I just killed my queue

It’s getting to be a habit: During the course of the day, I hear about music I want to hear. I’m busy, so I add it to my queue to play later.

Then tonight I’m on Facebook and someone suggests a song. I want to hear it now–so I play it now.

And my whole carefully accumulated queue is gone. What’s up with that?

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Yeah, I do that all the time. Should hit the Play Next Button to insert the song into the queue and wait for the current song to end or hit the ‘go to track end’ button in transport controls.

There’s a ton of discussion here about how to work the queue and the ideas are great so until something better gets put in an upcoming release, this is how i avoid ‘Killing’ my queue. (love that expression)

Fine for the cognoscenti to know these things–but key for regular users is logic, what to expect. I cant’ think of any reason why a “play now” would erase my hard-earned queue. All it really ought to do is skip to the head of the line, but the line’s still there.

The only difference between “add next” and “play now” is that the latter should interrupt the current song if something else is playing, and anyway, start right now if it isn’t. From a user’s standpoint, there’s no reason at all why it should destroy my queue.

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The real solution to this problem is a non destructive party mode. Most of the time I want “Play Now” to destroy my queue but when I have friends over and I’m bouncing around songs I need “Play Now” to be non destructive.

I agree with this functionality

It’s what iTunes does and its a small
Change for Roon. Hitting play now, play artist, play genre, play album etc should just insert itself ahead of anything in the queue. The queue should resume once whatever you picked is done!

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There are two sides to it. I used Sooloos for years, and I was always complaining about the clumsy process to replace whatever is in the queue with a new album, something I often do. Go to the queue, clear it, go back to the album, and play. At least four clicks: more in Sooloos which didn’t have a “back” button so I had to find the album again. I would definitely hate it if Roon went back to that model.

I guess both modes are useful.

Alternatively, for the original scenario, you could add these albums to a playlist instead of the queue. It doesn’t get damaged, and it is persisted, so you can look at it tomorrow or next week.

Create a playlist is the best way to preserve a queue, I agree.

Anders, I get that this approach is convenient for you, but as a logical proposition there’s no connection between “play now” and “clear queue.” You want every action to have the results you would naively expect. There should be no unpleasant surprises. For advanced users, you can always simplify things with keyboard shortcuts–maybe Ctl-x, Ctl-n to clear queue and play now.

Keyboard? What’s a keyboard? :relaxed:

Wrt logical connections and predictable side effects – when I tell my car to navigate to Costco it stops navigating to Whole Foods, when I tell my TV to play the news it stops playing Rocky, when I tell my kids to come in to dinner they stop playing ball. None of them resume the previous activity after Costco, the news, dinner.

I think we learn certain behavior and think it is natural. iTunes is a strong force. But several behaviors may be reasonable.

FWIW, this is, for me, nothing to do with what iTunes does. I haven’t used iTunes in years.

Our little disagreement on this bit of functionality doesn’t matter much. One of the great things about Roon is that important folks watch these forums. I’m sure they’ll make a reasonable call.

Cheers

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100% agree, keyboards cannot be considered a mainstream way of interacting with/ controlling Roon. Tablets are likely to be the most common interface.

The queue seems to be a polarized discussion with Roonites. One side likes it exactly as it is, others find it a little frustrating.

I’m in the later camp.

Brian2 posted this recently:

Well sure, the queue would behave exacty as it does now with add to end of the queue as the defacto option. In theory a simple implementation.

I still believe the queue in Roon is it’s weak point. For me I can live with it as I mostly listen to albums but I can’t recommend it to my friends that love playing songs and bouncing all over the place in a queue including backwards on previosly played tracks. They stay on LMS with iPeng.

Agreed. After using a WMC IR remote for years, I’m having to relearn, and heft a keyboard instead of a little remote. My better half is not impressed with the learning curve at the moment.

It might be better once 1.2 is out, and we can switch to touchscreen on our Windows tablets. Yet another learning curve ahead, then.

Don’t understand, why do you need to wait for 1.2?
I have been using touch exclusively on Windows and iPad devices from the Roon beginning.

Because the scenario in which we most often use Roon is via our HTPC, with Roon Core (actually RoonServer) running on our media server.

The HTPC has been running a 10ft interface for years; best controlled by a remote. Now it’s running Roon Remote, which is not a 10ft interface, and which requires a keyboard.

We can’t control the HPTC via another Roon Remote on Windows tablets until version 1.2.

No iPad devices in our household now or ever likely to be.

I can understand you can’t control other aspects of the HTPC remotely. But once playing music, you could control Roon itself from a touch remote.

What is in 1.2 that you are aware of to address your situation?

I was under the impression that 1.2 would give the ability for a Windows tablet to fully control Roon on another Roon endpoint. Currently, it can only control its own private zone or the Core system audio (which, being a headless server, isn’t being used).

Given that the UI when running on an HTPC requires a keyboard to navigate Roon, we’d much prefer using a touch-driven tablet to do the navigation and then “cast” the music to the HTPC, which is coupled to a Denon AVR, leaving the HTPC to just display a “Now Playing” info screen.

I don’t think this can currently be done with Roon 1.1.

Ah, didn’t catch your description. Thought Roon runs on the HTPC…