Hell freezes over, or how Folder Browsing came to Roon!

When i hear ‘folder browsing’, i think filesystem folder browsing, not something that requires additional work to setup in roon.

I can absolutely see where youre coming from, but this is more of a filesystem overlay. If youre looking to replicate this functionality you can migrate stuff on the file storage you have to reproduce the file structure you have in mind.

I very much see folder browsing as a necessary evil in roon to help us find those songs and albums that roon has not identified and make it easier to get roon identifying this.

Your idea doesnt seem to be anything with actual folders, more a way of grouping songs in ways different to albums. Interesting idea but nothing to do with folders.

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Can you help the community understand how the use if the inverted “Identified” focus isn’t sufficient to help with the above?

Albums being “identified” is not required to find them in Roon. Having simple file tags for album, artist, tracks is sufficient for that, even if they remain “Unidentified” by online sources.

I don’t think folder browsing was introduced for current subscribers; rather, it was a move to encourage new users to Roon, i.e., removing a barrier. Most people won’t use folders once they know how Roon works.

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It may well have been, at least partially. Perhaps Harman took a long look at the forum and decided it would be in their best interest to mollify the hardcore users who have been quite vociferous on the matter :slight_smile:

The blog about folder browsing talked a lot about existing customers, but I guess it’s both. Anyways, I just wanted to correct what was a bit of misinformation regarding finding stuff in Roon.

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Yes, it’s mostly my idea of folders than what folders might actually be. Before I bought a lifetime license, I had a one year Roon subscription. One of the great struggles I had with adjusting to Roon was how it differed from iTunes.

In iTunes, my way of organizing was to create playlists of essentially albums. For instance, “High Res 1990’s Grateful Dead”. I used those playlists as folders. Once in my version of a folder, I could view the contents in a variety of ways. As albums, as songs, by bit rate, etc. A simple click would alter how the contents of the “folder” (aka playlist) appeared.

I found Roon’s Focus feature too unwieldily. I never would’ve bought the lifetime license had I not figured out how to use tags in a similar fashion as my iTunes “folders”. But with Roon’s tags, I don’t have the quick click flexibility to view the tag content in a variety of ways. Perhaps Focus accomplishes that, but I’ve never ever jibed with Focus.

My imagined idea of Roon adopting folders was that I’d now being able create folders and view them as I wish. Even if Roon just uses folders on my hard drive, it still lacks a way to easily toggle between a variety of ways to view the contents of those folders.

For instance, I have a hard drive folder called “DSD Jazz”. When I open that folder within Roon, I’d like to be able to choose how the contents are presented to me instead of just seeing the folder as if it was in a Finder window.

It’s easiest to think of Focus as a prep tool for a view that ultimately becomes a Bookmark.

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Then the bookmark is of course the same as a folder as described above. Just a place to put things you want together.

Not really, because a bookmark done with a focus is dynamic, like an iTunes smart playlist.

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Bookmark does not remotely achieve the organization and view options I seek. And I find Focus to be unnecessarily complex and convoluted.

I want to put some albums in one place, and then view them in a variety of ways through one click options. Tags accomplishes the “one place” part, and has a “filter” search box. But the filter search box doesn’t allow for different ways of viewing the content. I’d like to see iTunes like options for “view as album, or song, or bit rate, etc”. Something simple like that.

No worries keeping Focus around, but just give me simple alternatives.

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Did you try setting 2 different focus criteria at a time in the album view so roon would show only albums with both DSD files and Jazz genre tag assigned? Example for ´192k´ and ´Jazz´:

If this is not working for you, I recommend to enable the ´Jazz DSD´ folder as a separated folder in roon´s setting > storage and focus on that folder as a source in album view:

I do not quite understand how you want albums in one folder to be displayed. Could you show an example how you liked it in iTunes please?

I guess the filter search is the wrong tool for that purpose in roon, merely a combination of useful focus settings will do.

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Sorry to disagree. I do know how Roon works, and I’m very happy to use the new folder feature. As I’ve said before, it’s not a binary choice; I love the Roon interface, but I also want (in some cases) to view my library, and play tracks from within folders.

That’s fine, but do you really think most users will prefer folders to Roon’s rich album and artists views? For some, yourself included, it has utility. For me, it is an irrelevance since my music is well organized, and I can view files and folders readily using a file manager.

That was kinda the point, Roon gave you a range of ways of displaying your library so much so that the actual location of an album became totally irrelevant

Then a bunch of users who couldn’t adapt to new ways of displaying and navigating their library lobbied for folder browsing . Roon , quite rightly to me, resisted until their new owners stepped in.

Folder browsing by passes Roon original concept and allows a user to bypass the whole ID process which negates most of Roon’s magic

You would be better off with a musical equivalent of an Excel Spreadsheet = iTunes ?

Just my opinion as a 7 yr Roon user :smiling_imp:

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There’s the issue of Roon suddenly not being able to see all music in your personal library, this has been reported recently. Wouldn’t folder browsing help with that?

That would be a bug that shouldn’t happen in the first place and one shouldn’t invent a whole new feature to work around a bug

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Agreed but, the feature now exists. On more than one occasion, due to metadata issues I have been unable to find an album which has been added. The folder functionality at least helps to check the location or presence of the item without resorting to other applications. So not essential but folders can have its uses.

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Anyways, if Roon can’t find something in other views due to a bug, I wouldn’t rely on it being able to find it in the folder browser, either.