There’s been much debate about Focus in 1.8, particularly the AND/OR issue. Personally I like AND but do have some bookmarks that no longer work so I’m glad to hear that devs are working on option to have either. In the longer term though I would like to see Focus become customisable and to work consistently across all sections of my library.
This would involve the ability to configure focus so that any of the data items could be shown under Albums / Artists / Tracks / Composers / Compositions. For example, I might want to filter Artists by Year - currently that is only an option for Albums or Tracks.
So, how about the ability to have any data item available for any of the library areas? Showing them all would be too complex, so defaults might be as they currently are but with the option to add / remove data items from any of the areas of my library.
That’s the first part of the request. The second relates to what happens with albums which are hidden. Here’s why it’s a problem …
My library has 7767 albums. Quite a large proportion of these are things that I only want to play occasionally. I have 3388 albums marked as hidden so, I can use settings to quickly switch between showing all or showing a subset of my library. There are a total 3193 artists and 124,118 tracks.
However, hiding albums doesn’t work consistently. Some examples …
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Top of Home screen shows 1920 Artists (not 3193), 7767 Albums and 124,118 tracks and doesn’t change if settings are used to NOT display albums which are hidden.
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Albums section of library shows the correct number of albums i.e. it changes if some are hidden.
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Artists section of library shows 3680 artists if nothing hidden, changes to 1920 artists if hidden albums not shown.
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Tracks section is correct - shows 57,652 tracks if hidden albums not shown.
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Hidden albums are shown in Artist Overview and Discography.
(By the way, the behaviour above is not new to 1.8 - I had hoped that it might be resolved but not so hence the feature request).
Why does this matter? Apart from being an annoying inconsistency, making ‘hidden’ work across consistently across all areas would enable a feature that has been asked for over a number of years - the ability to have different libraries for different users. Various work-arounds have been suggested for this but none work reliably.
So, imagine Roon with Focus being configurable and working consistently across all areas of the library and ‘hidden’ meaning really hidden. Combinations of Focus / Hidden / Tags could be used to create library subsets as bookmarks and a user could have a specific bookmark set as their default.