Have you considered a feature that allows housemates to indicate which music they want to see and which absolutely not.
Believe it or not, but lots of people live together and - even more important - they might share a Roon server.
In the days when the animals talked, a family (outdated concept according to my daughter - look it up on Wikipedia if necessary) owned a shared CD library in the living room and some family members had their own players with CD’s in their rooms. The main advantage of this system was that one could avoid exposure to undesirable musical triggers.
Today, in the connected world this luxury is no longer available. Mum or dad have to browse through the music of daughters and sons, an experience all parties see as a risk because it might jeopardise their good taste.
Please Roon Labs : rescue our families and support our digital privacy
I don’t want to know what my housemates are listening to in the privacy of their rooms and vice verse. If I want to know that, I can ask it or take a look on Facebook.
As stated before, I don’t see this as a security feature. If you can start with blocking genres : great ! If you can add individual artists : even better ! If you can add individual albums : the max ! The point is that information overload is avoided. In the GUI’s, just add house mate names and make it easy to select who you are.
On a serious note : you know better as me that the earlier a multi-user concept is introduced in code, the easier it is to handle.
Roon supports multiple users having different views of a common library by profiles and tags.
When a profile is opened the default view will be the whole library. You can focus search to exclude unwanted genres etc. and save the search as a bookmark. Now each user can see their own view of the library with one click.
Alternatively, for finer control, create a tag for each user and add it to the albums they want to see. You can bulk edit the tag into various album searches with select all, or remove the tag from unwanted albums. Then focus on the tag and bookmark that as the user’s view. Users can then choose to add their tag to new albums or not.
There are improvements which I would like to see, including setting a bookmark as a default view when Roon opens and telling Radio to only play from within that view, but the current tools enable multiple users to happily ignore each other’s music.
The problem is that focus does not do what people are requesting, which is complete physical separation of music AND meta-data from each profile. And currently the only real way to do that is to run a separate Roon license for each user.
An entirely made up example to illustrate a point, If I focus just on Children’s Music, Roon’s rich meta-data could lead the little one from Muppets songs to Alice Cooper (because they did a couple of duets together on a Halloween special [well worth the checking out on youtube]), which could lead to clicking on the song “I Love The Dead” which is not anything I want a child listening too.
I would like to see an option to show a monitored folder to a specific user. As an example, my wife has about 25,000 tracks that I have no interest in seeing (too much house and dance music). If I could add a folder under her profile and not mine I would not have to do anything else to manage music visibility…
As a workaround, if you created separate watched folders for her music and yours, then you might use a bookmark on Focus/Inspector/Storage Locations to filter out her folder.
I agree that being able to exclude folders by profile would be preferable.
Right – if you use Focus or Tags (even if streamlined through Bookmarks), you impair other use of Focus. Of course you can add other Focus filters, but you can no longer hit Reset, you would lose your personal filter. In addition, when you look at an album page or artist page, that is no longer filtered by the Focus (which I think is a good thing).
So I agree with Joel that the profile needs to be something more fundamental.
I just added some additional zones and accounts in the house for my kids (2x old airport express and some computer speakers). While they can airplay from many sources it would be very nice for them to have an independent view of the library and interests … not too mention not interrupting my own view.
Additionally as I was quickly thinking about it, Tidal makes a very nice augmentation of the standard library, but again I’d certainly prefer to keep everyone’s interests’ focused if possible.
I created a bookmark with my daughters music using “focus”. She uses her iPad to see her own music only. No need for different accounts. Bookmarks are great to filter to just the content you want
i feel forced to comment on this thread, because I just had my 10 y.o. daughter discovering Roon for the first time. She was using Search (Quobuz), artist and title selection and followed lyrics. Overall she had a good and easy time monopolizing my stereo. But her music taste is obviously quite different from mine and my futile efforts to find her a way to manage her own stuff in Roon led me here.
Actually, it’s quite shocking to discover, that a networking music management software like Roon does not feature multi user support and that this thread died 2 1/2 years ago. Considering, that the industry is working heavily on multi-room systems, multi-user support seems an indispensable feature with high competitive value.
Having more than one account (as discussed above) is nice but worthless when users cannot manage their own library and their own preferences and build context around their specific taste.
I may have overlooked some other thread discussing the same issue - but if not I hope, this thread and feature request can be revived and some demand builds for real multi-user support.
Year 2022 and this multiple profile feature still does not do anything. At times I wonder what am I paying for (ARC doesn’t work for me either, they made a feature that won’t work if your ISP has you on NAT). I really hope these developers at Roon can get this multiple user/profile function working. I have all my music mixed up with my kids at home.
I’m on my first ever paid month. I must admit, I coveted Roon for years and hoped that one day I’d be able to justify the cost of Roon membership. However, while obviously Roon is mostly excellent across the features it does implement, now I’ve had the chance to load my entire library into it, use it with multiple devices, try out ARC when I’m on the road… it does feel somewhat incomplete. Which is one thing, but surely the fact that there isn’t even a free tier means that this company should be able to develop Roon intensively and consistently add new features. Yet… we’re many years in now, Roon reached the massive v2 milestone…
Please forgive my whining. But as a broke, sick fool I assumed that Roon was the sunny uplands that I looked forward to while languishing on Apple’s frankly comedically bad iTunes and dealing with the various 3rd party replacements that weren’t Roon. (I recommend Swinsian btw, you pay for it once and it brings back the features that have been axed from iTunes in favour of, er, calendar syncing or whatever the justification was. When Roon is having a moment, it’s Swinsian I return to).
Anyway. A lot of the time it does feel like the sunny uplands. But the glaring omissions and odd under-developed parts sometimes bring me back to the cloudy grey car park with a thump… The real question for me now is, can I justify paying for further months of this? I’m certainly relieved that I opted for a monthly subscription, that’s for sure. I can imagine my posts having a much rantier and less constructive tone if I had paid for a year or god forbid Lifetime - which is a shame, really. It’s so hard to see something with such great potential and yet for whatever reason (I suspect the expansion and multiplatform nature of Roon is part of why things move so apparently slowly) it doesn’t quite reach the hoped-for amazingness…
I’ll try it sentence by sentence. Thanks for the help !