Yes I think so, I was just expressing my own opinion about it. Wasn’t meaning it to sound like disagreement with your point.
As you mentioned and then Danny confirmed, at one point they had pointed to a few technical challenges, but clearly, the stopping point is not technical, it’s that they feel there is a better way.
Everything of these points, browse by folders in modern days is like steering a car with lash and rein.
A database frontend is in every aspect more efficient and user friendly than browse by folder or did you store your client data in your office in folders.
And you don’t need to know where the files are stored, especially if the files are on a remote system.
… and we had that argument at work!
If you are stuck with the mental model that thinks of hanging files in a metal cabinet, the answer will be yes. It’s a wrench trying to break the habits of a lifetime…
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but does anyone seriously believe that roon and its 100k subs are going to find a way of breaking an information organization paradigm pre-dating modern computer systems by thousands of years? I don’t get that.
What is more realistic, it seems to me, is an extension of the tagging and bookmarking technologies being pioneered in the browsing and search sectors at the fringes of the internet looking for commercial applications. This is not trivial. Otherwise it would already have been done.
The question is, as ever, whether roon has the scale, or the commercial drivers to perform that function or incorporate the 3rd party technologies necessary.
Never having used folders for music I don’t see the issue, I can find any music I want to play in seconds. That’s all that counts for me.
How do you organize your library / search it’s contents?
I don’t organise it, Roon does. I use bookmarks for certain things like, Audio Books, Vinyl Transfers, Bootlegs etc.
Discover is very helpful if I’m not sure what to play. Favourite tracks is great to surf through and that often leads me on a journey.
As a last resort, I can just type a name in or browse about as I listen. It’s all there…
How do you search with folders? Only through your simple one-dimensional structure.
With a database like roon you can search in many ways
Why are you implying that I advocate a folder view? My comments are exactly the opposite.
I do not advocate a folder view. I just don’t believe that the remedies that you describe will ever be addressed by roon. They simply do not have the resources or business case to address such long standing problems in computer science.
My fault, sorry
Well, we are not quite there yet, are we?
At the end of the day any solution is going to be technical, not lawyerly. That’s how computers work. So this distinction between technical and philosophical is nonsense on some level. My personal view is that roon has a philosophical rejection of folder view but no real technical idea how to replace it with something better.
Mostly I agree that folder organization is not necessary or the best way to access well-indexed music. Most of the use cases I have seen plead to Roon were for bootlegs, podcasts, homemade music w/o metadata, etc. That stuff doesn’t index well and thus the brute force method of hierarchical folder access works best, at least until there is something better.
What needs to be pointed out is that this current conversation is not about music access, notwithstanding that’s what the anti-folder crowd is referring to, and in this case the conversation started about folder organization of playlists and bookmarks, and then I added tags. That is another whole beast. Please don’t tell me that a simple alphabetical list of those objects is better than organizing by folder. Again, until something better comes along!
For me: Thats a strange behavior of ROON - espcially if it is easy to impliment.
Yes - I may be not rational an “old school”. But a lot of ROON user would like it (and they pay for ROON).
ROON is like a jeweler saying “I dont sell mechanical watches. They are not rational an old school”
But I like mechanical watches.
Wy ROON does not give the desicion to the user? If the ROON-way of data managing is the better way a lot of people would see “browse by folder” as a bridge to the ROON-world and would switch to it after some times.
Christoph
The main reason for not wanting a ‘browse by folder’ is the integration with streaming services. Most people, except just a few, are not buying many or any new music anymore because they have everything readily available via streaming. We don’t need folder browsing, all we need is folder access or folder view for all the cases Roon falls short. What we do need is more personalisation in how we ourselves want to curate our collection in very personal ways. I think that is the main reason behind the many requests for folder browsing, You simply can not exept from people that they just throw away years of collection curation and let a ‘machine’ take over.
Just one tiny little example. Let’s say I have a folder where I have a collection of obscurities that I collected in a period of 25 years and I want to tag everything in that folder in Roon with the tag ‘obscurities’ There is no easy way to do that because I don’t have any access to view that folder without heavy workarounds. Yes there are workarounds but remember this is just one example. That’s the reason for me. No I don’t need, I don’t want folder browsing, I want folder view/access to be able to use my own curation without spending hundreds of hours to do so. Roon is great, it has many great features but it lacks any conversion tools for allready highly curated collections. My girlfriend pretty much hates Roon because of this. So as long as there are no ways to convert to Roon in a proper way people will still request folder browsing for the next years to come. The problem will only go away once people have converted to 100% streaming. Roon streaming integration and linking is great but for just browsing my own collection I still prefer my old player in many ways, it just feels more personal.
I keep my music in organised in folders in the OS (as I suspect we all do) but inevitably there is a “Cannot Categorize” folder in my case I store Classical Music by Composer so there is a folder for “Multiple Composers” where an album is mixed and a second one for "Collections: for big box sets
When you have a complex and sophisticated piece of software at you’re disposal “Why Bark Yourself?”
I rarely have issues finding what I want , using the animal analogy there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, rather than moan , spend Lockdown finding innovative ways around your library.
I do agree though better ways of organizing Tags, Bookmarks and particularly Box Sets are a much better use of development time
Just my 2p .
I have never stored albums by composer, by artist, by genre. I never got away with such a system. You allready have your filetags for that, storing files in the same way as your filetags makes no sense to me. I have my own very personal ways of storing my music that makes perfectly sense to me. The ‘obscurities’ is just one example. I also have demo’s that are pretty much lost if I store them in a general way by artist or such, so they are stored in folders with a name where I got them from. That works great for me because that is how my own memory about lots of these demo’s work. In Roon they are completely lost on the big pile and I’m not able to search for them because most are too unknown. That’s just one little example, there are many more. I wan’t to be able to make a ‘demo’s’ collection in Roon either by an album playlist or tagging but there is simply no easy way to do so because I can’t have acess to the content of this folder other than very heavy workarounds outside of Roon. Yes Roon goes a lot further in database management but a lot of my music is lost in the automation, it has been thrown on the big pile. Roon came into my house, opened all my closets, took everything out and threw it on a big pile. Then they provided me a search function where I only have to ask what I’m looking for. I don’t know while previously I could find my stuff easily because I knew where I kept it. Automated database indexing isn’t allways the best solution, it is great but it should be working together with my own curation, not against it. But like I said, the problem only persists with my old collection, it will become less of a problem because all new music either comes from streaming or can be added to Roon one by one so I have time and overview to curate them in the Roon way.
I’m sure you know about this, but…
People in this situation have doubtless used a third-party metadata editor for their curating activities prior to adopting Roon. And they will be well aware of where such folders reside, because they use the editor. So then it becomes a simple matter of defining a Roon “obscurities” tag (for either the albums and/or tracks) using the editor. Roon will import the tags and integrate them into its database.
It doesn’t seem such a hurdle or involve “heavy workarounds” to me?
That’s like asking to tag my CD’s with a permanent marker. I have lot’s of demo’s that I share with co workers so I don’t want to mess around with the ID-tags. I shouldn’t have to mess around with any ID-tags to overcome a shortcoming in Roon. Messing with ID tags AND folders at the same time leads to a complete mess in no time. It should not be necesary
And still, you persist on going to this particular jeweller… 
If your library is on a usb or has then just create a bookmark for that folder using focus. All the items will show and can sorted etc with just a click. This does not work for an internal drive unfortunately.