Full or Filtered Album Library Browsing functions missing

Hello Roon Team,

Recent reversions in 1.8 to working 1.7 functions and bug fixes: Well done, it was much faster than I thought, thank you!

I am sorely missing one aspect in Roon: Album browsing. The only method is to go to My Library / Albums and try to use a combination of sorting, focus and tags, which you can save into a linear list of Bookmarks.

In pre-Roon days you either had a sorted rack of CDs/LPs or an even better sorted folder structure, folder shortcuts, also supported by tags. In any way, you could easily create a system where your workflow to find something to listen wasn’t focused on any specific thing, but you could browse a combination of genre and performer.

I am sure that many people approach listening still in a similar manner.

I most certainly cannot use Focus, I only search for NEW material on Tidal/Qobuz. Usually I do this in sessions just skimming tracks to see if I like them. After that I save the ones I want to check out in depth into my library with tags. This also necessitates that I come back to the Album view in sorted by date added view and listen to these to see if they are a keeper.

When I listen to tracks I rarely have a specific album or song to listen to. Actually if I do I tend to find it scrolling down in the list rather than searching for it as (due to the process above) I do have a good idea WHEN I added the album, therefore where is it in my list. Worst case, I use tags and then browse or use “filter”. No Focus ever.

I use bookmarks for certain often performed searches, such as music for sleeping, party stuff, electronic, classical, or excluding certain genres to provide a cleaner look for the otherwise chaotic Albums list. These typically only contain some tags and a sorting method.

I general I want to see a larger list of albums (not songs) and browse them and pick one for my mood. If the selection process would not be so convoluted, I would have more complex saved searches.

I would be happy to see something like shelves under the albums menu item, maybe similar “mixed” thumbnails with titles like under My Tags just same size as the albums on top of the entire album list , which could operate as “subdirectories” (so if you click it will sort down the Album list as saved). This would serve as a part-procedural part-manual browsing list for searches. While the “thumbnail” function does something similar it is much less visual, the list even with just 6-8 items is already too long and the functionality is not focused on browsing really.

Of course any other solution that is able to achieve the goals described above would be nice.

Thanks
Áron