Enhance the Recent Activity view

Unlike others I really welcome the addition of the recently listened view, because I can’t remember what I’ve played weeks before.

The current implementation isn’t very helpful to find albums which I know I heard last sunday. Roon should at least show the listening date like the addition date in the recently added view.

The view could be even better if you would group the items in categories like iTunes does: “this day”, “this week”, “this month” …

6 Likes

I support this request. Both ‘Recent Activity’ views are helpful but oh so limited… As I see it, both views cut at 100 albums, which doesn’t make sense. And it would be so nice to be able to further drill down for some selectable period of time - say one day, two days, one week, two weeks, one month, three months, six months…

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My recently played doesn’t make it past 2 days. Which is why I have argued to NOT include single played tracks at all on the view.

This is updates to the HISTORY screen which is where they belong, imho.

Well, no. The History screen is an endless list of played tracks, without graphics, no album cover view, quite useless to me - I never take a look at it. It’s like having a typed list of all the tracks on all your CD, and to play some music you’d look up the track you’d like to listen to on the list, and discover on which album the track was…

The ‘Recently Added’ album list at least can be obtained for selectable periods of time by using Focus on the Albums screen, but there is no comparable ‘Recently Played’ album view, and that is what this is about - a ‘Recently Played’ album view, which shows me the clickable covers and basic info of all the albums of which one or more tracks have been played recently - last day, last several days, last week, etc. Quite nice if one wishes to come back to a recently played album or track… much nicer than seeking through the History list.

Now, if you insist that all ‘Recently Played’ info should be looked up on the History screen, that’s ok with me… but then you’d have to remake the History screen, as a simple endless track list won’t do it. In this case, all the Overview screen could be abandoned or at least be totally redesigned, maybe as a graphical Dashboard which would allow to do away with the menu.

Let me show you what that section looks like to me. go to the link and take a peek at the screen shots

I’ve never understood why the Filter functions are not available in the History browser, as they are in the Track Browser - it would make using the History browser easier for me…

4 Likes

Hmmm… THAT obviously is of no use whatsoever. But my Recent Activity screen is totally different. I have a nice list of the last 100 covers of albums I have added to the library or played, and even if I mostly listen to entire albums, that is not always the case. I don’t get the repeated album covers for every single track I might have listened to on that album.

I’l have to try and use Roon differently… selecting single tracks from albums, and see what I get… but that is not the way I usually play music.

Yep, there needs to be a better solution than to show the cover of every song that’s played as part of a playlist, for example. That behavior doesn’t give me any new insight that I don’t already have from simply my track history, and it completely swamps our what might be more interesting.

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Agreed. I don’t usually use playlists, nor play single tracks picked from one or other albums, so I didn’t see this behaviour in my Recent Activity screen. I just have a list of recently played albums, and that I found nice to have.

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I don’t want to entirely be a downer because I love the idea of a truly activity-based view. There’s a huge amount of opportunity to improve my music experience by surfacing a variety of things: recent playlists, recently edited playlists, likes/faves/ratings, … albums I played for a second time this week. There are just all kinds of things that a really smart view could show me. Show me things that don’t exist purely in a list! I’d love it.

I just tried this with a couple of my playlists, with the expectation that I’d find it equally useless/irritating, but I’m getting a different result to you, i.e. the playlist shows up as a single item. Is there a setting somewhere that would account for this difference? If so, I can’t find it.

Oh — interesting! I just retried this with a few playlists and it behaved just as you described, as compared to showing every track from playlists separately as it did last night. It’s quite nice this way! Would be great to know if there’s some rhyme and reason to the different display behaviors. Thanks for testing.

edit This is in reply to @David_Nightingale. I always always Ian the wrong reply button…

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The history on a track basis as a excel-type list is useless indeed. I never look at it. Condens this at album-level and present it as past activity with covers etc. and we‘re getting somewhere

Great idea @Tekl . :+1:

For what it’s worth, this behavior has now returned to what I originally experienced: a recent entry for each song in a played playlist. So — I dunno!

Would be great if Roon folks could share the expected behavior so we could know what to expect. I imagine that swapping back and forth isn’t expected though?

Am I the only person missing recent additions to your library?

I use Roon Radio a lot and when I hear something I like I put it in the library. This works nicely for European jazz artists that are unknown in the US. But also find things by Chick Corea and other US artists that are in the shadows but pitched by Roon Radio. Usually, I add the album and come back to listen to the rest of it. Was easy with the older Overview.

Is this the difference between playing a playlist and playing tracks FROM a playlist?

Many people use playlists to find tracks, instead of tags. The end result might be this experience.

If it comes from Roon radio it isn’t tracked.

Good thought, but in all cases this is from playing a full playlist, not specific tracks. In fact it’s a really reliable action in my part: I have a big workout playlist that’s bookmarked, and so I select the bookmark and then shuffle the list. Mostly that has resulted in a per-track display in my recently played, but once or twice it displayed only the playlist, instead.