Enhanced Social Media Sharing (stable album and track URL links)

All I want to do is right click an album, track or artist and copy an old school URL to send to a friend. I’ve tried everything, but all i can find is some overcomplicated social sharing feature. Help me out here, why wouldn’t Roon want us to pop links to friends in a straightforward manner?

Thanks,
Marc

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Because an old school URL is the address of a resource that lives out in the World Wide Web. Your Roon library doesn’t live there - it lives inside your Roon Core. So sharing of the content of your Library is done by sharing a picture of the album or track with your friends, or in the Roon Community, e.g. as in this thread:

If you want to share an artist, then you can also share their picture, or if that artist has a public presence out on the Web, e.g. a web site or a Facebook page, you’ll see these listed on the artist page in Roon (in the Around the Web section) - and you can click on them to open the URLs in your browser to share them from there.

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Although Imgur sharing is still broken and doesn’t work:(

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I figured this answer would come back. I just wonder how hard it’d be for Roon to set up a URL id for content that will automatically open Roon to the correct view. My guess would be very hard, as it was never built like that.

Frankly as a UX designer I’m stunned to see that the only way Roon users can share stuff is through an image. You can’t even cut and paste text through this, it’s almost pointless. And they surely are losing on organic growth this way. There’s no way I’m going to send an image of a track I want to share to a friend, I think they’d just be confused. I’m actually having to find the album on Spotify to share things I hear on Roon.

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So if you understand that it “would be very hard”, I wonder why you asked for it? Things may change if Roon ever moves to the cloud, but that’s probably a long way down the road. In the meantime, the rest of us will just happily share images with our friends and each other.

I guess it’s very hard if the receiver doesn’t have the Album/Artist/Track in his library.

Thanks for the warm welcome to the community. And I apologise for asking stupid questions about sharing music via Roon.

Apology accepted. :smile:

Ah good point. I’m still in cloud service mode. Well this might make it more integrated, what if Roon just makes the Tidal link available for sharing in a right click, if the content is coming from Tidal? “Get Tidal Link”.

And then send this “TIDAL Link” to someone with a Qobuz and/or other non TIDAL streaming service? It may even fail if the recipient has TIDAL but in another country/continent. While Roon might be able to generate shareable links in some way at some time in the future, I don’t see how it should work in a reliable way. Maybe sharing pictures and leave it to the recipient if and how he want to listen to the shared content is the most reliable, but not most comfortable way, to share content?

I’d venture to guess that anyone who is content to share pictures of what they’re listening to on a community forum is most likely over the age of 40.

I’ve sent links to a few friends of things I thought they might want to hear, and, to a person, I got back some variation of, “What the hell is this picture? What do you want me to do with this? Send a Spotify/Youtube link like a human being!”

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Two different issues here.
It might be possible to share the link with another Roon User. A link points to the picture, the source material and it’s associated metadata. It’s the metadata that Roon uses to identify albums irrespective of where they come from. So you might be able to share a link with other Roon users and if an album is identifiable as something they have access to, the link would indicate a match is possible and point to it (either on a Service or in your library). Click on the link and you are taken to the source material.

Obviously a lot harder when the link doesn’t point back to something that’s not exchangable. Like sending link from your library of a bootleg version of an album.

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Hah I’m 43 :wink: I think you’re talking about the 60+ age group :wink:

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Ok but wouldn’t Roon be able to establish that the user who wants to share it is accessing the song via [cloud service]. So yeah it’s limited, but at very least users can share a track or album via the content source. And even if their friend is not on tidal, they can at least click on something and copy paste if they want. I’m a UX designer by trade so these kind of problems are interesting to me :slight_smile:

Re other country: I’m not sure but I think that they’d show the page but say it’s not available. I know Spotify does it that way. YouTube too I think. It’s a common issue with any cloud based media service.

It’s not a “one click” solution, but if I’m listening to something I want to share, I head to Songwhip.com and have a link within ~10 seconds. The bonus is that it will work for whatever service the person receiving the link is on (most of my friends are on Spotify).

Building a “copy Songwhip link” feature into Roon wouldn’t be too hard, but I can see why it’s not a priority for them.

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I’m over 40 as well, but it’s my tech knowledge that is a lot older…ha!

You’re 100% right here. The people in my friend circle are all around the same age as I, but, they’re infinitely more hooked in to social media. I’m a curmudgeonly old man with all of it, really. :man_shrugging:

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That’s… pretty good actually. I can see me using that. Thanks!

It’ll save me sending screenshots to my kids… just checked it out with my son’s band.

Do that with Spotify, since odds are high that the recipient will have a Spotify account and it will work great on their phone, which is where they will listen to your recommendation, anyway.

I am now keeping dual playlists on Roon and Spotify (for sharing with my family & friends, as well as for listening in my car).

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Welcome! I’m almost 6 months on Roon, a veteran in this world of ever-faster redundancy. My hypothesis is that Roon approaches UX with only a limited number of personas in mind. And social sharing personas isn’t one of them. The original Roon team are all heavyweights from the high end audiophile industry I think. I find it interesting that this forum probably hosts people using systems of $5000 or less, all the way up to $100k+

And we in this forum probably represent over 20-30 personas? What a nightmare for UX/UI design coping with us lot! haha

But I do agree with you that Roon needs to see how to evolve further its design system to solve many of the design challenges posted by many users in this forum.

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