I can filter by genre, and play only Doo Wop, and shuffle tracks as I prefer to do. But it can still play Doo Wop Christmas tracks. I wish there was an “exclude” tab where I could shuffle all Doo Wop (or whatever genre I want at that moment) except for Christmas or Holiday music.
I’ve not been following this thread, and maybe because of this I am a little confused.
I have been running Roon now for quite some time in conjunction with Tidal and a collection of some 1500 to 2000 albums on my NAS. I often run Roon in ‘Roon Radio’ mode, and in all the time I have used it, I can’t recall a single instance of Roon playing a track that I would classify as being a “Christmas” track.
I assume that you must have a fairly large collection of Christmas tracks on your NAS in order for them to be played so often. In any case, is the appearance of a Christmas track so awful? Can you not just hit ‘next track’?
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Well, the real issue here is that in the Roon world, genres apply to Albums, and not to Tracks. And Roon doesn’t seem to aggregate up any Track genres. So if you’ve got a Doo Wop compilation album that has a couple of tracks with metadata for Doo Wop and Christmas, then because the album is likely only to have the genre Doo Wop assigned to it, and so it will get picked in shuffle play, and chances are you’ll hear the Christmas tracks.
The only workaround is to use the Roon Album Editor to add the Christmas genre to the whole album explicitly and do a Focus “Doo Wop and not Christmas” to just get the Doo Wop albums without any Christmas tracks. It does mean that you’ll be missing out on the other tracks on those albums that have both Doo Wop and Christmas genres though…
Ban all the Christmas tracks? Tag the “Christmas” as you ban them so that you could play them from the tag come that time of year?
Yup, that would work - use a tag on the tracks, since you can’t assign a genre to them…
Well, in my case, my music is organized by folders and the metadata is hit or miss, mostly miss. I’ve been using Tidal and Qobuz, and also playing music from my own collection, with entirely different interfaces. For the mind of music I listen to, much of it classical, a folder structure is infinitely better than the system in Roon, Tidal, or Qobuz – search that seldom works because tags aren’t sufficiently standardized for classical music, many works in many categories by the same composer with different performers, large collections, etc. Whereas it’s fine for pop, jazz, and rock, where I can just type in the name of a band and their albums come up.
I love the fact that Roon works with Qobuz – their own Windows client is a joke – and that it’s integrated, unlike in JRiver. And I love the fact that it will output to HQPlayer as well. Those advantages were enough to convince me to subscribe. But it’s useless for playing my own collection.
Really, I find it frustrating – JRiver refuses to integrate Tidal and Qobuz, despite the fact that so many of us are moving to streaming (the high res stuff is even better than my own 44.1 collection). Roon refuses to expend the minimal effort it would take to accommodate those of us who have or prefer a directory-oriented approach, since, frankly, metadata tagging doesn’t work well enough yet to be functional for classical, e.g., give me a listing of Beethoven quartets organized by ensemble and number, as in the old Schwann catalog. Neither company seems to be listening to its customers.
Another thing I’d like to see in Roon that I don’t believe is present but that JRiver has is the ability to feed it with the WDM driver. That way, you could send the audio from video players and websites to it. It would make it a more complete solution, important if you want to use Roon’s DSP features and convenient as well.
But for me it’s the inability to use a directory structure that’s the main problem. As I said, I’ve subscribed to Roon, but if they would add directory browsing and WDM I could switch to it entirely rather than using it as a front end for Tidal and Qobuz.
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it seems to me what you’re asking for is not so much a directory structure, but a drill down list, similar to what ArkivMusic has implemented. imo, this is by far the best way to navigate/discover a classical music collection, and something i’ve attempted to do with my own files. i can get it to display correctly in roon, but it takes multiple clicks to get there.
even LMS is much superior in this regard.
Returning, for better or worse, to the original poster’s complaints, here’s my Roon journey.
It can take a while to grasp the Roon approach, but once its understood, it becomes brilliant. It took me a very long time to figure this out, like a year and a half!
Coming from long time use of the iTunes universe, I was accustomed to that way of organizing music. Once I began to branch out to the various Mac audiophile players, I retained iTunes as my primary organization tool, the mothership if you will, as I traversed things like Audirvana, HQPlayer and Amarra Luxe.
The challenge with Roon is that my iTunes way of organizing my music did not readily, nor easily translate to Roon. And for a year and half, I could not grasp how to use Roon to organize music the way I wanted. I think it would be clever of Roon to make this transition easier for those transitioning from iTunes or other systems.
A huge issue for me was that in iTunes, I would organize my CD’s (3600 of them) in playlists. I didn’t use the playlist as a playlist per se, but rather a way to group specific CD’s to my particular tastes, DR ratings, etc (typical screwball audiophile stuff) and to view them in either “album” or “artist” views. This type of organization was driven not by tags or music types that the Roon “Focus” feature could understand. Instead, my system was created from my mind’s own curation sense. Focus was useless to access my music, my way because Focus has no way of understanding an individual human being’s own method of curation. And curation is the key.
I also used playlists as typical lists to play a group of tracks. When Roon imported my iTunes playlists, my “CD grouping” playlists ended up as a pile of tracks. Years of curation left by the wayside and somewhat useless in the Roon universe.
I’m a HQPlayer user, so Roon offered a massively better interface than HQP’s awful one. But for 18 months I felt at odds with Roon due to how Roon refused to give me a way to see my music as I wanted, or so I thought.
Then one day it hit me, like an epiphany, or a spiritual awakening, and a threefold path unfolded:
- Create my same iTunes playlist in Roon’s tags. Then tag each CD, all 3600 of them, manually, one by one, to go into my preferred tag. This grouped my CD’s in the way I wanted, and directly mirrored my long held iTunes centric way. With the bonus of being able to integrate Tidal and my 400 DSD albums into those same varied groups.
Now I have many tags that have essentially become folders for me, and when I open a tag, I get a nice “album” view, organized by artist. This was a major major step forward in my relationship to Roon.
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I used “Focus” to organize my “favorite” tracks of a given artist into bookmarks that I like to shuffle play. I created essentially many different folders, but did them as bookmarks instead of folders.
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I then took whatever favorite bookmarked tracks and added them to Roon’s playlists, mirroring my track playlists from iTunes, but with the welcome addition of Tidal favorites.
And now, after 18 months, my Roon library is organized the way I want it organized. With that done, I’m better able to appreciate the genius qualities of Roon and explore the many other great features without feeling so disconnected from my Roon library. I’ve gone from always about to quit Roon to someone who is ready to pay for a lifetime license because Audirvana and Amarra are stone aged in comparison.
But it took me so many hours to reorganized my 40K track library manually, one CD at a time, even one track at a time (the track part is not complete yet, but thankfully the CD part is).
I concede that Roon’s way is a better way, I totally get that. Yet it would be clever of Roon to devise a better way of automating the transition than having to go through my entire, modestly large library, manually. This lacks elegance and design finesse. Not for the Roon UI, but for the transition process. It would be more kind to customers making the transition, and it would certainly translate into broader market acceptance of Roon. And it doesn’t have to just be an iTunes transition, but a transition from a computer based folder model as well.
Its almost as if Roon is not understanding how much work we’ve put into organizing our library pre-Roon. Yes, the Roon way is better, so include in that “better way” a means to more easily transition my old library system, iTunes or otherwise, into the enlightened Roon universe.
Also, I hope Roon ups its sound quality game. On its own, Roon is perhaps the worst sounding player I’ve used. Its only because of HQPlayer integration that I’m using Roon.
All that said, Roon is brilliant. Its what iTunes should’ve grown up to be, and I’m unclear why Apple hasn’t bought Roon and made the Roon developers rich. As I’m using Roon, there’s no close second, even 9th or 10th. I do wonder about the long term viability of the high price for Roon and the lack of Spotify integration. Maybe the audiophile market is enough to keep Roon thriving? I hope so.
And so, after 18 months of complaining about Roon, I offer a fond tip of the hat.
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Can you give an example of sort of tags you are manually adding to your CD’s, and I wonder if you had added them outside of Roon could Roon then just picked them all up instead of you having to enter them within Roon itself ?
The issue surrounds transferring curation from iTunes into Roon when one first migrates.
Tags are not really a part of iTunes. My 15 years of iTunes curation that don’t easily translate to Roon fall into two categories:
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CD’s organized into playlists. The tag is the playlist itself.
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Tracks given star ratings in iTunes.
Yes, if I could create tags outside of Roon, then perhaps Roon could read those tags. Buuuut, iTunes doesn’t deal with tags. The issue is that I’d have to re-tag everything, be it outside or inside of Roon - there would be no time savings. Re-tag 15 years worth of curation, over 40K tracks and 3600 CD’s. And that’s a lot of work. The Roon developers don’t seem to grasp that iTunes playlists are not only for tracks, they are for CD’s as well.
Here are a few things that would make migration from iTunes to Roon much much easier.
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The ability to view iTunes playlists imported into Roon in not only track view, but in album and artist views as well.
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For Roon to automatically translate my iTunes track star ratings. For instance, Roon could let me set the import to take all 4 and 5 star rated iTunes tracks and have them automatically appear as “loved” in Roon.
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Another idea is for Roon to allow the option for all iTunes playlists to be automatically turned into Roon tags. For instance, I have an iTunes playlists called “John’s favorite Grateful Dead shows”. If Roon could simply turn that into a Roon tag, and automatically populate that tag with all the CD’s in that iTunes playlist, it would’ve saved me so much work. Like 30 hours, literally. And the track rating part is only 20% done.
As it is, I’ve had to re-curate every CD, and every track in my library in order to fit into Roon’s superior system. Part of Roon’s elegance and superiority needs to include a better way to migrate from library systems that differ from Roon’s. And iTunes, for better or worse, is the big fish in this particular sea.
I can see your general point, but if Roon added import from iTunes, then same thing would be requested for other applications. But if we can get that data out of iTunes and massage that data will Roon then read this additional data ?
Actually iTunes does use tags except for Wav files (where everything is stored in iTunes database) and ratings and a few other things.If using MacOS you could use a script such as https://dougscripts.com/itunes/2019/02/updated-copy-rating-stars-to-other-tag-v1-1/ to copy ratings from Itunes to another field in your music files. Then hopefully Roon could then import that data, I dont know if Roon can read external playlist counts.
You could exported your iTunes playlists to regular .m3u playlists, again there is probably a way to now import these into Roon but it is not something I have done.
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Roon already relates to iTunes by importing iTunes playlists, metadata and libraries. But yes, Roon ought to do a much better job of automatically integrating that data into Roon’s new and improved way, especially for anything that might be construed as curation because Roon’s Focus feature can’t understand iTunes curation. I ought not have to go through 3600 CDs one by one…
Of course itunes deals with tags, it is built on tags. You can easily view all of them (well, the ones Apple allows you to see) when selecting columns to display in title view.
Using the star rating to like a track in roon should be a no brainer.
Apart from that you are right: Import of curated content leaves a lot to be desired. This is most probably because roon relies on external curation (or external metadata=tags) which is pretty helpful for the majority of users, that never cared to groom their collection the way you do.
•Begin rant•
I have never seen the “light” when it comes to grading tracks in my library. First of all, why keep tracks in your library that you don’t particularly care for? And the rest all have their optimal situation where they are excellent! (~5 stars) and in another situation/mood they are merely good (~3 stars)…
I fail to see the use of those stars also, when would i ever play my 3 or 4 star tracks? And at what time is all of my 5 starred tracks perfect for the mood?
Nah, loose the star ratings and i really don’t care for Roons Favorite/Ban option either. 
•/Rant over•
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I do like Roons Favorite/Ban option very much, especially the Ban option.
I am an album listener when I do serious listening, and in such case I do like more complex tracks to play.
However, listening to Roon Radio whilst doing other things, I prefer not to have difficult or complex songs to play.
The Ban function at track level (or even album level) is perfect for this.
Dirk
I agree that the iTunes 1 - 5 star rating system is overkill. I rely heavily upon Roon’s favorite (heart vs no heart) system. When I listen an album for the first time I rate each track. The second time through I utilize “play only favorites”, a feature that’s a great deal more useful than iTunes’ star rating.
There a few perfect albums out there. I listen to whole albums so I don’t care about track ratings. But, there are plenty of songs in my collection I don’t like. But, they are part of albums I do like so they stay in the collection.
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It must be time to call it a day on this thread?