With the holiday season approaching, Iâve been curious about how you manage your Holiday/Christmas music collections in Roon. Some of you probably have extensive holiday librariesâmaybe decades of compilations, classic albums, and guilty pleasure tracks that only come out this time of year. I certainly do and absolutely love finding rare, oddball pre-1970s original songs Iâve never heard before.
Iâm curious: how do you organize and manage your holiday music? Do you create dedicated playlists of your favorite Crimble jams? Do you have more than one based on special criteria?Use tags to surface everything seasonal? Maybe youâve built a focus that pulls it all together? Have a secret go-to website/blog for finding good holiday stuffy you werenât aware of?
And hereâs the real questionâdo you hide or separate your Christmas music during the rest of the year, or does it just live alongside everything else in your library year-round?
Iâd love to hear how youâre using Roon to manage the seasonal rotation. Drop your tips belowâbonus checks on Santaâs nice-list if you share any clever tricks or Roon features that make navigating your holiday sounds easier.
I have manually curated some .m3u (âimportedâ) playlists from there that get played at this time of year, including one that I call âChristmas Traditionsâ which is my version of the Sirius XM Holiday Traditions channel.
I have a huge collection of Christmas music but in reality I usually end up listening to the same few albums, maybe a dozen or so. When I started with Roon I would keep it all in a folder outside of Roon (on a NAS) and put it all on a memory stick and put that into the back of ROCK and watch that folder. It was then easily removed after Christmas. There was a good reason for this at the time as Roon Radio would play Christmas music whenever it felt like it throughout the year if it had access to it. Roon has been modified not to do this now but it was a real issue 7+ years ago. Now I just keep the same amount of music on a folder not watched by Roon but on the same disc connected to ROCK. I enable the Christmas folder in December then disable it in early January.
Does it count if my answer to the question is ânot at allâ? I donât have any dedicated Christmas albums and I donât listen to any.
I guess I have Howe Gelbâs Schlager Christmas album and âChristmasâ by Low. Both are tagged with Holiday and Christmas genres, but it wouldnât be a disaster if I heard some tracks from them in July, so Iâm not taking any special precautions.
I have no Christmas albums in my Roon library. When my wife wants to listen to some, I do a search for whoever she wants to hear and search their discography for a Christmas album.
As an aside, she has already set up my MILâs Christmas tree in our new sunroom.
Yes, you retain all tags and play counts â
as long as you donât select and execute the option ââŚdisabled storage locationsâ highlighted in the image under âClean up Libraryâ.
Since the directory on my NAS is available to me year-round, I can modify it, add or delete albums (or covers). The changed data is then re-imported at the beginning of December. Albums I might have saved in August will then appear as newly added in December. Thatâs exactly how it should work.
Perhaps a little more information:
For Christmas, I used separate genres:
Christmas Pop
Christmas Jazz
Christmas Classical
Christmas Sampler
Etc.
And then defined these as sub-genres of Christmas.
No, I donât loose any play counts or tags. I use the same system. I have one folder that is independently setup as a storage location that I Enable during the Holidays and then Disable it the rest of the year.
