I just hooked into Roon some weeks ago. I’m quite satisfied about it’s overall performance and I agree with many other contributors here, that it is currently is the best music management software to handle a local music collection.
Roon’s front page marketing claims to bring back a full album experience “with excitement and engagement” in form of “a searchable, surfable magazine” - and this triggered expectations on my side, which the product in my eyes does not yet live up to.
I subscribed to it anyway, but after some time using it I ask myself, how this full album experience" is supposed to translate into user experience when using Roon on a daily basis - as contrasted to information-sparse playlist browsing and listening.
Just to drop a few ideas on the feature fantasies I indulged in:
- Links / excerpts: compile my favorite sites, articles, texts from the web and attach stuff to albums and artists in my collection
- Notes: add personal notes to collection items
- Suggestions: add suggestions about and link to similar artists or music
- Community: connect to the community of users
- Sharing: browse contributions of others and flag or like them; change visibility of your own contributions; follow other users
Today, I gather much information adhoc from the web. I do research on artists and take notes. I let all sources available inspire me. I think about music, albums, artists. I compare musical style, content and ability and search for similar works. So, to support engagement and excitement today there is much more available than just album covers, artwork and cover texts. Against this background the ‘surfable magazine-ness’ of Roon still appears quite limited.
What are others expecting? What did you expect, when you had your first contact on the Roon website? Tell me …
(2019-06-29) After discussing this with the commenters below I think that it is necessary to boil this discussion down to a less comprehensive Feature Request:
Provide a mechanism to embed or link to own content on the web. This could be web pages, or markdown content from your favorite web storage. For example, there is this link to album pdfs on Qobuz, which opens in an external browser. This should be extended to custom content, which may be added on the album edit page.
@community: if you think this is a good idea, please like it !