I really wish there was a way to select tracks and keep them together so that they always play in sequence rather than as individual tracks during shuffle play or radio. There are lots of works that are broken up into individual tracks that don’t really work as individual tracks. Parts of Side Two of Abbey Road immediately comes to mind, but there are many others. It would be great if one could do this in Roon.
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Jriver added this feature a few years back. The Kings, This Beat Goes On/Switchin To Glide comes to mind. Plus hundreds more.
If you have a tag editor that supports WORK, PART and WORKID tags you might be able to do this with existing functionality. I believe “yate” supports these tags. You can also configure mp3tag to do the same thing.
I haven’t tried this in a pop music context so I am not 100% sure but it is done all the time in a classical music context. For example, it is extremely common to want roon to treat the movements of a symphony as a single piece of music. In order to do that each movement is assigned both a PART tag and a common WORK tag so that roon treats the music as a single unit.
The question mark in a pop music context is that the public catalogues may not be already grouping the tracks in which case manually grouping them with WORK/PART tags may cause worse problems with the CD identification process. Others may have more experience of this.
This doesn’t really apply in the pop context. I’ll give two examples (the first one best describes the problem): Quicksilver Messenger Service album “Happy Trails” is shown as having 10 tracks. The first six are a live performance of the song “Who Do You Love” in which each individual band member has a solo which is a separate track with a unique name but where no one would ever want to listen to an individual solo out of context. Here, your “work” tag solution is perfect because it is really one song arbitrarily broken up. The next three tracks however are three separate pieces that flow into each other. You’d have to invent a work that combined the separate parts. Just like you would in my second example, the one I previously cited: Abbey Road by The Beatles. Here again there are suites created by making separate songs by different composer/singers that are edited so that they flow into each other. Out of context these edits create abrupt endings where one naturally expects to hear the next song yet there is no real “work” that one could link. And the “work” concept itself can also backfire. Take for example the first three albums by Mike Oldfield. Each of these albums were issued with a single title with two side-long suites designated “[album title] Part 1” and “[album title] Part 2”. But each side is really a separate work and they are not designed to flow together. Yet Roon insists on grouping the two parts into a work and I can’t get it to in-group them. There has to be a better solution.
There have been a few threads and posts asking for a change to how ‘Works’ err … works.
I listen a lot in random mode and when I do I don’t want full albums played or even tracks like the OP described.
I’d love an option where you can shuffle by tracks or by works or albums. You’d be able to toggle these on and off easily, in the best case scenario.
Currently I’m tagging Works and then creating a Focus playlist that ignores those. It works but means I don’t hear stuff that I enjoy hearing when I’m in shuffle mode. Lots of classical music, for example.
Yes, work feature far from perfect. Grouping of tracks needs to be configurable depending on the use context. It usually makes sense when you are listening in album mode. But many have found it has definitely “backfired” when in shuffle/radio mode and you don’t want to shuffle hours long multi-part works.
I too cannot use radio/shuffle with classical music precisely because the track grouping is so inflexible. An interesting twist from JRiver as has already been mentioned. It does not require an artificial “work” to group “parts” if none exists. But there seems to have also been unintended consequences (different ones) that took a long while to address.
I have a live album:
It has 23 tracks, 10 of them are spoken intros, I want to group the intro “Clay” to the song “My Eyes” so that when shuffle or radio is used it plays as one track. If thats not possible is there a way to remove the intros from being picked by shuffle/radio?
Haha last night radio played me the 1 minute intro “Clay” (a tribute to his newborn son) and then straight on to “Let it Die” by the “Foo Fighters”.
Thanks.
Richard
Bump. Any update from Roon here? There are so many non-classical performances that I’d like to always hear consecutively. I love hearing Bill Graham introduce The Grateful Dead on “One from the Vault”, but then want to immediately hear “Help on the Way”. Likewise, hearing “A.D. 1928” but then not “Rockin’ The Paradise” on Styx’s “Paradise Theater” doesn’t work.
So yes, most of side 2 of “Abby Road” as everyone mentions, but there are many other similar situations. From the outside, Roon’s impressive architecture would make one think this would be an easy addition.