Custom track ratings

Does it achieve anything that wouldn’t be achieved by creating a Favourite Tracks tag and tagging the songs accordingly?

Yes.

Fundamentally, my tracks are rated. Already. From no rating to five stars.
This has taken years. And evolves.

This is also true of many other users - judging by responses on the myriad other threads on this topic.
It’s also possible - as other users do - to give each track a % rating, which is supported in tagging, if more granularity is required.

Favouriting ? Too binary in Roon : like / no comment / ban ? IMO that’s useless.

Could you explain why (Roon) favouriting, or re-tagging every individual track in a collection is / would be a good thing?

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all that Roland, here above, said :grin:

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[quote=“rolski, post:22, topic:3262”]
Could you explain why (Roon) favouriting, or re-tagging every individual track in a collection is / would be a good thing?
[/quote] Wasn’t suggesting it’d be a good thing, merely trying to establish your use case. So you’ve got all these rated tracks in another system, how did/do you use those ratings?

Smart Playlists:

Looking at that you could create tags e.g. 4+ Tracks and tag the tracks in question accordingly. You could then play the tag, which I believe always shuffles. So I’m guessing the real clincher is being able to leverage your existing ratings rather than having to recapture them?

Right :slight_smile:
even though… changing “Focus”, once the above is in place, is not as immediate as selecting a different playlist :wink:
but at least…

You can bookmark them or navigate to the Tags section.

One thing on my ‘to do list’ is to experiment with exactly what I can do within Roon with respect to importing track ratings as ‘tags’. It could well be that there are ways of using the power of focus in some interesting ways.

However, in response to Evand’s question I will give one clear example of how I use track ratings, something that simply cannot be duplicated in Roon. Lets say I am using the evil iTunes, I can go to ‘songs’, and iTunes will list everything in my library, with my own track ratings clearly shown at a glance, I can then sort on artist, genre or anything else I fancy and see clearly the tracks I really love (5 stars), and those I love less (3 stars) and those that I’m not that keen on at all (1 star). It is all very clear and obvious. Then lets say I want to listen to a particular artist, I could search say on ‘Bowie’, this will then list all my Bowie tracks, I can then sort by track rating, and I have a list of Bowie material starting with the best, then gradually drifting down through 4, 3, and 2 star tracks. In Roon I could use focus to search on Bowie and say ‘Tag 5’, representing those 5 star tracks, so this gets some way there. But can Roon do the nice track listing with gradually descending ratings? No it can’t! It is also very easy in iTunes to enter or tweak a track rating, changing tags in Roon is not a one click of the mouse thing.

There are a whole host of ways can use iTunes track ratings and play listings that Roon simply cannot mimic. It is for this reason that I actually spend a lot of time using iTunes even though I am a Roon subscriber. The saving grace is that I can use iTunes to create a playlist, so once I’ve done whatever I want to do in iTunes I can then pick up this playlist in Roon and use Roon for the actual listening. It’s far from ideal though! For me, adding track ratings to Roon would be the biggest game changer of the lot. It would be so much nicer than running iTunes and Roon in parallel, which is totally annoying to be honest, but it is the best fit I can get with my needs currently.

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Agreed. Every word.

This is almost a deal breaker for me. Have a decision to make on Roon in Sep.
For now I maintain all my tags in JRiver. I have a very large library where I have taken the time to tag each song 0-5 stars. I would love to easily get my 5 stars (almost 2400 songs) into Roon without having to manually click the heart (which is buggy anyway - especially in the Roon remotes. Sometimes it takes. Sometimes it doesn’t). Even if undertake that I will have to maintain the 5 stars in both systems which is problematic.

Until Roon can come up with a way for me to read my favorite tag data I’m in limbo and cannot 100% migrate (which I would like to do). Or maybe integrate a JRiver playlist (I refuse to use iTunes). I don’t get the feeling the developers think this is a big issue but it is…

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YES! This is the same as my “Bouquet of Flowers to the Roon Team” post. Roon is very powerful in many respects,but it lacks in the sophisticated ways to customize how we slice and dice our collections for listening. I still love Roon, but it takes user work to implement these things, and thus Roon should either support importing existing embedded tags or export what we do within Roon so that it can be preserved and used with other software.

There is another issue with trying to get Roon to do what you describe: Tag logic is additive, not reductive, generally. For example, if you Tag a bunch of artists, albums, or tracks as “mellow morning music” and then you also have your track ratings in Roon Tags, you will not necessarily be able to pull up a Focus of the intersection between morning mellow music and 5 star tracks. I think it will bring up all morning mellow music and all 5 star tags. I have been working on logic to address that issue, although I haven’t had time to test it yet: instead of a 5 star tag, you would have a 1-4 star tag and then EXCLUDE (using the minus sign) the tracks with this Tag, thus leaving you only with 5 star tracks.

Of course this is only a problem if you have to combine two Tags to bring up what you want to play. But generally, I use multiple criteria to create my dynamic shuffle playlists and that’s where the challenge is.

Foobar filters work perfectly for this. But Foobar doesn’t do what Roon does otherwise. So my hope is that Roon is able to build in some more sophisticated logic options as well as export/import capabilities for user-generated metadata.

Not meaning to be duplicative to the other thread. I just think it’s a critical user point.

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Yep, me too, still waiting to see my per-track ratings in Roon…

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It is good to see that individual track ratings is still getting some interest from Roon users here. For me it has been the absolute number 1 feature that I miss in Roon, and it’s absence does lead to me not really using Roon as much as I would like, or indeed as much as I should considering the cost.

Anyway, one thing I note is that there has been zero input from the developers or the mods on this topic. Some topics seam to get much interest and input, but other topics are simply ignored. Is it the case that the developers have zero interest in this functionality, and rather than clearly stating this, such topics are simply ignored? Personally I would sincerely hope not, but a bit of feedback and transparency would be most welcome nevertheless.

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I don’t have any special knowledge, but there’s a difference between not commenting and ignoring. I’m pretty sure the Roon team read all the feature requests.

Absolutely, they do read all the requests and nothing is ignored.

Me too. Without this feature I cannot migrate to Roon as the one and only solution.

I cannot fully migrate to Roon either without a similar function. It won’t be track ratings, but rather my custom method of rating albums. Same idea though. We need to be able to take an embedded metatag in a media file and convert it in some fashion to a Roon Tag. And that has to be on a batch basis, not file by file or album by album.

But I think they’re considering how to do this. So I plan to be a little patient with it as long as Roon improves their radio and random play functions, or implements more intelligence regarding shuffle capabilities (i.e. wide/narrow/deep).

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In my mind it would be nice to choose in the settings: Roon rating or tag rating. Or in a filter.

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You are right, I agree there is a difference between not commenting and ignoring. It was certainly not my intent to be deliberately provocative and I absolutely loathe the kind of forum rucks that emerge elsewhere, so I sincerely apologise if I caused any offence here.

To be clear, the phase I should have used is ‘not commented’, this would have more accurately reflected what I wanted to say.

Although it is perhaps worth noting that from the perspective of a forum user, it is actually impossible to tell the difference between ‘ignored’ and ‘not commented’. My only view into the world of Roon is via this forum on a computer screen, it is perhaps because of this I carelessly used the word ignored. It is a bit like being in an unfamiliar town, you ask someone on the street if they know the way to the train station, the stranger does not respond. It would be normal to think ‘he ignored me’! In this example, the term ignore is probably accurate, although the stranger may not have heard me, he may speak a different language, he may have known that there is a giant sign coming up that says ‘Railway Station’, thought I was an idiot and I would see the sign. The point is that if the stranger says nothing, I do not know. Also, it is ironic that in a thread where a number of users post about custom track ratings there is indeed ‘no comment’ from moderators or developers, however, when one poster uses the word ‘ignored’, one moderator does have the time to take the trouble to clarify that noting is ignored, whilst ‘not commenting’ on the actual topic.

To be honest, I am not asking for much. I do not expect the request for custom track ratings to be Roon’s number 1 priority. I do not expect it to be implemented in the next couple of months just because I asked about it.

What I am interested in is if it is a feature that Roon never intend to implement because it does not fit with the ‘philosophy’ of Roon. Is it perhaps a ‘maybe one day it will happen’ feature? Is it an ‘almost certainly will be included but no time soon’ feature, and so on. With no comment from Roon it is impossible to know.

OK, I could just sit back, enjoy Roon for what it is, and wait and see. However, I have put a lot of time over the years into creating my track ratings, so I need to be clear what I might be doing with them going forward. This has implications for how much time I spend getting everything set up in Roon, metadata tweak’s, tagging etc.

I have been a visitor to this forum long enough to know that the developers do not like to advise ‘road maps’ of planned features or commit to schedules, I have read posts discussing this and I fully understand and respect Roon’s reasons for not providing this. However, all I am asking for is a tiny bit of insight, for all I know it may well be pretty much decided that custom track ratings will never happen, and with my naturally cynical mind this is indeed how I interpret a ‘no comment’ from those within Roon. I do hope I am wrong though!:wink:

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