Glad to see some of the earlier miscommunication in this thread resolved. One point I’ve made before that I’ll mention again is that much of Roon is built around your library, and many of our most powerful features only work on the content inside your library. This includes Focus, Radio, Favorites, Tags, and so on.
In the future, we are hoping to expand some of these features (like Radio) to include non-library content, but for now much of the Roon experience is built around building and exploring a library of albums you love, whether the music lives on your hard drive or in your TIDAL account.
The point of the Collections feature is to make it easy for new users to get the Roon experience, and use all of those features, even if they don’t have a preexisting library on TIDAL, or locally.
The idea of editorial collections that you can browse and add to your library “a la carte” is absolutely something we’ve discussed, and I think it’s a great idea – it’s just not what this feature was designed for, which was a simple way to “kick start” your library.
Simply converting these Collections into something “browseable” introduces additional complexity as well. Every country has access to a slightly different set of TIDAL content, as determined by rights holders. Like TIDAL and all streaming services, Roon has to respect these constraints.
The Collections feature requests the whole list from TIDAL, but only content that’s actually available in your country is added to your library. If we were going to display all the albums and let you browse, we’d want to precompute the availability for your country, since it would be lame to show you an album you can’t actually play or add.
This isn’t an insurmountable problem but it’s effort that cuts across the team – the lists need to be precomputed and maintained, the new screens need to be designed and built, our QA team needs to test as if they were in a variety of different countries, and so on.
For now my recommendation would be to add the Collections you’re interested in, use the Tags dropdown at the top of the album browser to browse, and then delete any albums you don’t want in your library.
As I think I’ve mentioned to Andybob, we are also thinking about how to make this experience less confusing for new users, so look for some changes in the “onboarding” experience soon.
And finally, thanks @allan2 for the feedback – we’re listening, so please keep it coming.