I add my music folders by genre, so when holiday season is over, i’d simply deactivate my storage folder called “Christmas”.
Or rather, don’t have music in your lib, that you dont want to hear…
Other than that, thanks for letting us know your gripes with Roon, you are not alone, but there are many other views also.
Atb /Mike
The ‘browse by folder’ request comes up fairly often, and Roon just don’t want to go there. To be honest, you can train yourself off thinking this way - but despite Roons stance, I have to think folders when I add music to my library, why can’t I have the option to think folders when I retrieve it?
Me neither.
IMHO 2 weeks is far too short for a true evaluation of ANY software. Try some development software – I think MS Visual Studio is useless as I couldn’t learn its foibles in 2 weeks 
Roon offers many alternate routes to do the same thing , only digging deeper and asking questions really allows a full appreciation.
Roon is not perfect , there are many post by me stating so and where it has shortfalls but at the moment there is no other music software that comes close.
I freely admit to using JRiver to get around some of MY percived limitations eg Big Box Sets but I still persevere with Roon.
You can’t hope to influence change in any features if you don’t contribute to suggestions to improve .
Initially after the 2 weeks , I did the $120 Longer trial for 12 months , after that I think you can have an opinion, at 2 weeks you simply haven’t seen enough to comment
Just my 2p
First I don’t think it’s a question of difficulty or complexity why Roonlabs doesn’t implement a folder view.
Second I don’t know if it would be more clever to implement it nevertheless because its lack could shy away potential customers who are used to folder browsing their music collection. But Roonlabs decided to stick to their philosophy – they have explained it quite a few times. So it’s indeed out-of-scope.
I get the point behind the philosophy to not rely on hierarchical structures when using (or just exploring) a library. Any modern library does it that way. The shelves you still find there are more decoration than storage and most of what a (big) library holds you may not even be able to browse by strolling along shelves because those are a few storeys down in concrete bunkers. You’d find what you want by browsing indexed and cross referenced catalogues. Then robots grab the stuff and deliver it to you so you can use it in a nice (historic) reading room …
While others mentioned work arounds I agree with you. It’s annoying and in most cases Roon could do better. I’ve requested a feature along this line a while ago but it doesn’t have priority for Roonlabs or so it seems.
As a music player, it is. As a library and multi-room solution it’s a matter of debate. To be honest, for me the most distinguishing feature compared to other solutions which are able to achieve what Roon does (more or less) is the metadata from rovi. If it’s worth the invest is really hard to tell - but it’s helpful to me most of the time.
As mentioned by others, it is possible to use focus to select which genres you would like to include in a particular view. It is also possible to select genres (among many attributes) which you would like to exclude from the view. Saving the selection set as a bookmark seems particularly powerful. Thanks for asking these questions. I had not previously paid much attention to the focus and tagging options. Now I can see a number of ways that they might be of use in my day to day listening.
PS: It might be cool to have a feature in the hamburger navigation to add bookmarks to this list.
I would have appreciated a longer trial period - I think a month would have been reasonable. Perhaps with a bit more time people would ask questions in the forum rather than post needlessly aggressive assertions. Maybe not though, there’s no pleasing some people.
We aren’t defending Roon. Some of your comments come from a lack of knowledge. Roon is different and requires some effort to fully exploit it. The “focus” and “bookmark” functions in Roon allows for several of the issues you’ve commented on. Apparently you are unaware of it. Did you use this forum to find out how to solve issues you had during the trial? Doesn’t sound like you did.
Folders - you are stuck on that method of navigation and don’t get that Roon works another way. You are free not to like it, but Roon ihas chosen not to use folder view and has a much more sophisticated method of navigation and one more suited to modern technology. We can also get to our albums in Roon in 5 seconds. Folder view isn’t necessary for that.
Tagging- there is no perfect tagging solution. Tagging isn’t standard, and record labels tag haphazardly, so there isn’t any software that doesn’t have issues. Roon does allow you to re-tag and display your files using those tags.
MPD doesn’t stutter on the same files - means something is amiss in your Roon setup. Roon has no issue with even much bigger file formats/sizes.
We get that Roon isn’t for you. But that was a foregone conclusion since you seem to have approached it with a closed mind and didn’t use your trial period to find out how to use it the way it should be used.
I’ve partially gotten around this by creating “genres” that I don’t want played and then not including them in my focus groups and bookmarks. If, for example, I don’t include the “christmas” genre in my focus groups, I can call up my groups and those songs don’t appear.
You can ask for an extension of the two week trial. I did when I first used Roon.
I should have asked!
Anyway I took the plunge and am really happy I did.
I’m not going to patronise you, because you’ve already had a bunch of that in the replies, but on:
Spotify doesn’t provide the APIs for the integration Roon needs.
Roon’s decision to eschew folder hierarchy is a deliberate, fundamental design decision. Perhaps they should make it clearer in their marketing, but it’s implied and whatever your personal views on it, I applaud them for the lack of metooism. There are literally dozens of alternatives if that’s a requirement.
The cost thing is a perennial chestnut. I’ve argued for a Roon to provide a monthly sub option but it is what it is. That’s a personal value judgement. The thing I’m in violent disagreement about is that it’s just a music player. For me, that is very far down the list of its capabilities in terms of curation and new music discovery.
Yah. That’s the thing.
Digital music on CDs was pretty drab absent the album covers.
Once the digital files got pulled out you could tag them, store them, rearrange them all you want. Still pretty dull, but it gave you something to do.
Roon was an “AHA!” moment for me. It used the metadata to show me how music was inter-related. It became fun and easy to jump from one album/bio hyperlink to another, and in so doing find another genre of music I hadn’t heard about. This was a whole new dimension to music enjoyment I’d never thought of.
Roon is about music curation and new music discovery. Well said.
Roon has been a complete ‘game changer’ for me. And I’m someone who just wants, and uses it as a ‘simple music player’.
I came to Roon very skeptical, and from using the Lumin app with my A1. However great the Lumin control app is, Roon is light years ahead, and it’s been one of my best music-related purchases, up there with my aged Linn LP12, Lumin A1 and Chord Hugo TT 
Once you add a significant number of albums to your library from an online service such as Tidal a folder view is not much use.
My own view on this is that makes it total sense for Roon to encourage users to use metadata rather than folder view since folder view only provides a single (usually album artist/album) view that is very limiting. However I do think a folder view is useful to help resolve issues, for example Roon may identify an album as being by a different artist then the user expects, and then if they can only rely on the metadata they are unable to find this.
I give an example of this using my SongKong tagger, a user used SongKong to identify and also (optionally) reorganize their folder structure, they then complained that some of their Frank Zappa albums had disappeared. The issue was that some of the albums were really by the Mothers of Invention and had been moved accordingly, but this distinction was unimportant to customer. If we apply the same situation to Roon we can see that if the user could browse by folder structure then they could quickly work out what had happened, without this ability it is rather more difficult to track down such an issue.
I get it, a folder view is irrelevant with integrated streaming services. But many of us come from a local library mentality… I find myself often clicking “view file info” to find and sort out tagging issues.
Clearly Roon is not a fit for the OP. Thats fine, Roon is a niche product and clearly the OP is not part of this market. Kkthxbye move on, and let’s discuss stuff that’s actually interesting.
Then go look at the folders in your OS.
Yes, a “view file info” in Roon to get the path… then open this path on a pc/Mac to edit. You can’t get away from dealing with folders, even if Roon won’t entertain it.
You want Roon to replicate views that are available elsewhere because…?
