This is an important conversation. A lot of the ability to customize the Roon listening experience is supposed to be built into Tags, Bookmarks, and Genres. In some areas, Roon is already reasonably powerful, but in others, it is still pretty basic.
To summarize my other posts on were I think Tags need to go:
—Ability to import file-embedded metadata into Roon Tags. As discussed here:
—Multi-level tag hierarchy to allow drill down. Basically some method of organizing Tags other than flat on a single display page. Right now you can Tag Tags and you can use bookmarks, but these are kind of workarounds and requires continual manual organizational maintenance. An example is I have a set of Tags based on recommendations from friends. I don’t want to see this on the same page as my Tags used for administrative purposes like “Lossy Compression” and “Corrupt Files.” So I would want to have a page that shows only the top level Tag categories and then be able to drill down into a display of the specific category of Tag I am browsing.
—Tag sort logic as discussed here. This is a critical one as the workarounds are severe and limited in function:
—Ability to assign custom graphics to a Tag rather than the mosaic of objects within the Tag.
There is another elephant in the room when it comes to Tags. Paulb’s post does the best job of articulating this:
I have experienced this confusing disconnect as well, and I do not have an easy answer for this one. I think it arises out of the very innovative feature that Tags can be applied to almost any object within Roon - a track, an album, an artist, a playlist, another Tag, etc. In other apps, tags are inherently at the file level, which is usually a track. Even if the software, like Foobar, is able to display something so that it appears the tag applies to the album or artist, this is only because that same text string appears in the same field in each file tag.
In Roon, it is so much more sophisticated, but it is a kind of a web of relationships. I understand, this is the basis of Roon. But displaying in a simple, understandable fashion what tags are in a track when in album view, or displaying what tags apply to an album when looking at a track list, etc., is to me inherently difficult. You almost need a 3D display like in the bridge of a Rebel cruiser in Star Wars. I mean, there should be a way to understand what Tags have been applied to objects RELATED to the object you are viewing, but are not applied directly to that object, and having it function a little like a family tree. Anders brings up some similar ideas here, but related to Genres:
This I feel is super challenging. And tying browsing too tightly to Tags could lead to user errors and frustration – for example when I start to browse based on a Tag and my expectation is that only Tagged objects will be displayed, I might click down a given path, then leave, come back later, and not understand why all of my music appears not to be on a given screen. Roon almost needs to display my browsing path so that I can understand how I got to the subset so as to avoid me thinking there is a problem with the library. Not an easy one to fix.
OK, I have more, but this post is long enough. Thanks for considering!