Custom track ratings

It does seem like the first thing you’d do when creating a music manager.

I have to say that I agree with @evand on this one. I know that this forum is full of feature requests, but it strikes me that this one offers a tremendous improvement to Roon’s functionality for what I suspect is something relatively easy to implement. Do any other feature requests offer this kind of “bang for your buck”? Indeed, if you look at my post way back in February '18, I managed to utilise the Album Artist metadata field to kind of “hack” individual track ratings into Roon. This was easy to do. Of course a fully supported implementation would be more complex, but I suspect the basic building blocks are there already.

It is also worth noting that JRiver have been making big noises recently about iTunes being phased out, and sending out emails advertising JRIver’s iTunes integration and the new features such as iTunes playlist import. OK, I know that Roon already supports iTunes playlist import, but if those playlists rely on individual track ratings then Roon can never offer any kind of transition from iTunes, only that it can work in tandem with iTunes. JRiver does support individual track ratings. So in terms of sweeping up potential customers moving away from iTunes, JRiver has the advantage.

I also note that this thread has been running since August 2015, over four years now. In this time there has not been one single post from the Roon team. I got told off for suggesting that this topic is being ignored, and that the “Roon team read all feature requests”. Sorry, but it has to be said, from the perspective of a Roon subscriber, zero comment in four years is ignoring a topic.

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Not that being the OP gives me any special authority here, but thought I’d update. I’ve been using Roon quite happily since 2015 without that feature. I don’t feel particularly ignored by the developers. I don’t think that 90 posts in a thread about a feature is an indicator of overwhelming support or demand. I’m not a developer, I have no idea how hard or easy this would be to implement. I do know that Roon - as is - gives me more than enough tools to slice and dice my library in more ways than I’ll ever have time to experience. tl;dr-would be glad to see it happen, managing just fine without it.

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Totally but I think we get used to our work arounds and forget to think about the potentially we’re missing. Like how good would it be to have a global radio button that just starts playing from your whole collection but preferences song selection based on track ratings - most tracks are high stars, some low stars but then 2 out of 10 tracks are no stars and haven’t been played in >6months. The benefit being mostly good tracks but a few that need discovery. I have heaps of tracks i’ve never heard because i bought an album for 1 song. And the mix could be adjustable depending on how adventurous you were feeling.

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Wishful thinking. Roon radio is like a city cab - you don’t get to pick the journey, only the pickup point.

I have just started looking at the new features in Roon 1.7. I notice there is now a “ROONTRACKTAG” feature. Just thinking aloud here, is there any way to utililise the ROONTRACKTAG feature to invoke individual track ratings in some way?

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It should work and with the right tagger it may even be possible to automate this somehow (copying from existing rating tags to ROONTRACKTAG).



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Can i ask how you used star symbols in the tag name??!!

I copied one I liked from here:

https://www.alt-codes.net/star_alt_code.php

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Bump…This request is super old and this should have been added by now. This is ridiculous

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Roon does not agree with every feature request. However, since they don’t respond to feature request, you never know if they agree or not until it shows up as a feature in Roon or it doesn’t.

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Currently I am trialing Roon coming from JRiver. I like the interface much more, BUT the inability to use track rating is a show stopper… What is most disturbing, is the fact that I found many threads on this subject within the community and not a single reply from Roon staff.

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A new update is around the corner, I don’t know if this is included. I expect it has been a feature request at some time and you should add your name in that section.
Personally a Heart is all I need to mark favourite tracks and it’s great to be able to swim through these randomly.

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This thread is over five years old now!

The addition of individual track ratings would be an absolute game changer for me. I could get demotivated by the age of this thread, but as others have mentioned the absolute silence from Roon might actually be a good sign. Consider other threads requesting folder views and similar, responses from Roon make it clear that this will never happen, no such responses here.

So I shall remain optimistic. Although I am not holding my breath, as they say.

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Unfortunately not. It is even worse. Some including myself used tags as a workaround for a five star track rating, but in Rel. 1.8 the tag editor is useless, and the tags are not shown in the track list anymore, so you do not know at a glance which are you favorite tracks of an album. Same with playlists.

Roon have said they are looking again at tags based on feedback, so you can expect something soon.

Still relatively new to Roon so haven’t solidified the way I use it yet. But I’m in the ‘believes in track ratings’ camp for many reasons stated above.

The iTunes smart playlist + Roon tagging workaround has a close enough effect and is not oppressively burdensome to me. But whether I do that or we get full rating support there is a HUGE piece I can’t get past.

Ratings do evolve, but whatever I do after that in Roon doesn’t update the files.

So I hear a great tune in Roon and have to go back to iTunes to update its rating, and regularly refresh Roon tags to reflect that? That process of initial rating / tagging workaround and then ongoing maintenance is starting to get a bit much for me.

Or, I dump years of work into managing them directly in Roon only to lose it all if/when I ever switch software or it gets retired. We’re listening to music for the long haul. And that lost value is precisely our starting point with our existing ratings right now.

And this is different than just regular metadata tags (Title, Artist, et al) where there are many external sources for it if it’s ever lost. There is only one source for my opinion of my music.

So far I’ve just been gravitating toward seeing Roon as a music discovery tool and a ‘musical showroom’, where I give up the primary way I control broad listening across my library. And I keep on using iTunes more than I’d like.

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We are professionals involved in high end hifi. Since Roons exist we have a look at it to see how it is improving. We do not understand the lack of track rating basic or custom. It unfortunately makes Roon unuseable for us. We hope it to apear as paired with hqplayer Roon is great. In order to tell more about custom rating it means that we need to create criteria as

Recording quality
Interpretation
Etc.

Of course it makes sense only when paired with the ability to sort tracks in a playlist on the rating criteria of our choice.

I wouldn’t call Roon un useable in any degree, it may not be as good as you would like with one feature missing, so that would make a great optional feature request.

Personally I like the way you can favourite individual tracks, but if I had the option to rate them, it would be information overload.
How many stars would you have? Would these stars be based on audio quality, production values or just music you enjoy?

I get to know my music and don’t need stars to tell me what I like but appreciate some folks may want something like this. I do wonder how many though.

Just my thoughts…

I can’t remember many Track names, Lyrics and sometimes even not Artists. So ratings are essential for me. I got comfortable with iTunes five Star ratings. I know that everyone uses the ratings differently. In my case I use them like this:

1 Star - An ugly song I really hate and don’t want to hear in any situation / spoken words like in the soundtrack for Kill Bill
2 Stars - A track I don’t want to listen randomly but is okay in the context of album listening
3 Stars - Good enough for random and background listening and for party playlists
4 Stars - Really good song I can listen often to
5 Stars - One of the best songs of this artist (in my opinion) / favorite track

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