Request here is for a more powerful grouping feature inspired by our natural browsing and collating behaviours.
Tags? Focus? Nope. Enhancing our behaviour, not constraining it. Read on.
Let’s just start with stating my love of Roon. It’s been over 25 years since I first logged into Hotline servers and started a digital collection. More than anything Roon has reduced the stress of managing a large (50K+ album) library. I don’t feel compelled to tidy it. The trouble is, Roon also makes me engage with music less, and enjoy it less. That ‘stress’ of organising something large and messy into something manageable where you can enjoy your music, is part of the pleasure of collecting. Every time I use Roon, I’m left with a disconnect between how I want to engage with my music, and what the software dictates. I want my music ordered my way. Roon says no.
Roon is great for discovery; for always moving forward; for making connections, for zeroing in. Yes I want to discover, but I also want to revisit.
Roon is terrible for collating larger collections into something manageable our brains can comprehend and navigate. For me it fails in this most fundamental way, for the most dedicated music collectors, so the collection becomes less browsable, less enjoyable. I’m left floundering in an ocean of noise.
OK. Focus, and Tags, you say.
Focus presents me with your higher level and most popular groups, in a narrow window, prioritising the centre of the bell curve. I’m immediately influenced and distracted by what you present. Seeing the same 6 performers is just annoying when there’s a list of 10,000. Where are the groups I actually care about? Say early 80s Belgian cassette labels or Japanese improv. How about 90s lo-fi psych, but only the ones I like. What about the albums I got from the mutantsounds blog? Maybe I want to gather all the music I’ve bought on vinyl this year. This is how I listen… in real life. I ring-fence groups of albums, and return to them.
Tags promise more bespoke grouping, but the experience quickly becomes degraded by the limitations and clunkiness of the feature. What say I want to reference my peculiar genre combinations that match how my vinyl is grouped on the shelves? OK, that works. How about if I also want to reference different groups of fave labels, and also different sources i’ve downloaded from, and also best of lists from different years. Once you have too many tags, of a different types, all listed together, they become meaningless.
You are kidding us if you think Focus and Tags offer suitable functionality to engage with large collections. They’re just rehashed Amazon-like features which a software engineer has convinced you is relevant to the music browsing experience.
Software has the potential to enable ordering in all sorts of different ways. A to Z if you’re like that. Roon genres, if you like that. Or my ways. Roon has that potential.
The ability to group easily in different ways is fundamental to browsing large collections. It’s organic. It’s what we do with crates and shelves and piles on the floor. It’s the pile of records beside your player. It’s the shelf of CDs you’re thinking of selling. It’s the folder of albums you digitally ripped from LPs and need to sort in genres, or a friend gave you and you want to spend time listening to. It’s the collection of live show recordings you’ve made and burned onto CDr. And it’s A to Z on the shelves. It’s all these at once.
Don’t tell me I can use Tags for this.
Right now, I’m switching on and off monitored folders, because it gives me the greatest flexibility to listen to ever changing groups of music I make. It’s also painful.
I am fully aware mature software doesn’t change easily, and that makes you vulnerable to competition.
If only I could set up my digital collection to browse as easily as I can with my vinyl collection, in that messy, organic and ultra easy way. That would be great software to match a great collection. I hope I can inspire you (or someone else) to become that.
