Folder/File Display of Music Content [Not on the roadmap]

Roon needs to provide a Folder/File DISPLAY of audio files listed by directory structure from the hard drive. Roon’s arrangement of content is very slow and cumbersome when dealing with thousands of artists and albums from those artists. Additionally, Roon does not always get it right when arranging content into various categories. The majority of end users arrange their content on a hard drive volume in a very specific way to facilitate quick access. Roon needs to provide a Folder/File view of the content and make it navigable for accessibility purposes.

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One of the design goals for Roon is to bring album cover artwork back to the browsing experience. The UI has been designed as an alternative to a Folder/File view. It is one of the distinguishing features of the software. Focus tools and Bookmarks provide powerful tools for accessing content. There are a plethora of Folder/File music programs; why turn Roon into another ?

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Could you elaborate on how many you’re referring to when you say thousands. Also what hardware are you serving from?

I take note of the comments mentioned above, we don’t want Roon to be another ‘also ran’ option. Let me be very clear, I have ripped close on 3 thousand cd’s to wave files, I have converted some 2000’s Lp’s to wave files using Lynx hardware. I am desperately wanting to use Roon as my software management facility due to its powerful Metadata retrieval system, however its navigation to find content is very slow and cumbersome. If you know exactly what you are looking for, its fine…if you want to scroll through your content looking for something interesting to play …this is where it becomes totally unworkable. The slowness of moving through screens and screens of album covers simply does not work. Like most end users, I have stored my content on the HDD under an artist folder followed by an underlying album folder or folders that represents the material eg Jethro Tull (Artist) ----> Aqualung (Album) / Thick as a Brick (Album). For classical music storage, it is based on the a Composer folder followed by a Composition folder eg Beethoven (Composer) ----> Symphony No. 9 (Composition). It is for this reason that it it is absolutely imperative that a folder system be introduced to allow us to quickly navigate to content. Both myself and friends have relatively sophisticated high-end systems, with powerful Pc’s, in house cabled networks between Pc and Dac players. The overall control of content display and maneuverability amongst the folders using Album covers simply does not work, this needs to be corrected. The point below about why introduce folders when we can use album covers … the answer is simple, when dealing with large quantities of material, Album covers as a navigation mechanism does not work (very slow), whereas folders do!!! As a high end piece of software, it should have both options available. The Roon developers need to provide the additional functionality. Given what I have said, I no doubt will still probably buy the software within the next week or so. It still has alot going for it.

Regards

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With all due respect I’m running a library exponentially larger than what you’ve described and don’t experience any of the performance issues you ascribe to Roon.

  • I’m running Roon Server on an old Quad Core PC with 8GB ram and both Windows and Roon Server share a SSD drive
  • wired network is gigabit
  • wireless network is 300N

Could you elaborate on your hardware?

I don’t find Roon’s navigation slow or cumbersome at all. Are you using the alphabet functions ? Just type the first letter of the name of the Artist (in Sort By Artist) and you’ll go straight to the start of that section. Then I use mouse wheel scroll to get to where I want. You can also drag the scroll bar to the relevant section (with two letter accuracy) or, on a tablet,use quick jump (ABC) to select a first letter.

Have to agree with @audiomuze and @Andy that even with very large libraries, navigation to an album, area of albums, artist, genre, composer, etc is significantly better than drilling into hierarchical folder/album lists.

Lists are like staring at a wall of CD’s in my old bookcase. 5000’s CD’s and nothing to play.

@Nicholas_Evans, I really recommend you take some time to explore news ways here.

For example, starting with a track, viewing credits, clicking on credit link to another artist, selecting related track, …and so on. I find this a much better way to build a rewarding listening session when I don’t necessarily know where I want to start. So, where the OP finds this “totally unworkable” I find it quite awesome.

For example, pick a track and let “Radio” take over from there.

For example, use FOCUS, select albums you haven’t played, zoom in on genre, scan the albums in view…press play.

Browsing across screens on all machines here is under 1s. It should not be anything like slow and cumbersome.

I cannot imagine using lists for this now. I imagine you may also find the same eventually.

Again I here the comments, yes I have played with all this options mentioned above. Where the problems really show up, is when dealing with classical music which has typically many different composers and associated pieces coming from the one ripped CD. This is where Roon does not get the arrangement of content correctly divided into the relevant categories. This is why is important to have a folder/file system that can represent the content accurately. All I am requesting is that the option exists within the Roon software!!!

How would you like to see classical content arranged/ divided?

Every great tool has a capability to dumb down to a large folder view, and a tabular file view that allows the user to quickly scan large amounts of data (think sorting on header in excel). By NO means does this function take away from the wonderful GUI and overall collaborative universe that Roon has created. But damn, any time I want to see where some of my “unknown artist” or unidentified albums lie physically, I have to get out of the program, go to JRIver, fire up the file view and do mass tagging/editing…Then immediately rescan watched folders in Roon! Why? Cuz it’s 1000% easier and quicker.

Roon needs to have a folder view capability that shows us our files naked! (Note: and no, location doesn’t do it. No one in his/her right mind would define every album folder as a watched folder, which is all “location” knows!!). Don’t worry, we’ll go back to the sexy GUI. I’m not sure what everyone is so afraid of. Roon is great; Roon with backdoor rudimentary file folder views is greater.

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Add the ability to view files in the folder arrangement they are in on the drive. Sometimes that’s the only way to locate files to play them back. Should work on local drives and network drives. There are several albums on my NAS that just can’t be located on Roon. If I could scan the folders on my NAS, I could find them. That’s how I do it in J. River.

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When you have 12,000 albums and 160,000 tracks, graphical browsing just does not work! It is way too slow and literally tiresome.

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Maybe, but that is what Roon is and as stated in the thread title [Not on the Roadmap].

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