Sallah, thanks for the detailed overview of how you Roon. I’m glad my suggestion was helpful. Those AHA! moments are always great. I guess it’s time to bare my soul and show what I’ve been doing and what I desperately want to be able to do in Roon.
First, a bit of context. If people had not seen Foobar in Columns UI mode, they missed a seriously powerful piece of software. While I am happy to leverage Roon’s many means of listening to music, It is important to me that Roon be able to come close to the listening mode I’d build for myself in Foobar, which felt like artificial intelligence when I had it running well:
The above is “Filters Mode” in Columns UI, Foobar. Pay special attention to the “Mood” and “Shuffle” columns as these were my masterpiece. The data pulls from custom file embedded metatags that I added through Foobar. You want a quick and efficient way to drill down to whatever you want? Start from the left and just select across to the right.
With the custom fields, with the “Mood” column, I could choose what mood I am in - this is sort of a cross between a playlist and a genre concept – it spans genres, but the basic idea is that I tend to have standard “music moods” that I get into, and each of these covers one, or one that I think I would enjoy building into my habit. Note that I also have built in, two moods for happy hour with my wife: what she “likes” (my music that she tolerates) and “loves” (her music that I tolerate). I tagged moods at the artist level, but it could be done at the album or track level to more precise effect.
Using the “Shuffle” column, I can choose between “Hit” albums, “Deep Cuts” albums, “Deeper Cut” albums, Box Sets, Live, or other attributes. With any column you can choose more than one category so any of the above could be combined. These choices allow me to decide if I want to listen to the overplayed hits, or if I want to scrape the bottom of my collection, listen only to live tracks, or any combination thereof. This could also have been applied at the track level should I have taken the time – I did that for some albums.
This is powerful: combined with genres, you can use boolean logic to select only Hits that are “Earthy Rock” and even combine that with a genre selection. When I have friends over, I will limit playback to “hits” and then choose the appropriate mood, and off we go - I only get music they know (until I want to spring something on them) but it follows my choice of artists based on mood. If we want to explore, we go Deep Cuts.
Here is how I drill into Roon in a similar fashion:
Above is a bookmark of my top level tag categories. (Note that “Group” is an innovation similar to “Moods” - Groups are things like “Chicago Bands” or “MQA Albums;” Admin is for things like denoting lossy codecs, corrupted files, etc.)
Drilling in, above are my “listening Moods.”
Clicking on one and above you can see the albums and artists in my Cool Blue Planet mood.
I’ll use this to Shuffle or Radio based on moods. It does tend to match what I want to hear pretty well, except there is no way to control hits vs deep vs deeper. I have to rely on the Roon radio logic to weave through the Mood. I find this to be much more accurate to my listening desires than using Roon genres, but that’s obviously because I grouped them for my own use. There are ways to get cross sections with genres included as well.
So this is a reasonably good way to enjoy all the other benefits of Roon and approximate the virtual-DJ functions that Foobar could provide for me. But I do think that Roon would benefit from being able to take further cross sections out of tags, bookmarks, genres, whatever. Track ratings would be one way to look at it.
I’d really like to be able to implement the Shuffle capability that I’d built into Foobar. That was more powerful than Roon’s current capability, because I could decide how deep to go into my collection. Roon can’t do this very well at present for one main reason: there is no boolean logic in Tags. So while I could Tag each album (or track) as a “Hit” or a “Deep Cut” I could not filter the objects in this Tag to represent Tag=“Mood: Cool Blue Planet” AND Tag=“Shuffle: Deep Cut” – the result comes out OR, not AND, and displays all objects denoted Cool Blue Planet and all Deep Cuts, not the intersection of the two.
A secondary reason that I haven’t implemented any Shuffle functionality is that it took a LONG time with 5000 albums to add these designations in Foobar, it being album by album (artist by artist for Mood was faster) and it really should be track-by-track. I feel I should be able to import these into Roon since the information is there in the files - indeed it is even in the Roon database, just not accessible meaningfully – and I also want it to stay in the files as I want to be sure that if I ever stop using Roon, I will lose the minimum time investment possible.
Even without the shuffle layer to sort with, listening in Roon is quite a pleasure. I do find myself reading through the bios then surfing to related or similar artists and this is a nice collaboration between my own efforts and the Roon team’s efforts. It’s enough to keep me with Roon as long as Roon’s Shuffle and Radio do a decent job of weaving within my Mood tags. But it would be wonderful to be able to add that Shuffle filter layer, and even more wonderful to have Radio and Shuffle option sliders to really get under the hood!