When I listen while working, I am easily distracted by vocals. I want to easily filter my collection or while browsing search for albums within the artist, genre, etc. that are instrumental. Is there a way to filter search results, new release grand selection or other screens to only show which albums are instrumental?
Not looking for suggestions about making playlists nor creating my own genre. Hoping that the instrumental albums are already identified for that somehow and I can just add an “Instrumental” tag to keep those in my library available in one click.
Instrumental is not an available focus option. I think the only way to do this is to tag your albums as you get them. I don’t know how large your library is, but if you allocate a half hour a day to tagging maybe you can get what you need in a few days or weeks? I don’t mean this to sound facetious, but maybe listen to jazz. The majority of jazz is instrumental so you can focus by genre.
While I would agree that the great majority of jazz would be vocal I still have enough vocal Jazz to fill a playlist that roon tells me is good for 107 hours - and that is just the ones in FLAC format.
And tagging for instrumental need not be album-by-album. Select as many as you wish and tag them enmass.
Stumbled on his thread. When you say to tag en masse, how does one get a selection of albums or tracks to do this in Roon? Does one have to make a playlist first? I’m a relative newcomer to Roon, so I’m always open to tips and tricks.
With certain genres this is usually straightforward. With Classical in Focus, just exclude, “Vocal Music, Opera, Choral, Lieder etc. With jazz exclude Vocal Jazz, “Female Vocal Jazz” etc. This doesn’t really work with most Pop music as the genre “Vocal Pop” is rarely applied. I could only find 30 examples from 5,000 plus pop/rock albums. So unless you are tagging yourself this won’t work. Depending on your library, excluding variations on Singer/Songwriter, American Popular Song, Rap and Chauson might work. But with Pop genres it gets complicated very quickly. Did you try genres like “Ambient” or Down-Tempo” which are often non-vocal to start with? They may be too modern or Dance oriented for your taste but choosing genres which aren’t explicitly vocal oriented to start with is probably your best bet as a starting point. Original Film Scores are another good source. I also often see explicitly titled instrumental only mixes of vocal releases but I doubt they are the type of “background” music you are looking for:
I’m interested in many genres, rock, indie, jazz and classical mainly. Sometimes, I’m in the mood for instrumental music in any of those genres and some others. Also, I’m not just interested in looking at what’s already in my library. Every Friday, I browse new release Grand Selection. It would be very useful to filter that to instrumental albums while browsing for library & Listen Later additions.
Currently, I usually browse Jazz or Classical genres to easily find some to queue up, but it would be nice to easily focus on all the instrumentals that would include everything from Tortoise, Khurangbin, Zappa, etc. and filter out their albums that make you want to sing along
Roon is using the allmusic.com genre categories, so you will find on their website explicitly instrumental genres like “Instrumental Rock” and explicitly vocal genres like “Vocal Pop”. The problem is none of this is applied systematically in roon’s data sources. As it happens both Tortoise and Khrangbin get explicit “Instrumental Rock” credits (but not Zappa), so you will probably find more “Instrumental Rock” in your library. I only found 16 in over 5,000 albums, so like Vocal Pop it is not a genre that is often applied. You also have to remember that these genres are applied at an album not a track level. So there are no guarantees these albums are exclusively instrumental.
If by Grand Selection you mean Qobuz Grand selection I don’t think there is a way of focussing at a genre level until you add the albums to your library. Someone else might have a trick.
Looks like in general you will have to self-tag your instrumental albums as the current state of genre tagging in the data sources roon is using is not precise enough for what you need across so many genres. There will be exceptions. For example, you will certainly get decent results with genres like Classical where for example you can focus on Chamber Music and exclude Vocal Music.
