I am using Roon trial and love it, but I like to browse my music collection by folder, can I do that?
Short answer ⌠No
Really long answer ⌠request comes up from time to time and the Roon team always replies that it does not fit their vision for the product and will not be implemented. Recent quote from Danny Dulai, COO of Roon:
Given a scale of 1 (totally open to change) to 10 (firm like we are on UPnP/DLNA or folder browsing in Roon), see our flexibility below.
On the subject on themes and colors:
*** no custom colors: 9**
*** no more themes for the sake of aesthetics: 5**
*** no more themes at all: 3**
*** altering the current themes to be better: 1**
On the topic of global user-scalable fonts:
*** not happening due to technical limits in how Roon is currently implemented: 10.**
*** happening soon: 9**
*** not happening ever: 1**
I would say folder browsing is NEVER going to happen.
Tim
That makes no sense to meâŚ
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How are your folders organised ? If they are Artist/Album then Roon supports that kind of browsing regardless of where the files are stored.
If you have a more idiosyncratic folder structure then you can use Roon Tags to maintain your categories. Best way to do this is:
Back up your database
Disable existing storage
Make the head categories separate storage locations
Use Focus/Inspector/Storage Locations, Select All and Add to Tag to create the Tags.
You can then disable the separate Storage locations and revert to a single storage location if you wish.
I understand the thinking is that users should be freed from an arbitrary storage hierarchy so that they can create dynamic filters based on the underlying properties of the music and files. Users do this by becoming familiar with the Focus tools. The devs feel very strongly about this. Roon is opinionated software and this is one of the strong opinions. You can find various discussions about it by searching the Forum.
There is a learning curve involved and the Roon Knowledge Base is there to help people climb it.
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Steven, having lived with some form of folder architecture in your previous streamers/organizers, Roonâs approach is distinctly differentâŚand hard to make sense of.
But it does make sense, just not the sense you have become accustomed to. Give it time.
Cheese ânâ crackers, not again.
I appreciate your response and I understand the philosophy. But I have a music collection with (according to Roon) 32,580 albums, 395,055 tracks, and 4,039 artists, thatâs over 3.5 TB in size. I love Roon and plan on buying it, but sometimes I just want to go to my Deutsche Gramophone folder and play that symphony by Mahler that Bernstein conducted with jumping through Roonâs hoops, and I know where it is in the folder because I put it there. I guess in those instances Iâll just have to fire up Media Monkey
Philosophy is great, but misused it creates zealots.
Peace.
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Chips, no fries! Cheeseburger!
(This always reminds me of the SNL Billy Goat sketch)
Thats really to bad. Roon should be the perfect gateway to your music, and that means any means necessary to find your stuff. I run into this problem all the time, where I dont know the file title of a paticular file, and the file is not known in Roons database. Only thing i know is where it is in my personal library, but roon wont let me find it, just by browsing whatever file location i know this way. That is just to dumb and very much against the whole idea of Roon in my view! Since Roon knows the paths to all files anyway, why cant we then have a browsing method called âby pathâ ?
Roon, liberate us from this tyranny! 
In addition, Roon is not exactly the master of finding stuff anyway, so having the ability to just browse to the file via a well known method to play the stuff you have organised yourself is a must in my view. In my case, as a former music producer, I have loads of old masters I would like to browse and play in my library. This is being made extremely inconvenient by the lack of a storage location based browsing method.
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So you can search by folder!
It may not be upfront and obvious but it is simple enough once you know.
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One level deep.
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More of a sort than a browse.
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Great! That clearly better than nothing. Not inspiring, but a way 
Thank you very much for that help, Brian!
If you type in the search it will take you down more than one file level deep and you can then also filter by the other filters - album, composer, release date etc.
What is it that you want to do that this doesnât allow you to do? (not being snarky, genuinely curious - we all conceive of our music collections in different ways)
When the content is not some known release (e.g my own transfers of masters, only being file-named and sorted into folders and subfolders). then there is no metadata or entires in roons database. Only a âdumbâ file. You can find the file in the library, but it requires you to know exactly what the filename is⌠You see?
I am a roon member since Dez. 2018. In life before I use LMS & IPeng as the remote (which provide folder browsing - but I never use) We have half a dozen streaming devices in our house. My library is abbot 5700 Albums, 2500 Artist, 94K tracks. I am the admin of our network (Rock, NAS etc.) and responsible for backups, ripping and storing the files. My hole family didnât know anything about the NAS (like capacity, how many HDs, how many watch folders in roon) And they do not know â of cause! â where I store the files and which name I gave to the different folders.
BUT they all use roon and they all find their own Music!
We use Genre, Album- and Artist name, history, bookmarks, search and âsimilar toâ
Itâs so easy.
If you donât remember the Artist âBuddy Tateâ, type âSTâ for Stan Getz in Artist browser, scroll down and you will find all the names; much easily then looking in a folder, searching for a name.
As mention in these thread before: If you are streaming (and searching) Qobuz, Tidal or Highresaudio, Amazon (or whatever) you will never be able to see the folders, where the music or information are stored (like in the whole Internet) But you will always find the things, you are looking for â using the keywords.
We do not miss folders browsing. 
PS: Sorry for the bad English, but this is not my origin language.
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Yeah sure I get that but what this implies is that you have a file system where you know your own logic as to where albums are so you can browse to them quickly but when in Roon and you want to look for an album you donât know the name of the file or of any of the folders or sub-folders they are contained in.
If this is the case surely the answer is browse in your finder to the file to find out the name, look it up in Roon and then edit the album info in Roon, add appropriate tags and so on. Not hard work one at a time.
On the other hand I totally appreciate that you obviously have put in a huge amount of time recording your own albums digitally and are used to searching for them via folders. Given Roon can show the Path it wouldnât seem a huge leap to enable you to browse the path but keep it as a fairly low key option so it doesnât interfere with the overall UI.
I have a combination of well known official releases and loads of my own stuff such as master, vinyl and tape transfers. It really means a lot in terms of flexibility, that a user can browse folders if necessary.
Why should this not be added to roon as an browsing option?
Another way around this, could be a piece of software that sends a file for âroon playbackâ. Then you could browse however you need, and âopenâ the file using that software. After all, the only reason for using roon for playback of unknown material is the engine! There is no need for any other roon feature in those cases, and it would also be of benefit for all the users âwaitingâ for roon to index new files, that there is a way to manually send a file for Roon engine playback.
Is that an idea that could solve the issue âoutsideâ roon?
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