Yes, please bring back the full width waveform.
That’s a UI item that serves multiple functions, and now in 1.8 it serves next to none.
You could use it to easily move within a song (to the “loud part”), now it’s that much harder.
Also, the way the progress is shown (by sort of “bolding” the waveform) doesn’t help matters, as it tends to make everything one big blur. So if you want to move BACK, it’s quite hard to discern where that “loud” part started, once it’s played…
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+1.
Although I understand the esthetical (minimalistic) choices of 1.8, I totally agree about bringing back the full length of the waveform, there is a lot of wasted space and it impairs functionality. It’s a pity given how useful the waveform is. The transparency of the bluish overprint that covers the played part of the track could be increased to make the waveform easier to read and to use.
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+1
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I’d be interested in Roon explaining their rationale for changing the waveform size… again. I can only imagine this relates to the new portrait view on tablets. As I’ve posted elsewhere, in its present state it’s neither use nor ornament to me. Shame.
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I fully agree.
Not only is the waveform smaller and not functional, but the currently playing song information is pushed to the left corner of the screen in smaller type and often truncated for lack of space.
The entire bottom playback bar of 1.7 should be restored. It was fantastic as it was.
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I don’t think it was fantastic in 1.7, it was very easy to move the current playing position when you picked up a tablet. Now that it is shorter this happens less - but the waveform is so much less useful.
One big use-case for me is to time-shift radio programmes and listen to them later and I always want to see the waveform, so that I can skip loud/quiet passages, so that I can skip talking or adverts or so that I can skip a track I don’t want to hear right at the moment. All this is now much harder than it used to be.
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Plus 1, please bring back the old waveform.
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I use the waveform quite a bit. I appreciate the improvements to the waveform made in 1.7, and I feel that shortening makes it more difficult to use.
I also wish that the shortened version could be used for the phone version of the app.
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As already posted elsewhere in the forum, I cannot understand this change. Even the Roon-logo is basically part of the waveform. At least for tablets, this view should be clearly spread.
The information about the current playing track is no longer satisfactory (Classical have long titles).
The header (my albums, etc.) is so much too big, it could be saved space here without loss of information.
Classical lovers who want to play special parts or someone with other long playing tracks (audio books, self-recordings) now have a massive limitation compared to all previous versions of Roon.
A design change certainly always has supporters and opponents.
But here you lose a useful function because you can practically no longer use it.
You should be able to expect more functionality and not less from a new software release.
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That has been variable back to at least 1.6 (my first version). Some of the “waveforms” have been wide, some nonexistent. On my computer, I haven’t seen any change. But then again, it seems there is so much variance on what people are experiencing. Makes you wonder why.
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Yeah I requested some improvements to the waveform seekbar almost 6 years ago:
Disappointingly, the seekbar has gone backwards since then. It’s a very useful feature and could be made a lot better - even allowing the dynamic range of a track to be visualised. Hopefully the team will be able to work on this soon.
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Definitely a bit of deja vu here, Roon tried cannibalizing the waveform with 1.6., but restored it after some outcry. Now they’re trying again. Oh, and the new app icon is a plain white chicklet for anyone without 20/20 vision. I support the full width waveform requests.
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I’m not quite sure what all this excitement over the waveform is all about. What insight does it actually provide? That some bits are loud, and some bits are soft? I can see that even with that graph being a little shorter than in 1.7.
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Instead of a waveform I currently have a straight line.
I am not sure how this occurred in the first place.
I can’t find how to change it back to a waveform does anyone know how to do this?
You only get a waveform for locally ripped music, not QoBuz or Tidal.
Thank you for the quick response.
I know I had a waveform when Roon was first initialized.
You would think it would still be applicable with streaming Tidal or Qobuz.
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Well the waveform doubles as a seekbar, and I think half the gripe is that the seekbar aspect is so reduced as to be clumsy to use. And this in a music player software that doesn’t have fast forward / rewind buttons.
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I never even noticed it looked smaller as I pay little attention to it, which I guess most users dont and why they reduced it. All I want is to play music not umm and arghh over the dynamic range representation in a waveform whilst it plays.
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Its a purely subjective topic / design choice. Not something to bother about while a pretty big number of functionalities are objectively broken.
The waveform isn’t only to “umm and arghh over the dynamic range representation”… Have you noticed that Roon doesn’t have forwards/backwards buttons, to jump to another part of a song? Guess why that is?
The waveform! You’re supposed to be able to pinpoint exactly where you want to go in a song just by clicking on the waveform. A brilliant idea, much better than navigating the song through buttons.
BUT, there isn’t a brilliant idea that can’t be implemented poorly, and unfortunately, the 1.8 version of it is, frankly, poor.
The width is insufficient, and the glossy blue overlay is, well, too much.
This needs to go back to how it was in 1.7.
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