Hi, I use the tag field “Rating” to save my songs as favorites in JRiver. I use 5 Stars in that field. Is there any way to find the songs in Roon?
Thanks
Tony
Hey, Tony, I have not found a way to so far. As far as I know the “Rating” Tag is not used by Roon. They do use their own favorites heart tag. It would be great if there could be a way to populate a Heart in Roon if the track’s Rating tag is 5.
This is somewhat complicated by ratings/favorites in Roon being per-profile and not tied to the media itself.
It’s not completely clear what we should do when importing data from other software, since your favorite’s from JRiver don’t necessarily apply within your partner’s or childrens’ profiles, but they come without the necessary information that would be required to make that distinction.
@brian
But, somewhat avoiding the question, haven’t “we” already made that distinction / decision within our own databases, which somewhat makes the point moot ?
To explain, for a “single user” there are no conflicts - the ratings they’ve decided on are their ratings.
For a mother / father / child#1 / child#2 scenario, either they’ve separated their music / files by physical location, or folder (on a NAS for example), or some other form of identification, or they’ve come to some compromise on ratings which is understood / accepted by that user-group. And in this case, they can work with a user-based (or user / location-based) filter anyway, so there’s no confusion or crossover.
Maybe someone who has this actual situation can comment in more detail how they’ve set everything up.
I am a single-user and as I’ve mentioned before, “ignoring” my ratings (which also previously applied to metadata) is driving me nuts ! 
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Tony mentioned marking a track with 5 stars in JRiver, but, all JRiver is doing is actually populating that track’s metadata with a “Rating = 5”. Which is going to apply to the entire household in his current situation because JRiver just displays the value tied to the media. So any family member using JRiver already shares the Ratings tags. iTunes might do it differently, I’m not sure.
But, you can pre-populate each profiles Rating with what is currently in the file’s meta-data and then leave it up to each profile to clear the hearts. I haven’t found a way to mass mark/unmark hearts. If there was, then there would be a quick and easy way for each profile to “clear out” the base Rating tags and start afresh, or to clear out specific ones.
The problem really lies in that Roon takes all storage locations and serves them up together for a family. I know we had mentioned this earlier, but, confused ratings is just a knock on effect of this. Being able to have a storage or a storage filter tied to profile would clear up the Ratings issue.
thanks for the insight. For me if Roon could just utilize the Rating Field that would be great.
To explain, for a “single user” there are no conflicts
This is part of the difference in perspective between being a user and being responsible for designing something like this. It’s obvious that doing this for a single user is straightforward and without issue. That’s the easy part–almost not worth discussing, because almost no matter what we come up with, the single user cases will work very well.
The trick is doing this in a way that doesn’t reduce the power of Roon in the most ambitious and complex situation.
We think about just about all aspects of Roon’s design this way–you’d be surprised how often a design discussion about a simple feature ends up being 5 minutes about how the feature works for the end user and 55 minutes about the complex interactions between the feature and the rest of the system for some small subset of configurations.
The point is, every feature we build has to work for as many configurations as possible, and simple solutions that only address the simplest subset of users (in this case, “single user” configurations) generally don’t get built because they limit our future possibilities to get it right for everyone else. If we gave in and implemented simple solutions like this, Roon could never grow into its full potential.
One mechanism that I’ve considered: make external personal data import an action, not automatic, sort of like metadata preference. So you’d multi-select a bunch of content and say “import” instead of checking a box and having Roon do it automatically. Then all of the ratings/etc would be imported into the currently active profile.
The other issue with rating, is that Roon doesn’t have track ratings as a concept, and importing ratings as “favorites” would lose fidelity. Throwing away information like that almost always comes back to bite us later, but adding ratings at the track level would make an already crowded part of the product design even more crowded.