It's the little things

So now we have a shiny new look and some lovely Qobuz implementation from Roon, it’s time to look to the future and hope that Roon may, in the next build, fix many little bugs and make minor (in our opinion) mods and tweaks and make minor additions which would elevate our collective Roon experience to insanely euphoric levels :slight_smile:

Here are my starters for the thread, what are your’s? (remember this thread is to try and group relatively minor requests, not whole modules like “Roon Mobile”)…

  1. The ability to edit and add to Artist Bio and Album Review content
  2. To fix the annoying … bug with the exporting of albums
  3. To see a log of exports - successes and fails and duplicates
  4. To fix the exported track cover art embedded filename from obscure “Artwork 1” to “Front Album Cover” - Currently most portable apps don’t display the art because of this, which makes the export feature quite rubbish.
  5. To allow more advanced boolean combinations of tags (AND).
  6. To refine the insanely complicated deletion of items procedure both for local and streaming content.
  7. To NOT automatically add to the Roon library complete albums of streamed content when only individual tracks of those albums have been favourited within the streaming service.
  8. To allow for focusing on half stars - at the moment we can only focus on 1 2 3 4 or 5 star albums - why have half stars if we can’t filter them. Moreover improve the filtering by rating altogether - it’s only possible to see “=>” 1 2 3 4 or 5 stars at the moment. Why can we have more flexibility? And what about personal ratings? These seem to be all but irrelevant, when surely they should be the priority?
  9. Show ratings of albums on the SHOW ALL ALBUMS screens

Hopefully we can expand this into a great list of some really good ideas to elevate Roon yet further.

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Great idea.

And I understand the reasoning behind your requests.
And behind some expected additions like box sets.
But let me raise a different perspective.

Almost all of your requests, @Sallah_48, seem to me to fall in the category of management and curating of the content. (I removed the word “obsessive”, no value judgment is intended.) Logs of the export process? Half stars — five levels is not enough, you want ten? Complex Boolean expressions? I’m not saying there is anything wrong with those, I’m just suggesting that the curating style of features is of interest to a subgroup of users, and it might be relevant to both other users/voters and to the Roon team to recognize this and gauge how big that subgroup is.

Similarly with structured management of box sets: as I understand it, the concern is for box sets that have packed 80 CDs’ worth of music into 60 CDs and in so doing have scrambled the CD grouping and destroyed the ability to identify and assign a cover to the CDs. They thus require organization in Roon. Reasonable request. But perhaps mostly for classical? In the jazz category that I favor, the (fairly rare) box sets are just pricing bundles, they preserve the original CDs and metadata and covers, I can ignore the fact that I bought them together in a discounted bundle just like I ignore other kinds of discounts. So, if my understanding is right, how common is this requirement, is it just classical, is it only for purchasing of shiny disks or does it apply to downloads and streaming, is it growing or shrinking?

Note that I am not implying any discouragement of these features just because I don’t care for them personally. We all have our personal desires. I just think some sort of grouping and identification of constituencies would be useful. Because there will be people who want better user interface integration of certain high-end filters in HQPlayer, or SACD ISOs, or CUE files, or new compression techniques for DSD files, or Dirac integration, and how can any of us (and the Roon team) make sense of this wide-ranging stuff?

(That said, we have to simplify Delete, I suggest just mapping the command to Hide. :grinning:)

Hi @AndersVinberg

these are just my starters. The whole point is to interest others to highlight their small niggles so maybe a host of little changes can result in a holistically great improvement.

Ref the stars issue, the point is there ARE half stars so why only allow sorting to 1 star level, it’s just poor implementation. That’s the other point of the post, to highlight badly implemented stuff which went under the radar upon first release and never got corrected. They are minor things and niggles which just could take a few minutes to correct (like the album art name on export) but are just overlooked repeatedly by the Roon team on each development.

The idea is to try and sift through the simple stuff and highlight it to Roon in a single thread for consideration.

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Just a quibble, but this isn’t always true of the Mosaic box sets. That said, I’d agree that the box-set issue is mostly a problem for classical fans — The classical box sets are where the disc count can get really high, and that increases the frustration factor.

Here’s a small thing that bothers me and that seems like it should be relatively easy to fix: When composers are set to display in track listings, don’t mix in arrangers with composers. For example, take a look at these track credits…

You can see that the composers are correctly listed as George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. Now look at the corresponding track listing…

That makes me crazy, so in that situation, my suggestion would be either to not display the arrangers at all or to have a separate “Arranged by” line.

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Oh yes, it’s another one of “these” threads, and as ever I feel compelled to add in my 2c lest my wishes get overlooked…

To be frank, I have been championing a number of requests for a while now, many of which I believe are popular with the Roon community here. And I wouldn’t say these are ‘little things" - to me they’re pretty important. These requests have been outlined in a variety of places including their own threads, others’ threads, Roon version feedback threads and elsewhere. I think that the requests and feedback system in general could do with some improvement with a more systematic approach - but then I’ve requested that somewhere too…:joy:

I have most recently iterated my current “wants” list here:

Essentially the top requests are still better box set handling/the ability to group albums in the albums browser (e.g. group a number of albums in a series), the ability to organise albums better on the artists’ page (i.e. by albums, singles & EPs, bootlegs, anthologies, compilations, etc), better album art handling (with the ability to move/delete/label images and with a better overview of the available images) and the ability to add extra reviews to albums.

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Would you mind explaining this in more detail, or link to a post where you’ve already explained this? I’m just not understanding what this is.

I’d be delighted to @orgel.

Browsing your music via the album view is one of the main ways to view and browse your music in Roon, and in some ways most reflects the way you would look through your physical music collection.

There are times and circumstances where a further level of “grouping” in this view would be nice. The main example for this would be to group album series together. By series I mean albums that are released sequentially as part of a series, though not together as a box set (though this request ties in and overlaps with better box set handling, which has been requested numerous times elsewhere). Albums which are released as part of a series are mainly compilation type albums (if you want to call them “albums”).

For example, I have around 20 Cafe Del Mar compilation albums - currently these appear separately when I’m browsing my albums, though it would be great to have them grouped together under a single Cafe Del Mar entry, which when clicked shows all the individual albums. An added benefit could be some sort of series description which is shown at the top, much like when viewing an artist’s page. So in this example you would have a description of what the Cafe Del Mar series is about at the top, with the albums then listed below.

You may also wish to group bootleg albums together so that they don’t clutter up the album browsing experience. There are probably a number of uses for such a feature.

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I’m done asking and suggesting things, deaf ears and all that.

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We can only live in hope @evand :slight_smile:

Thats a great idea. I’d love to see an organic system in place to group albums. Select a load of albums and have an option to group and display them as a group. Dare I say it, like folders, noooooo!!!

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I think it’s always worth asking and presenting some sort of rationale for the request. If and when your wish is granted is another question, but if you don’t make the attempt to get it in the work queue….

You can do exactly this with Tags.
And in opposition to folders, an album can be part of more than one group.
Great times we live in, not longer bound to the limitation of folders, yeeeeees!!!

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you save yourself the frustration of nothing materialising.

Minor fixes.
Number one: the completely useless interface of sorting songs in the album recognition tool
Number two. The utterly annoying, highly distracting and butt ugly colour of the footer in the light theme

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Agreed, but Tags are only half functional in Roon right now. Or perhaps I should say one dimensional when other dimensions are obvious, relatively easy to implement, and sorely needed.

Well it appears you didn’t remove it, just moved it :slight_smile:

But it is a fair debate - should people’s niggles be addressed. My response would be not if it does not increase the power and functionality of the software, at least not until the higher priority items are done. But absolutely yes when we are talking about things that other media management software has already successfully done, and sometimes far better, and where we would like the best of both worlds with Roon doing these things.

Box sets is a great example. I am not a classical fan and so my box set pain is limited to David Bowie and Johnny Cash. But I can certainly imagine how frustrating it is to sit down for a lovely Roon session, everything else being great, but to have to remember whether that targeted album is disc 42 or disc 76. It just needs to be easier than that. .

Tags are my most desired “please finish this development job” niggle. I use tags to create shuffles that are more targeted to my tastes than Roon Radio (which I also like…now). Tag queries on indirectly tagged objects is terribly slow at times, and you cannot sort or query on multiple tags except with OR logic. The idea of Tags is hugely powerful, but the implementation is half done and just doesn’t need much more to be great, but we’ve been waiting for great for several years.

Another great example would be options for what info/content is displayed on the web/chromecast display. Not so tough to implement, but a great step forward for those of us who enjoy visual content with our music. Discover being something other than random. A customized home page. Nowhere near the level of effort of MQA, Qobuz, Roonmobile, etc.

Thus, I agree, I would greatly encourage the Roon team to try to do a clean-up, finish some of the partially done features, kind of release. Roon is obviously already amazing, but there’s some low hanging fruit that will kick it up another notch.

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Bring back the display of available and unavailable resolutions that used to shown in, I think it was, Device Setup.

This aided people in determining what resolutions their DAC could accommodate.

Never really understood why it was taken out.

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This is exactly what I’m still missing after several years. I don’t hear anything anymore about the great intended UI/UX overhaul. Instead, focus firmly remains on techie things / plugins / add-ons.

Some people reassure me that Roon does have a plan in place to improve UI/UX, only they will do it in stages, not in one big bang. Sounds nice, almost Agile, but all I see is some fragmented patches, very inconsistent from a design perspective.

Roon is said to have a clear roadmap, a vision, but I’m getting more and more worried that UI/UX is not sufficiently integrated. I sorely miss a holistic approach.

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@Sallah_48

  • Fix font issues.
  • Allow filtering of results. Eg maybe I search for Mozart, then I just want to filter the Tidal results that are MQA (or not).
  • Fix oversized Internet Radio tiles
  • Fix boxsets
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I quite like the idea of a “breadcrumb” type search where your search builds on previous searches and you could easily navigate back in your search history.

One of my niggles is still that when you have albums you scroll left / right. But click “show all” or more and the scroll changes to up / down. Minor thing but I still find it a bit jarring.

I’d like two very simple things. None music management but focused on the actual act of listening to music.

  1. show a grouped volume control. Super simple.
  2. allow music being played on 1 device to be “moved” to play on another and port over the playlist.
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