I guess like a lot of people I to used to have heavy invested organisations of my music on my filing system.This was along time ago. As a DJ it was worse - lots of metadata to add by hand, add via analysis apps (bpm, key etc) etc and then I was often copying files around to make collections because that is basically the only option there was back then.
Then itunes added virtual folders via simple queries and that changed everything. There was another apps I found who name I cannot remember that took this further. I used to create hierarchies of virtual lists made up from structured queries and it could copy out a selection from which I could play my sets.
Finally I no longer needed a physical folder structure beyond satisfying the needs of storage, ripping, purchasing, separating formats for copying, transcoding etc.
Up until then, I had been maintaining folder with complex organisations and it was a pain especially when one day you come up with a better idea to arrange it all. Is this what people who are tied to folder view now have done in the past?
If so, is your folder structure something that could potentially be defined by a bunch of queries even if those queries are beyond what you can conveniently do with focus/tagging etc in Roon today?
When I first got Roon I did spend quite a bit of time organising and tagging, but over time it became too much of a chore and/or I forgot about it too often when adding new music so it has fallen into disrepair. Often those tags were simple a bunch of focus actions whos results I add to an exiting tags (and OR subquery operation if you will), or that I select and remove from an existing tag (AND NOT).
So I would very much like a user defined structure query system on Roon where I could create a query that defines a collection (like you used to be able to do with iTunes on a mac in the past and maybe still can?). Then maybe I want to make another query that results that result set and defines a new child collection and I can give the query a name and store that too under the parent query. Ie a hierachy. Maybe I want to make several such hiercharies. They only every got stored as queries. Maybe under the hood there is some caching if needed - I dont care, so long as the results are little more than a click in time.
Under the hood, I bet this can be trivially added to Roon - after all it is already a database and this is what they do. The UI and presenting a simple query designer that is powerful enough while also comprehendable to someone who has never ever heard of SQL or a database and might be a bit shakey on AND, OR NOT, grouping (parenthesis etc) well - thats more of a challenge
Under the hood there is already appears to be a bunch of multiple hierarchies, present at some level int he software stack in the SDK, so I am guess creating some definition and storing them in a navigable is nothing new either. It would all abnout the user experience - a focus V2 if you like
Would such a thing solve the problem of recreating what you miss without direct folder navigation?
Of course, this doesnt address the companion need for much better metadata and lets face it, label don’t seem to have much interest in doing a better job of their metadata - even the DJ orientated ones dont seem to be any better never mind all the other genres.
(Maybe this should be moved to a feature request, it wasnt really intended as such, but now I see it probably is - my bad!)