Folder Browsing

You got that right! Thank goodness for music and pizza delivery.

Roon’s position is definitely clear. I was reacting to “chase.” I want to be clear that I, and I’m sure the entire Roon forum does as well, appreciate your and other Roon team members participation in the forum. Not only does that make it a better source of information, I think it is part of the mystique or spirit of Roon that it has a personality through its team as much as its product.

Then let’s take it as a challenge: while some requests for folder browsing may be based solely on new users not yet understanding the organizational and navigational potential of Roon, I think it’s clear there is a need that isn’t entirely met by current Roon for some users, and it arises out of various related needs where going directly to the OS is just a shortcut.

If Roon doesn’t want to implement folder browsing, what will Roon do to meet this need?

Maybe instead of asking for folders, we could compile the challenges that folder browsing might have helped resolve, but could be resolved another way. To my recollection:

—List view for quick scanning and scrolling
—Box set handling
—To navigate a user defined organizational structure
—To be able to play files not within the library
—Trouble shooting “why isn’t this album showing up in Roon?”
—Challenges handling classical
—DJ playlists / electronic dance
—New user transitions into Roon

5 Likes

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 :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:

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!)

1 Like

With the risk to offend some or all developers at roon (this is not in my intention and I apologize in advance) they are not currently able to implement a decent and/or logic in the “Focus”, so what you want/suggest may be way “under the hood” (in your words :)).

1 Like

To say nothing about the stillborn called “Focus on Similar”.

I used to be using folders to organized music collection, but everyone have their own system to managing it, but no standards for ROON to follow, when I first using Roon (once Roon screwed up my collection by organized folder, nightmare, I still not fully recover to original form till now), and I have to convert every single SACD ISO and FLAC+CUE into individual files, then delete duplicates, what a learning curve when I migrated from foobar2000+jriver, worth the hassle, my own experience.

But the reality is, I rediscovered many new music, at the same time many of my old collection not visible to me anymore, as some very old collections not really properly tagged due to metadata not available at the time of ripping, only in track01/unknown01/untitled01 format but the containing folder name tells which CD I ripped from, the best we can do is search the keywords, unidentified album still named by folder name as title. While ROON metadata and album identification still not yet perfect, some albums identified into totally different version or album, or breaking into fragments of many albums from one sampler/various artists collection, have to reconsolidated manually into one album again, I think let the user able to search the album by folder name, have a chance to discover them first, otherwise we can never able to manage them properly.

I know once ROON added folder browsing hardly take them away, and heading to wrong direction, but ROON have to enhance the user experiences who migrated from other softwares to ROON to overcome the difficulties before the user finally able to enjoy the ROON experience and features set before the users given up, that’s the point ROON have to consider, not just singled out file browsing, SACD ISO requests.

Hi James,

I think this is a good list and a really helpful suggestion. Would you like to open a fresh thread in the Roon Software section incorporating the list and inviting user suggestions ? I think it will get more traction there than in the middle of this Feature Request thread.

Great idea Andy & looking forward to the new thread @James_I

And although I’ve not contributed here, I have read it all. :grin:

Great idea! See if I can get this right…

Link to the new thread for those interested:

It’s also addressed on their interview yesterday with Chris Connaker of Audiophile Style (Computeraudiophile).

1 Like

Clearly best to browse by metadata rather than folder but there is one situation whereby I think folder view would be useful, for those songs/albums that could not be identified by roon and don’t have good existing metadata.

Fair call Paul…the identification I think impacts hard on those into DJ type music/mixes, from reading previous threads & of course lesser known artists.

I am sorry if this has been posted already, or doesnt immediately give access to folders. I wanted share a possible approach - It’s like browsing by folders, but better, although may take a bit of time to set up depending on your folder structure. The Roon Tag hierarchy is great but leaves lots of tags at the top level which is cluttered.

I created and bookmarked a Tag called “My Folders”, and then about 7 tags for the categories I have been using for years. Classical, Folk, Jazz, Metal, Pop, Punk, Rock etc. I added the 7 tags into My Folders Tag. I searched and added classical composers to the Classical tag with some tweaks here or there, and the same for artists for Jazz and Metal etc. I also have tags (“subfolders”) for main Composers and Others - so I can separate the hundreds of compsers that come up with compilations that I’m not interested in and keep the favourites in Composers A. I clicked on the My Folders tag and created a bookmark also called My Folders, which I moved to the top of the bookmarks. I only go into Tags from the menu if I need to - like for maintenance.

I am in no doubt there is a much better way to achieve all this, and I also appreciate the commercial reasons for getting us all to listen to new stuff all the time. But at the end of a long day I need something familar and relaxing. Otherwise Roon is awesome.

Glad you discovered this option. I have been pushing Tags for years. I used the same to separate types of music by Composer, Create a Mozart Tag, then add to it, Symphonies, Operas, etc as subtags, and then bookmark the Top Tier tag.

1 Like

People can choose.
Thats what many people don’t want to see. Many people want all the “new” features and informations that ROON has, but on the other hand want to keep the “older” ways like e.g. file browsing or a little bit of the famous iPod click wheel etc.

That’s impossible.
Because if you put all possible functions in one app it would be hard to handle for most users. ROON is a new way for music lovers to not only navigate our own music collections but offers an implementation of streaming services as if they were part of your own collection.

So, you can choose:

  1. iTunes, JRiver for the old way
  2. Freeware/Shareware like Volumio for a more simple way (file browsing)
  3. Audirvana for great sonic performance but less innovative features
  4. ROON for sonic performance and a complete new way to experience your own AND new music.

The only way you can not have it is all these ways combined. I used iTunes for 6 years and Audirvana for 8 years. But ROON is better, at least for me.

So just make your choice, but please stop accusing ROON of all the BS.
Sven

Hi Sven,

Can I please apologise, I had no intention of accusing Roon of BS. Unfortunately I spent a while trying to meet a use case - and in the process read a lot of posts from folk frustrated trying to do the same. Naturally, I wanted to share how I managed it using the epic features in Roon to make it look just like folder browsing but better. Thank you for your reply , and sorry again for any offence caused. Matt

Hi Matt,
it wasn’t your post that bothered me. I just read the hole thing today and not post by post over all this time.

And tags are a mighty tool.

So this “sorry” is for you :wink:
Sven

Roon offer you a trick to implement folder browsing yourself.
Add on folder and bookmark/ tag it.
Remove the folder and add the next one, and so on.
Finally you of cause add all folder locations and you use focus to browse them.

Simple as that. Problem solved.

May be I’m missing something with Roon. I have digitalized years ago my old K7 and vinyl. They are on my NAS but they don’t have any tags. How can I find them in Roon since they have no metadata ? How can I retrieve them with Roon to listen to them ?
In such scenario, folder browsing would be a great addition IMHO.

Folder browsing isn’t going to happen. I would just tag them as a project, then get some great cover art in there and enjoy the music…