Folder Browsing [Never happening] 2016-03

+1 for me. I have a large Classical Music Library which organized by composers/conductors & band. IMO, is much easier to browse by folder. As re-arranging tags which up to ROON 's standard would be a great pain for 4,000+ albums.

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It seems that Browse By Folder is a sore subject for some hard core Roon users here.

I’m sorry guys, but I would bet that the majority of users would love to have this ability to browse our files at least from the desktop. I could understand from a phone or tablet, then folder view could be omitted.

Folder view would just be feature added set that would not take away from the Roon experience in no way what so ever.

When folder browsing and a song or album is selected to play you will automatically be thrown into the Roon experience of Meta Data in all of its glory.

Also for those who like Roon just the way it is, then nothing would change for you if this is how you want to use Roon.

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I expect it’s because we’ve learned to let go and have been cured of our dependency on old ways of thinking? :slight_smile: It can be frustrating to realise that others have not yet seen the light…

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I’m not sure it’s that simple.
I think there are situations where I could find a specific song or album more quickly through folder structure than through the options Roon presently gives me.

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Hi,
Are you able to document some of those examples, it would help Roon to identify where improvements can be made and where the development effort should be directed.

In my case, I drop albums into folders using a few criteria. I have a set of folders for recent additions containing a folder for each category and then artist. This to me is much easier than tagging albums and using a saved search. I have also noted in the past that searching on John Coltrane, for instance, returns albums where he is a leader as well as a band member. If I sort by date, the two get intermixed. If I browsed by folder and then sorted by date, i would see what I want.

Another issue folder browsing would address is as an easy way to discover which albums did not import. Right now there is no way to figure which these are and I have about 600 tracks that don’t import in a library of 50,000.

I don’'t understand the reticence to supporting browsing by folders. The more modes I have to get at my music, the happier I am am. If a person doesn’t like browsing by folder, they can ignore it.

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If browse by folder structure is a problem to achieve, would it be possible to search by “file quality” like exclude all MP3, or only above 96, or only 24 bit ?

My music is organized in CD rips, Hi-Res, and MP3.

If tagging can solve this, how do I multi-tag ?

You can do this in focus already.

You can focus on specific file qualities or if you have separate watched folders setup you can focus on individual watched folders.

Let me give an example: I have a folder called “children’s music”. At the moment not all albums have good tags (mostly “folk”, “musical” or “misc” appear). I like to select all albums to add a meta data tag “children’s”. Then browsing this category in Roon would be a dream.

So +1 for browsing by folder (at least in the Inspector).

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Hi @Gabriel,

You could use an external file tag editor, to tag the files in those folders. Once done then use Roon focus.
IMHO tagging the files is the best way forwards, as the tags can be seen by any music server you choose.

But Roon should be a 1 Stop for all of your music. Having a browse folder feature for example what Gabriel pointed out would be nice and you are controlling all of your music from within Roon.

I’m was suggesting a solution that will work today for @Gabriel.

Back to the wider topic:
Given that Roon is not ripping or file tagging software (there are many great well established apps for that) and Roon’s raison d’etre is to abstract the user from the burden and limitations of file systems I’m not personally convinced that Roon needs to support browse by folder structure. That said I’m not opposed to it either … it’s just, after using Sooloos and now Roon, it has never popped on to my requirements list.

Thanx! I’m probably used to a One stop shop, as mentioned by Mike. And using Squeezeboxes for the last decade, which has a folder browser, isn’t helping either. Probably a mindset thing. But judging by the amount of reply’s in this post it certainly wouldn’t hurt to develop it.

Other than that: I’m very happy using Roon, it’s a big improvement and keeps me better involved in my music listening and discovery.

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I came in here to see whether my request from months ago (browse by folder structure) was in the works or not. What do I see? More of the same. People asking over and over for this feature to be implemented. Every time this happens, it is met with much eye rolling about why anybody would want such a stupid feature in the first place, and much smugness about how the Roon Way is superior. And then some suggestion for some incredibly complicated workaround like editing the tags for thousands of files.

To the OP: FORGET IT, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN. Roon devs know best, not you. Your music will be organized how THEY want it to be organized. You have a painstakingly curated file folder structure, like I have? Forget it. Roon is more interested in presenting you with random mumbo-jumbo with no way to over-ride their completely random decisions.

Plenty of other media players out there. And their devs actually listen to users.

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As mentioned recently in more than one place, we are hard at work on functionality for browsing storage devices.

Roon uses the same UI engine on all platforms, and supports a variety of platforms and devices for Core and storage, respectively. Building a native browser in Roon’s interface that lets you browse every conceivable combination – your Linux storage from your iPhone, or your OSX storage from your Android phone – is a big project, but it’s one we’re committed to getting right.

That doesn’t mean everything else is on hold – we have a lot of changes and new functionality we want to release over the next few months (and years) and that work is in progress. This isn’t about us “knowing better” – it’s the simple reality of making big changes to a complex product with a team of our size.

We try to be as open as we can be about our roadmap, and every change requested on this community is considered and weighed against the amount of work involved, the goals of the product, and the number of times the change has been requested. Sorting this category by views you’ll see we’ve shipped 9 of the 10 most popular feature requests, all since Roon launched 16 months ago. We’re quite proud of that record, even as we continue to work down the list.

@Keith_Wong – I’d be interested to hear more about your “painstakingly curated folder structure”, so we can make sure the new functionality meets your needs, even if there’s still a good deal of work to do before the feature goes live. Appreciate the feedback :wink:

Edit (March 2017): As of Roon 1.3 we have introduced some new ways of interacting with files, as detailed in my post below. While Roon will always emphasize artists and albums over files and folders, the new functionality has made things less opaque, and we hope it helps people connect to their music in new ways that don’t involve remembering which folder you saved a file to :slight_smile:

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An option to browse your local library from a file/folder perspective would be very nice to have.
I have a pretty well maintained library that is structured by my listening prefs, and the lack of manageability in other playback software.
I see a potentially very nice combo in browsing a folder structure and while selecting an album-folder being directed to Roons “normal” Album-view. This is of course would apply to slecting either an artist/Composer or song also.

Any more takers on this?

its been asked for before but I would still rather it there than not as it is now…at least if an option to find easily - there is the option for finding where something is now but but not by means of finding it in your nominated filing mode

Hi,
I’ve merged you post into this existing topic
There’s lots of discussion to catch up on but Mike’s post just above yours is perhaps the most pertinent.

It looks like Windows 8 start button issue.

Hi all,

i found a for me perfect solution. I never really used the genre tag. And normally Roon is using its own tags for that. So I just replaced the genre tag by my folder name and in the settings of roon, i enabled the “use my own genre” AND “use Roon genre”. My own tags all start with 00_ in its name, so they are the first tags by browsing genre by name :wink:

Works brilliant!

Greetings

Christian

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