Brand new Roon user here, still in the trial period deciding whether to go all in…
Christmas music keeps surfacing while I’m playing music various ways. I’ve read up online where people have had problems in the past (2021), and it seems Roon should suppress it??
I’ve had it occur when starting Roon Radio from a particular jazz track - very reproducible. Upon further investigation, it appeared that track (album) was not recognized by Roon on import, so maybe it didn’t know that it wasn’t Holiday music?? Still seems odd…
But I started simply playing the Jazz genre, and the second track was Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas from a recognized album, categorized with genres Christmas/Holiday/Holidays/Jazz.
Only a few days in, but seems unless I request a specific album, I’m eventually subjected to holiday music. Isn’t Roon supposed to handle this properly?
Put the Christmas music in a high-level folder separate from other music folders. Then enable/disable that folder in Settings-Storage as appropriate for the season. When the folder is disabled nothing from it will be available to roon. But also remember that some jazz albums that are not specifically holiday may contain a track of a Christmas song (Dexter Gordon’s The Panther for example).
How do other music apps that you use handle this? IMHO, it’s not reasonable to expect Roon to know which music is associated with what holidays and filter by month accordingly. If you disagree, submit a feature request.
From going thru the forums I had found this thread, which implied that starting Roon Radio from a non-holiday track would exclude holiday tracks.
And in a separate discussion it was stated: “We’re investigating this one – we have long had a rule that prevented holiday music outside of December but we think a bug may have been introduced over the last few months”
It seems there’s been no further discussion since 2021, so my expectation that Roon should do this was based on discussion that it seemingly already did.
A big advantage for me with Roon is its having a more sophisticated approach to genres than Apple’s iTunes/Music app provided, but I’m trying to understand how much massaging of the data/files will be required…
This is a problem that Roon solved years ago by using the track metadata to ensure seasonal music didn’t play when it shouldn’t. This assumes of course that all online music is appropriately tagged. If Roon is still playing Christmas music when using Roon Radio then something is probably broken at the Roon cloud end.