When I’m listening by myself, I love the new one click play behavior. But when I’m DJ-ing a party (and by “DJ-ing a party” I mean “playing music during weekend breakfast for my wife and kid”), it is really nice to have the extra step to prevent me from accidentally interrupting a song that is currently playing. I catch hell every time that happens. Now that I’ve started to think about this, one-click play is also one of the most nerve wracking features of mobile players and apps (from iPod to Tidal) anytime more than one person is in the car/room.
As I’m sure many of you know, JRemote has the option to change the behavior of the play button. I’ve found this to be a little confusing, but everything about JRiver is confusing compared to Roon.
Perhaps you could make the Play (Now) button smaller and the Queue (menu) button larger?
I have a suggestion which may satisfy most users (hah, sure… ;)):
On each userprofile allow a setting for default play-button behaviour (Play now, Play Next, Add to queue) AND whether the queue should be “volatile” or not. That way you could easily create a userprofile called “Party” or something and have your friends and family chose whatever’s next without ruining the queue.
Personally i dislike the queue and very much much like the current behaviour. And please dont forget the History view, (which of cours wont show you what was supposed to play before you accidentally pressed play now on a song) along with a pretty decent tool for creating playlists. If you are worried about your queue, instead make it a playlist?
FWIW I prefer being closer to one click play with this update, but I was hoping for something far more ‘elegant’ and maybe a bit revolutionary - something in line with what Roon was trying to achieve at launch.
Instead this revision is functional (although not for everyone it seems) but isn’t going to win any design awards - it’s actually a bit ugly IMO and is inconsistently implemented.
I hope with the next overall interface iteration, the package is bought back to a beautiful, consistent design.
Meanwhile, seems like it would be better just to give people more options, which to be honest was the case previously too. I really don’t see the problem with options - metadata monsters have literally endless options for how they want their metadata to look in Roon, why can’t people just have the play system configured how they want it?
For people that like to build queues (and many people do), having all of the buttons at the top level of the interface destroy queues is not good.
“Play Now” should be split into “Play Now (Add)” and “Play Now (Replace)”. Either of those two buttons, along with “Add to Queue”, should be selectable as the default menu option.
These changes would make the interface flexible enough to accomodate those who use queues and those who don’t. This will be even more important when the non-destructive queue option (currently on the roadmap) becomes a reality.
Allowing users to choose a default option is important. The use cases are too broad not to allow for a small amount of flexibility.
EDIT: Ooopss… I thought this was a different thread. I posted something similar up above. I’ll leave this reply here it as I think it bears repeating.
not only larger but at the left side which might help other users to retain their old habits and the ones who like the new behavior can click the smaller play icon on the right
I like the new look, but would rather have the default behavior to add to the queue. Maybe in the future have an option in settings as to what the default behavior should be.
I certainly wouldn’t want it to continue playing some stuff I was playing prior if I had just told it to play a particular album. If I wanted to queue an album and play it immediately as you suggest I would expect the button to say just that.
Slighly small buttons to comfortably tap on my iPhone 7 but visually clear to me what they do. Though I also have to get used to the changed action and pressed play when I wanted something else, I think we will all learn quickly.
The feedback is indicative of the split of preferences at least as I see it. With some 10,000+ users here there always going to be some divide but often these tweaks to the interface will be much better understood when its out there in the field - not just in testing (which is more about about bugs) but with real user experience and more importantly feedback.
Roon is a growing product and growing has pains sometimes.
I would put money on some more options for what was before being a preference at some time, but for now its not the end of the world surely. Give the guys time to sift through the feedback and plan some updates in good time.
Definitely a long awaited step in the right direction. To get to a decent final result:
Offer options for preferred behavior of the one click button, as clearly one size does not fit all
I would like to see the full range of play next options that JRiver incorporates, ESPECIALLY “play this album after album currently playing”
Make the last chosen option, eg add to queue, the one click option next time, with the other options still accessible in the drop down. Th one click option is then always the one you chose last time.
I repeat, this is a definite improvement (even though like everybody else I initially carelessly deleted the queue a few times!), but it can still get a lot better.
In the album play options, present the user’s chosen default as the first button in the menu, so it can be selected without having to hit the dropdown. The dropdown then becomes activated only in the event the user wants to do something other than their chosen default.
“Play Now (Add)” would play the selected music immediately and add it to the queue. “Play Now (Replace)” would play the selected music immediately and replace what is in the queue with the current selection - which is the behavior of the current “Play Now” button.
The point of having the two buttons being that choosing to play music should not automatically delete the queue.
