Focus on Multiple Genres ("And" Focus)

Ok, I’m having a bit of a confused moment.

In album view, if I want to focus on Celtic albums that are also Thrash Metal, how do I do that?

If I focus both those Genres, then I get albums that are either Celtic or Thrash. I’m looking for albums that are “and”.

Of course, in this extreme example I would expect 0 albums, but I’m getting dozens.

The reason for asking is that I thought is was the other way around in the past.

Cheers, Greg

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Right now, we only do “or” focusing for Genres, but we could do more in the future.

I’m going to move this to feature requests, and we can take a look at this when we redesign Focus, which is on our roadmap but not imminent at the moment.

I also need this feature as it is not about genres only. Roon doesn’t have/support ‘OR’ at all, which basically contradicts with the ‘focus’ feature as not having OR is a lack of focus :slight_smile:

Also, the software should be able to provide a more complex focus, e.g. give me tracks that meet the following:
(“tag1” OR “tag2”) AND (“genre1” OR “genre2”) NOT “released in 2010”

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To bump the conversation here and in related Improve genres filter (where @danny says something about quotes that I don’t understand), I’d love to see a text input search filter field in the Genre focus filter, similar to the one in Labels, for instance (see screenshot, top right). That would enable us to focus on, for instance, all genres with the term ‘Brazil’ in them, i.e. ‘Brazil Samba’ AND ‘Brazil Bossa’. That is now only possible, if I’m not mistaken, by clicking on every single genre we want included. If I’d like to listen to all my ‘World’ genre, for example, that would involve a lot of clicking. Thanks for considering.

There is a workaround and it takes preparation: when you click a second time on a tag or genre tag, the logic goes to “and not.” It’s the only way right now you can include “and” in boolean logic among tags.

This in fact illustrates one reason not to include full Boolean logic: the rules are difficult to understand. If you were able to search for “Brazil Samba” AND “Brazil Bossa” the answer would be NONE because you are asking for albums that are tagged with both Genres simultaneously (ok, it might happen, but it is not what you want). In this case, what you should do is OR, which is in fact what Roon does with Genres.

There is another issue here, which is that clicking on all the Genres with Brazil in them is cumbersome. My solution for such situations (e.g. all the various spellings of the ECM label) is to go through and do it manually, then when you have that view set up right, define a bookmark for Brazil or ECM.

My search term would be ‘brazil’ and it would result in all genres including the word ‘brazil’.

Four words I’m sick to death of coming across re Roon.

I think some form of filtering logic for tags is an absolute must. But I agree it should be easy to use and not require programmer level logic or be some sort of command line like process.