James, On the playlist front, I think iTunes’ Smart Playlist is the gold standard. Its the only thing I miss since migrating to Roon.
Here’s one idea I had: create a “random symphony program” a day. Maintain several playlists, auto-updated, one for each Musical Period. Then using those six or so lists, create a new lists that randomly picks, say, one from each list.
Take the same idea, but divvy the music by dates and create interesting contrasts of evolving music through time. Or by different composers, or different forms… You get the concept.
Here is the one and only window for creating a playlist:
Comparison operator options are “contains”,“does not contain”, “is”, “is not”, “begins with”, and “ends with”. Comprehensive enough, but it gets better.
Here’s the list of “tags” (to use Roon nomenclature) which can be used instead of Artist"
[Software may shrink true size; the bottom-most is “soft album artist”]
As impressive as the sheer number of tags/things one can play with (about 50!), the real kicker is “Playlist”. Yes, you can use playlists to build other playlists, allowing one to, say, build a playlist that’s 25% Piano Jazz, 25% Vocal Jazz, 25% Ragtime and so on. Proportional playlists, that automatically update with DB changes. Wow!
My point isn’t a lust for iTunes. In many ways it’s low-rent (no HQ stuff), and it underperforms badly in some areas (editing). But if I were building a way to get at my music, this is what I would choose. Very powerful, but can be used very simply if desired.