I recently added a Support item, “Bookmark is ignoring focus”. Researching this some more I realized that the real issue may be that bookmarks simply don’t work as expected outside of My Library. I did a search while Browsing, then a focus (please see the support topic for more details), and finally created a bookmark based on that focus. When I used that bookmark it ignored my focus. Does the focus/bookmark combination only work when looking through My Library? Is there a reason for that?
I can filter (focus) the search without any problem, it’s just when I want to remember the criteria via a bookmark that things fail. The bookmark appears to forget any filtering I did after the initial search.
No, I didn’t add the results to my library. I believe that’s exactly the problem. The focus/bookmark is allowed to happen based on my search of Qobuz, but then the focus is ignored when retrieving results based on the bookmark I created.
Bookmarks don’t save filtering only the focus settings as filtering is done after a focus to whittle the results done to a more granular level. What is it your filtering for that can’t be added as a focus?
Focus and hence bookmarks only work on content added to your library they do not work on searching only filters can be used when using search.
That’s not what I’m seeing. I’m not using the filtering feature, just focus, and I’m doing it on content that has not been added to my library. The problem is when I set a bookmark based on the focus, which has properly narrowed my search. Selecting the bookmark gets me back my initial search results, without the focus having been applied.
I’m new to roon (still in my evaluation period) but it seems to me that if bookmarks are allowed on searches/focus of non-library (e.g., Qobuz) inputs then selecting the bookmark later should give you back what you saw when you created the bookmark. True, or am I missing something?
Here’s a link to my original post describing the problem…
That’s not entirely correct. E.g., you can go to an artist’s Discography and can use the focus to show only albums with certain criteria even if they are not in your library.
However, when you create a bookmark for that, this focus does not seem to be saved. Recalling this bookmark goes back to the artist’s main page (not the Discography) and the previously selected focus is not active. At least that’s the case if you have nothing by the artist in the library. I tested this with A-ha to be sure
Yes, that’s exactly (not with A-ha, but the same idea) what I did. So now my question is more philosophical…
I understand how adding your own music to the library makes sense, but if you are almost exclusively going to use a streaming library (e.g., Qobuz) why is it necessary to import your favorites into My Library to get full functionality? If focus and bookmarks worked correctly, what do you gain within Roon when you move something from the Browse library (viewed through Roon) to My Library? Why not just put a tag on what you like and use that to limit your selections when you want?
Historical and software architecture. Roon was first only for local libraries. Streaming had to be integrated later, and it wasn’t / couldn’t be rewritten from the ground up for that.
There are many consequences of this that are limiting and Roon knows that at some point they will have to solve this, but it’s a lot of work and not without frictions (requiring always-online in Roon 2.0 because of heavier reliance on cloud infrastructure wasn’t met with 100% approval, for instance)
Processing power. Adding something to the library also creates a selection of data that has to be queried, and even the very large libraries of some users with 1 million tracks are still vastly smaller than 90 million albums on Tidal or Qobuz. Running a query on 100K or a million in-library tracks is still within the possibilities of a local PC, running the same query on a billion tracks on the streaming service isn’t.
This is also why search had be moved into the cloud to be able to improve it to the level users expect. This post explains the necessary search infrastructure and probably also tells us something about challenges that would be posed by running a focus on all of Qobuz/Tidal:
A silly but easy question. What’s the best way to post a suspected bug? I put the following on “Support” a few days ago. Is that considered a bug report?
Thank you. That explains a lot of things, and I’m glad to see that this is an issue that Roon is aware of and working on.
Personally I’d like to see the division between “My Library” and streaming libraries all but disappear, with a single switch that you can set to limit suitable features to either local, cloud catalogs, or a combination. I’m sure there’s complications to doing that, both historical and technical, but it could make the user’s experience much nicer.
Are there release notes published with each release? I’d be curious to see what has changed so far.
Finally, for me, relying on the “cloud” (always thought that term was just marketing verbiage for the internet) is fine with me. It’s already crept into so many parts of our lives that it’s nearly impossible to function without. I don’t know where Roon has their computing, but even for them it probably makes sense to use the Amazon/Google/Microsoft “cloud” instead of trying to maintain their own servers.
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I don’t know either, but in this context here it means computing resources (CPU, memory, software, database data) that are located somewhere on the internet as opposed to on an individual’s PC on their local LAN. Whether that’s on Roon’s own servers or Amazon, etc., doesn’t make much difference here.
“Cloud” does have a meaning here because a few pages of HTML somewhere on “the internet”, which are downloaded but then rendered locally on a PC, is different from whole servers doing all of the computation and only sending the results to the client.
Using the #support category of the forum will ensure that a post is flagged to the Support team, and if it turns out to be a bug, it will be reported by them as such to the devs.
Your report about the Verdi composition - it’s not quite clear to me how you have navigated to the pages that you show in your screenshots - but I’ll respond further in that thread. Thanks.
Well, i’m definently one of them… I have absolutely no interest in the vast majority of available online content, but is of course very pleased with the augmented information on my content.
To me, thats the primary criteria, “in library=true/false” for most situations.
As a new user, in particular one unfamiliar with Roon history and use cases, I find the separation between “My Library” and my Qobuz library confusing and inconsistent. If you just look at the reaction to this topic and the associated support issue I entered it’s obvious that many are unsure what results to expect when the libraries are mixed, or even what features are supported. It appears that some bugs exist as well.
Yes, it makes sense to be able to label certain content as special to you. It also makes sense to have the ability to limit your library to just the special content when you want. But it doesn’t make sense to me to have functionality be different for “My Library” vs. my Qobuz library.
I imagine adding streaming libraries was not easy, and kudos to the Roon developers for doing that in a way that overall works well. However, I would like the integration of libraries to be more transparent. Technically, I’m sure this is not easy, if for no other reason than the size of streaming libraries being so large, so working with them must often take place off in the “cloud”. But this is not a unique problem, and has been solved by other interfaces, for example researching genomic data that is both exponentially larger and coming from diverse sources.
My guess is that there are lively discussions within Roon about exactly how to tackle libary integration. Hopefully they’re coming up with good solutions.
That’s the point, there are no (functional) differences between online and local content when its actually a part of your library.
And for Qobuz content that means albums, tracks and artists favorited (either from Roon or in Qobuz app/site).
