It is easy to implement in Roon (modulo a zillion other meaningful feature requests, bugs, etc), but it goes against the philosophy / design decisions Roon made. There, I think the mistake is to lump browsing one’s own music with browsing for new music. That superficial similarity is utterly misleading. Clear evidence: there are a great many posts throughout multiple topics where dissatisfied Roon users are doing the same thing, using outside software to maintain their ability to browse their own music. Those same users like Roon Radio, Tidal integration, etc. I don’t know if Roon developers will ever consider doing playlist right, but at least I am getting payback by learning about alternative solutions to iTune: MediaMonkey is the latest. Thanks for that! Cheers.
Daniel, Roon does not recognize folder location or folder titles for organization or retrieval purposes. However it does have focus, search, bookmarks, and tags to perform the location and browsing function.
These tools, after an adjustment period, have allowed me ample browsing capabilities for my library. I would not consider going back to iTunes.
John,
The issues I am raising is that Roon ignores highly personally meaningful and manually curated information that many users have and want access to, that as best as I can see it would be easy to implement in Roon while enhancing - not disrupting - the UI, and that the failure to provide this feature is based on adherence to a design decision (dogma) that is wrong. Saying that Roon does not recognize hierarchical information for retrieval purposes is saying Roon does not recognize tree structures for retrieval purposes. Roon is good, but they have not reinvented CS. Tree structures are useful, in this case the best approach for many users.
This has nothing to do with iTunes v. Roon! I am glad that Roon is working for you, but in this and several other threads there are many individuals who express the same perspective I am raising. And they are long time users of Roon who are frustrated about this issue. They maintain lists on iTunes, MediaMonkey, JRiver, and others no doubt, and use those lists to find the music they want, before awkwardly using that info to find the selections in Roon to listen to. So I am pleased that music retrieval on Roon works for you, but it does not work for others. How many of course I cannot say.
Thinking about this issue, I am wondering if the current approach in Roon works well for some types of listening preferences and some types of music but not others. It seems irrelevant to dig deeper, however, unless there is some indication that the developers are listening, and care.
The issue has nothing to do with ITunes, but with Roon inefficiencies. These tools (tags, playlists, bookmarks, etc) could be made much more useful if some form of hierarchy could be implemented in the UI to manage them. Nice to have playlists or tags in Roon, but since they are presented strictly as flat lists, they can quickly become unmanageable when their number increase. I could easily have thousand of tags in Roon, but browsing and searching them would become very painfull. A hierarchy would help organize them and make them much more enjoyable.
Dear united Roon Users,
How do you force Roon to show all the albums of a CD box (e.g. an opera or the collected works of Szell …) separately instead of a list of CD 1, cd 2 cd 3 …etc with no art, and often even no mention of the work (all the works) on the CD.
It sometimes does do so (all albums separate entries) but often, it doesn’t.
How can you trigger this phenomenon?
Roon still has a lot of secrets which I don’t know yet. I hope to discover more and more in the future with your valued help.
Frans Gommers
I am far from sure, but I believe the correct general answer is that you don’t. You can’t. What it shows depends on metadata - too often wrong - that it imports, and decisions made on what constitutes a work. Effectively you cannot correct the metadata, or change the decision structure, or impose your own structure. I think your best approach is to make a playlist in Roon (or outside of Roon that it will then import). But playlists are not particularly well supported in Roon. And then some but not all of your music will be best found in playlists. Or make a playlist for each work. But then you have a lot of playlists. Roon treats those playlists as one long list - a flat file. What is Roon’s own definition of such flat file structure? “Meh”