Folder Browsing [Never happening] 2019-10

Yes, looking at your example, I search on “Debussy L 100 Estampes” and I get, under compositions, nearly 150 performances. Then I just use the filter and choose the performance I want by typing in “gulda” for example, or, hit the back arrow and type in “Weissenberg” and it pulls up all the recorded performances by “Wessenberg”.

However, if you want to do it by tags there are a couple of methods. Most basic is creating a set of nested tags, you create a tag called “L100 Estampes” to which you apply it to the albums or tracks in questions. Then you create a Tag call Solo to which you add the “L100 Estampes” tag, then you create a Tag called “Piano” to which you add the “Solo” Tag. After that you could then you create a “L99 D’un cahier d’esquisses” tag, add the albums or tracks and then add that to the existing Solo Tag.

Now when you click on the Solo Tag you get something like this:

Tags can have more than just albums or tracks. For example, you can Tag a composition, and when clicked will bring you to a composition page with all your library performances and then also all those not in your library but on the streaming services. Like below, notice that the image states Composition not an album or track.

Personally, I would go this route. As in just a couple of clicks you can get to the composition and all the performances; with the lowest amount of setup.

And Tags can be applied to Artists, Genres and Playlists. You can even have different types of content under the same tag.

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Ok everyone, it seems you guys want a better answer than “we hate folder browsing”. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.

There is no folder browsing coming to Roon because it promotes behavior we don’t want to exist. We feel that it, like UPnP support would get us more sales short term at the cost of our souls (and future). I’d love to discuss it with you over a drink, but that’ll have to wait. This decision is a strategy. A long-play business and product strategy. If it doesn’t make sense, you wouldn’t be the first it baffled. Everyone was so sure that no-UPnP-support would be the death of us all throughout our 2-3 years in business. RoonReady seemed like a crazy idea that would never take off. We got lucky and it worked out… or we are awesome. I’ll let you decide. Folder browsing is like that for us.

While we are not even slightly against self organization, we are unwilling to go past the track-browser-path-column when it comes to files and paths. Sorry to those who need more and can’t figure it out with tags, genres, and playlists. Ask for help, many have figured out solutions and are content without folder browsing.

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Freedom from UPnP and folder clunkiness is the best thing that happened to my music experience since I went all-lossless-digital 7 years ago (or so).

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@danny thank you for your very timely and more detailed explanation, I can live with knowing it’s due to “strategy” not ability. Work arounds exist.

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Dear forum, dear Roon,
I am to blame of this lively and sometimes obnoxious thread.
It is very nice to see that the Roon moderators address the fairly aggressive reactions about me asking for folder browsing.
Those who don’t care about folder browsing should not add any comments.
The forum should be there to discuss its possibilities or workarounds.

I do have a problem about the statement highlighted above. The behavior that comes with folder browsing is mine to decide on. The behavior is "being too lazy to fix all the tags, or the behavior that I sometimes don’t know the artist or album name but I do know its location.
That is what my request is all about. Nothing more.

But as the British say you ar flogging a dead horse, the Dutch say you are pulling a dead horse.
I know I was doing. Still a pity. (yes that is me in the picture)

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Please provide some examples of what you are talking about here.

A post was merged into an existing topic: Posts about Posts in Folder Browsing thread

Heartily agree with all you wrote. I don’t post much at all here anymore because of 2 things

  1. the protectionist flaming going on when trying to introduce new ideas or get existing stuff fixed
  2. nothing’s really happening in the dev side anyway and hasn’t really since I started using Roon apart from a few cosmetic and ergonomic fixes.

To overcome the folder view problem, I ended up literally renaming the albums (all 12k of them or so) to reflect their folder position (I use a unique numbered folder for each album) so now it looks like this in album view:

PS… Still love Roon and use it constantly :slight_smile:

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Great - thanks! With this, I hope I can find the stubborn tracks that just don’t want to be found by normal search.

I know we have the ‘First Amendment’ Danny, but now you’ve made Roon’s stance on this clear, is it time to close this thread?

Do you actually understand why people ask for it? Do you have any empathy for them or useful intuitions about their needs? What Roon solution can you propose that would make Luke23 stop asking for it? How do you suggest he uses the current tools in Roon to achieve a comparable result to the example in his post? This is a guy with an immaculately curated classical music collection and lots of knowledge; you should be asking for his advice, not cutting him out.

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Yes. People need it because they are used to an organization system that they built up from scratch. Often, that organization has some property of organization that is quite a bit of manual labor in Roon to get 100% parity (tags, playlists, genres) or the person is unaware of the options. Often, due to lack of metadata identification, it creates dissonance between “regular” Roon usage and “special” Roon usage with these unidentified albums.

I’m going to propose a solution for his example of Debussy’s piano works sorted by catalog number.

  1. Composers
  2. Debussy
  3. filter on “piano solo” or “piano duo” (I don’t have Debussy handy, but with Bach, I’m able to do “solo cello” easily)
  4. sort by catalog number L (With Bach, I had the choice of BWV or BC)
  5. now you see the piano solo compositions.
  6. click one
  7. now you see performances of that composition, sort by date if you want them by date, location, ensemble, or conductor

More power, more info, no manual organization work. Does it require metadata? Yes.

If you have too many unidentified albums or we have bad data, it’s not going to be good. Folder browser would help in that case – but we’re more interested in solving the problem, not adding a solution that we feel is moving backwards.

This is the critical thing… he’s also losing out on so many other ways of browsing that are even more interesting than the thing he built.

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Please review my post above which details a couple of different methods.

This fails with Debussy, (and most every other composer.) You get no results for either “piano solo” or “piano duo”. You can filter by “piano” but you will then get solo piano works, piano concerto, voice and piano and so on. But “piano solo” produces no results, with Qobuz at least.

So I ask you again, what have you got to offer Luke23 as an equally powerful alternative to his scheme?

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I logged into TIDAL. This looks like a bug. These parts are clearly known to be for Solo Keyboard or Keyboard Duet. Filter should filter on those. I’ve let our dev team know.

He should be able to do exactly what I said. He got hit by a bug. That sucks. I’m not adding folder browsing to deal with this.

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I indeed think that you can’t, it only works with a perfect tag on each file, and then to play the stuf that you want you still need to make a playlist… The same problem with box sets, or sampler disks … a pain

See above. You can on some composers, and not on others. Depends on the data. This is a bug. We will fix it.

okay thanks.(our response crossed)

Ok, closing this out. We’re done.

@moderators, please convert future public posts on this subject to private messages and reply with a link to one of the official company posts in yellow.

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