browser since I bought into Roon and presented an number of reasons earlier in this thread. There are a number of valid use cases and very few technical drawbacks other than philosophical ones. I would use a browser long before I use MQA… Just saying.
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The Model T was a big improvement on the horse buggy…
Filing cabinets: “last Christmas we went sailing in the Caribbean for Annie’s birthday and Frank dressed up as Santa Claus, it was so funny, let me show you the pictures, I have them here in the C drawer for Christmas, hmm they are not here, maybe the V drawer for vacation, no, maybe the T drawer for travel, no, maybe the S drawer for sailing, no, maybe the A drawer for Annie, no, maybe the B drawer for birthdays, hmm, where can they be, maybe the U drawer for US Virgin Islands — yes, here they are! Let me show you. Wait, where did you go?”
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Until it contributed to global warming…
Metadata library only approach:
I put those vacation pictures right here, in this drawer. But the cabinet automatically took them and moved them somewhere else. What did the cabinet think they were? While some are marked with their contents, there are a lot of unmarked envelopes that look the same, and I have to open each to see if those are the vacation photos. Why can’t they just be where I put them?
…OR…
I have these vacation photos. But before I can show them to you, I have to decide what album they should go in, and what mnemonic device works best to remind me what album they are in. I can’t just open and look at the photos; I have to make all kinds of organizational and labeling decisions about the photos, and then, once I have satisfied the file cabinet that the pictures are in a place the cabinet determines makes sense, only then will the file cabinet give them back to me show you.
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Aah, now if you had exif data none of this silly decision making would be necessary.
When I was shooting on film, I would put the print in boxes and there was no system that changed that, they just stayed where I put them, as @James_I said. And the result is, I have a basement with tens of thousands of prints in boxes. My digital pictures, with exif metadata as @evand says, are well organized on my computer, hundreds of thousands of them. But it is not without effort, the camera is not able to mark them “Vacation with Katie”. I do that in Lightroom, on original import.
Another example, which supports both perspectives. In my library, books are sorted by author’s last name, which is a lot of work. But there is no way to find them some other way. I recently wanted to find a book by title, and I actually went to Amazon, looked up the title, found the author name, and was then able to find the book on my shelf, didn’t have to buy it. So my shelves are the worst of both worlds, like the hierarchical file system: a lot of work but extremely limited retrieval.
My Kindle books are like a basic metadata system, I can find them bu author or title or “recent”. But there is no stronger metadata, and no way to label them “Katie’s recommendation”.
And finally, like in some scenarios suggested here, I have a stack on my bedside table, and another stack on my office desk, so here I find them by storage location, without having to maintain metadata. Works fine, until I have “special stacks” all over the house and can’t find anything, even if I use the Amazon lookup trick. I admit, in some such cases I buy a second copy…
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+1 for folders
Isn’t so easy. You add that specific folded to your library. Only that folder. Then tag it. Remove it, next folder, and so on ?
Finally you can just add the top location of your folder structure. And you’re good to go.