“Well, that’s, just like, your opinion, man.” -The Dude.
I don’t think so. And you’ll find a lot of the folks may not think so either. The sad state of music today has allowed artists to put out a sh1tty album with one good song, and people buy it. But that doesn’t mean the album is dead.
I have gone to tracks view twice, and I’ve never even bothered to scroll in it because it’s worthless. I don’t need a 33,000 entry long list, it’s just not useful. Try the other views, try focus, try search…
I was a bit frustrated when I started fussing with roon. That’s why the trial period is so good. After two weeks you KNOW if it’s for you or not. I came from iTunes, and there are some things that are really nice about the iTunes way of doing things, but roon also has some things that iTunes could really learn from as well.
Just to say Focus is available on the tracks view, as is filtering and column sorting so it can have it’s uses for finding/selecting large numbers of tracks.
Also if your iTunes library is organized (Preferences->Advanced->Keep Media Folder Organized) like it should be, then the folder structure will help roon out when it imports your music if it doesn’t recognize your tracks. I pulled in 2300 albums and only had to touch up a couple, I credit the folder being organized for helping with that. Also my metadata in my files was all tidy when I was in iTunes.
When I started I, too, was frustrated with the simple act of “Play”. The RTFM method was difficult as “TFM” was a bit lacking / non-existent because of the fact I was trying to do things the way I had done them before.
The Roon way is better and now I cannot imagine using iTunes or something else that continues to use a “file / directory” focused way of playing music.
Obviously, iTunes wasn’t 100% or you wouldn’t have invested in trialing Roon. Keep at it, use the suggestions here, and keep asking questions. Use it with an open mind of “new” and “different can be good”. Many people end-up agreeing after a week or so. Not everyone of course but that’s what trials are for. This thing really cannot be trialed in a day. It’s just to different than everything else out there.
For me, that’s exactly what I would expect. Tracks are tracks, and albums are albums, so if I want to play the tracks on a particular album I’d start with the album view rather than a list of every single track in my library. On the other hand, if I wanted to find a particular track I might use the Tracks view to do so, but I wouldn’t expect it to carry on playing. As @Mikael_Ollars mentioned above, Roon takes an album-centric view of a music collection, and that suits me fine - I guess I spend about 90% of my listening time playing whole albums - but obviously your use case is different. I can appreciate your frustration but, as others have mentioned, Roon’s way of doing things doesn’t satisfy everyone.
That’s what I would expect and want also. Not that I ever play individual tracks, but if I did, it would be like playing a 45 in the “good old days.” I want to play that 45 and only that 45. If I want to play the entire album, which I always do, I would click on the album play now.
Thinking about this a bit more, it would be inconsistent for the Tracks view to play from one track to another. When you’re in album view, hitting play plays through the tracks sequentially, but it doesn’t automatically carry on and play the next album too. Likewise, you can play your way through a playlist, but you wouldn’t necessarily want your next playlist to start when the first one finished. You can also shuffle play tags and genres, but you wouldn’t want or expect Roon to jump to another tag or genre when the first had been exhausted. By that logic, the Tracks view would be quite different to every other way of interacting with your library if it played the next track automatically.
We’ve actually been through this disussion before on more than a few times.
But i agree… Whatever the reason, if you are seeing a buch of tracks/albums/playlists on the screen, you should be able to Play them, or at least get the “Play from here”-option.
Somebody claimed this was not possible as there was “no selection”, but i disagree, like the OP i consider the selection is either my whole library, or what is seen on the controller screen.
Besides, this thread has got me to have a look at the darkest alleys of the Roon UI, the Tracks view… And there are MANY a strange behaviour here.
Frankly, imo this view could be dropped. It’s not particularly useful (to me) as of now.
You could, and that’s clearly the OP’s opinion too. Equally, you could say the same about the Album view - click play and Roon will play on from album to album and artist to artist. However, and as I mentioned, I don’t think it would make sense in either case. In fairness to the OP I can see that the Tracks view does look like a list of tracks that could be played in sequence, but I don’t think it should, in terms of both usability and consistency with respect to the rest of the UI.
And after reading from top to bottom, I find it most interesting due to what appears like long time users not being familiar with all of the functions. That certainly doesn’t mean that I am either. What I believe it shows is that many users find the system that works for them in terms of how they play their music and don’t explore beyond that. I may further infer that the UI is rather clunky and doesn’t necessarily invite exploration.
Of course, reading through a lengthy handbook or trawling through forums doesn’t necessarily appeal to some either.
One of the reasons I started playing via roon was that I was using jriver and was constantly lost in the UI. Every release added new things I didn’t want especially around multimedia.
Roon is quirky but the quirks mostly carry through from release to release.
We all assume things should work in a particular way and that one version of a UI is correct and intuitive. I was around in IT training when graphical UIs became mainstream. After seeing what people with no instructions get up to, you realise UIs and their associated hardware are not intuitive they are learned behaviour.
Leave a room full of computers and mice whilst you have a coffee, come back in to find the trainees have come in and are “using” the computers. Individuals are:-
The mouse is under their foot like a sewing machine control. Running the mouse on the screen glass tracing the windows. Talking to the mouse. Holding the mouse upside down and rolling the ball. Trying to use the keyboard with the mouse.
I have lost count of the number of software packages released at my place of work without any training documentation, because ‘it is so intuitive to use we don’t need to write any’. Yeah right…and this is to a group of users that are to put it kindly, not exactly computer savvy.
I do hear you, and as far as playback is concerned, I would mostly agree. It’s not a screen I often use. Nevertheless, in combination with sort/filter/focus options it has been a very useful tool for me for troubleshooting and editing my local library, e.g. identifying duplicate tracks and files or creating playlists and tags, doing stuff related to track names across the library etc etc.
It ain’t pretty but has it’s uses, which are difficult to replicate other than through a linear and customizable listing of tracks like this, IMO.
I realize that others find it useful. And i was more considering an on/off option for the main menu selections.
(I never ever use Composers and Compositions either, but of course they’re valuable to others.)
If roon took notice of all of the UI requests and moans it would either be so full of switches it would look like the flight deck of Concorde or have nothing but a play button.
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