Dear Roon, I love your software, using it now for almost a year.
As an old (windows) pc user I am used to folders.
And while I am now listening to great music trough Roon I found that I missed music that sits on my Qnap NAS (running Roon perfectly) in some folders.
I ripped all my 2500 CD’s over 10 years ago when I switched to Sonos. I always played them via the folder search input.
I have now upgraded the system, with HiRes music and Tidal (MQA) files and that is a great addition … but I want folder browsing
What is the problem?
Please explain why browsing music via a folder input is so difficult.
Roon provides access to the contents (music and metadata) and not to the structure containing them (the filesystem and folders). It’s a principle that strongly identify this product…
Yes I did, and it is faster for me to use a file explorer and then add the track in the search function of Roon.
That is just what I did this afternoon while enjoying music and thought about bringing up the folder search option back in this (mostly very friendly and informative) community
It’s not a matter of if we agree with Roon. We know Roon’s position on this and that it is not going to change. You need to come to grips with that fact…
Couldn’t you just just use Windows Explorer/Mac Finder on a computer or a folder style app? I keep a constant backup of my music on two separate hard drives and when I plug them into Windows I know the same number of tracks are consistent across them and Roon.
As for knowing what you have, if anything I’m more aware of what is in my collection because of Roon.
Roon (probably) isn’t going to add a folder browser function for the reasons cited above.
However, it is helpful for Roon to understand exactly what you can’t accomplish when you can’t search by browsing folders. I think you started to get to this earlier in your post.
Roon has a design philosophy they want to stick with. But I get the impression that if there are things that are important to a lot of users, they will try to find ways to provide a function that fits their design philosophy. The tool may be different, but you may be able to still get the task accomplished with a different tool.
Moving on from folder browsing, there are some things that can be done to enable easy access to folders that contain music that may not fit usual Focus criteria for easy bookmarking.
Firstly, the Focus/Inspector/Storage locations tool enables you to Focus on top level folders, so if you have a folder of recent music on your desktop copied from a USB stick, for example, you can add that folder as a top level Roon folder and Focus on it with this tool.
Roon Tags are a way of organising music outside of Focus tools or folder structure. You can create a Tag by selecting all albums within a view and add to it from other views or Focus bookmarks.
There is a longstanding feature request for Roon to recognise a file tag created in a third party tagging program and use that file tag to generate or add to a Roon tag. Roon has already implemented ROONRADIOBAN file tags so there is good reason to be optimistic about this request.
If you get stuck with a particular use case then there are many experienced users on this Forum who are willing to describe what they do or what can be done.
Hi andybob, the Focus/Inspector/Storage feature I have used and it works but is stil more work than using file explorer via windows/ipad Qfile and then look for that in Roon.
I must admit that what Mark_Hyland states is also true. I did find music I had forgotten trough the Roon interface and that is great as well.
I created an extension to play tracks to audirvana using Roon as the library. And using the data in the process I created a page to view the library in the folder format.
I just tried it after turning on the “path” for searching and it seems to work (although I only have about 300 tracks on my laptop now as I’m traveling). I’ll do some more test when I get back in about 2 weeks.
