Feature Request: Apply Tags To Playlist Contents / Enable Focus On Playlist Membership

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi

I’m writing to raise a feature request that I suspect will resonate with many users who manage large libraries and make extensive use of playlists for genre-based curation.

At present, Roon draws a very hard distinction between playlists and library objects (tracks, albums, artists), which I understand is intentional. However, this design creates a significant limitation when it comes to using Focus as a primary browsing and discovery tool.

In my own case, I have a large library (50,000+ tracks) and a set of carefully curated genre-based playlists (Ambient, Disco, etc.) containing hundreds or thousands of tracks each. These playlists already represent a substantial investment of time and musical judgement. Naturally, I would like to use Focus to explore and refine these collections further — for example, to filter Ambient tracks by year, format, mood, or other criteria.

However, because Focus cannot interrogate playlist membership, and because tags applied to playlists do not propagate to the tracks they contain, there is currently no practical way to do this. The only workaround is to manually tag each track from the main Tracks view, which is not realistically scalable for large libraries and largely duplicates work that has already been done via playlist curation.

What I (and, I suspect, many others) would find immensely valuable is one of the following:

• An option to “Apply tag to playlist contents”
• Or the ability for Focus to include playlist membership as a selectable criterion
• Or a bulk action that converts a playlist into track-level tags

Any one of these would allow playlists to act as meaningful inputs to Focus, without undermining Roon’s existing metadata and tagging model.

At the moment, the result is a slightly frustrating mismatch: Focus is extremely powerful, but it cannot be used with one of the most common real-world methods people use to organise music at scale. The effort required to bridge that gap manually is far greater than the benefit gained, which discourages deeper use of Focus altogether.

I appreciate that there may be architectural or philosophical reasons for the current separation, but from a user perspective this feels like a missing bridge between two otherwise excellent features.

Thank you for considering this, and for the ongoing work you do on the platform.

Best regards

Alan

[Geoff_Coupe]

I’ve moved your post into the relevant category: Feedback > Feature Suggestions.

If this feature suggestion is important to you, please vote for it by using the Vote button at the top of the thread. Thank you.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi @Geoff_Coupe

Thanks for your assistance here.

A

[Arlen]

@Alan_Meldrum

a bulk action that converts a playlist into track-level tags

That’s already possible. Open a playlist, long press a single track, select all (top left of screen) and add to tag.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi @Arlen

I know the process you are describing, unfortunately the end result is no manageable tracks when you get to the Focus part, as shown in the screenshots below.

A

[Arlen]

@Alan_Meldrum

no manageable tracks

I see… that’s probably because these tracks are not in your library. You can only add tracks in your library to a tag.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Exactly, whereas I want to add them to a Tag from a playlist I have created - with all the tracks in the playlist already in my library - which I demonstrated above does not seem to be possible.

A

[s73nm (Sven M.)]

You are missing the point made by Arlen. You won’t be able to add tags to track that are not in your library. First add the tracks to your library, then you can add tags.
Regardless of tags, a track that is part of a playlist and not in your library will never show in the your tracks, so you wouldn’t be able to use focus on it anyhow.

Also, note that you don’t have to select all the tags in the playlist and add them to a tag. You can simply add the tag to the playlist, and it will be inherited by the playlist tracks that are part of your library.

The big advantage of working this way? When you add tracks to the playlist at a later time, this will automatically get the playlist’s tag.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi @s73nm

I think you are missing the point that I have made. I want to collectively tag tracks in my playlists which are already in my library, ie if I have a playlist called Disco, I would like to either select the playlist and tag all of the tracks contained within the playlist with the tag ‘Disco’ with one command, or go into the playlist and select all of the tracks together, and collectively tag them that way. At present it is not possible to do that, as far as I can see, and you can only tag tracks one by one in the Library > Tracks view, but if you have a workaround I’d love to hear it. For the avoidance of doubt, all of the tracks in all of my playlists are already in my library.

Best regards

Alan

[Alan_Meldrum]

@s73nm

Also, note that you don’t have to select all the tags in the playlist and add them to a tag. You can simply add the tag to the playlist, and it will be inherited by the playlist tracks that are part of your library.

As I have demonstrated in my screenshots above, I have not been able to do this.

A

[s73nm (Sven M.)]

Can you add the “Date added” to the columns in your playlist and check if your tracks actually have a date set?

As you can see in my screenshot below, the first 5 tracks are part of my library and have a date set. The last 2 are not part of my library.

When I click the ellipsis button for a single track that is in my library, I can add a tag to the track. Note that the “Add to library” is grayed out as the track is already in the library.

When I click the ellipsis button for a single track that is not part of my library, I have the possibility to add it to my library. Note that in this case the “Add to tag” is not shown in the menu.

The screen shot you showed is indeed the way to add the playlist to the tag. When doing this, there is even no need to select all the tracks.
The screenshot shown by Arlen is different as he selected the track, and used the menu to add the tags to the tracks, not the playlist.

When adding the tag to the playlist, you will see that your tag contains the playlist as an item. Wheras if you add the individual tracks each track will be added to the tag separately.

When navigating to Tracks, and using focus to filter on the tag, 82 tracks are shown. This is more than the 3 individual tracks that I added to the tag, but less that the 100 tracks in the playlist that is added to the tag as there 18 tracks that are not in my library. I.e. the ones where “Date added” is empty.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Here’s the thing, if I engage ‘Date Added’ to the playlist tracks, no data appears:

Even though when you check in My Library > Tracks, I have identified two tracks from the playlist which are indeed in my library:

If I select the two tracks - in my playlist, Chillout 3 - and add them to a tag, when I check in tags it has not added the two individual tracks, it has added the entire playlists. So there seems to be some disconnect because the dated added info visible in tracks is not appearing in a playlists I have created. Is this unusual?

A

[s73nm (Sven M.)]

Thank you for sharing your screenshots. I finally understand (more or less) what is happening.

The playlist you are sharing is a Qobuz playlist. I.e. it is a playlist that was created in Qobuz). Although I’m not certain (I’m just a user like you), it would appear that tracks in a Qobuz playlist are never part of your library.

I did some testing:

• I have a Qobuz playlist containing tracks that are not part of my library
• I added an album containing one of the tracks to my library, and just like you, I noticed that the Date added was not set on the playlist
• I then tried to add the track back into the play list, only to notice that the same track from a different album was added to the playlist in Qobuz
• Even after adding that album to my library and adding the track once more, the Date added on the playlist was not set.

In then tried something different

• I copied the Qobuz playlist to a Roon playlist
• Although all tracks were copied, and some tracks were in my library, the Date added was not set in the playlist
• I clicked on the album of the track I had added to my playlist, and noticed that the album was not marked as being in my library.
• From that album, I added the track back to the playlist. The date added was not net.
• I then navigated to Albums, and searched for the album, which was marked as being in my library.
• From there I added the track from my library, to the playlist, This time, the Date added was set. And the track was correctly showing in My Track with Focus on the tag.

My understanding:

• Roon references Qobuz tracks that are in the library and not in the library in a different way
• Tracks in a Qobuz playlist in Roon are always referenced using Qobuz
• Tracks in Roon playlist are referenced depending on how they were added to the playlist
  ** If they were added from a track referenced using Qobuz (e.g. from a Qobuz) playlist, they are refrenced using Qobuz, even if the track is in the library
  ** If they are added from the library, the are added referencing the library, even if it is a Qobuz track

In conclusion I would say that the feature you are requesting is already available. However it is not working for playlist items that originated outside of Roon, which could be considered a bug.

[Alan_Meldrum]

Hi @s73nm

Thank you for taking time to provide such a detailed response. I am able add individual tracks to a tag from My Library > Tracks, as shown in the screenshot below, however it would seem that adding tracks as a batch from a playlist is not possible.

In short, Roon has no built-in way to convert a playlist into track tags in one action, there is no native shortcut. Which I suppose is what I was requesting in the original message.

Best regards

Alan