Dear all,
Browsing in the history of topics, one can already find many ideas and contributions to enhance Roon playlists : we already have been many Roon users asking for more features, more ease of use, nesting and crossing, more versatility, flexibility and interoperability with playlists from Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Qobuz, etc…
Most of these aren’t obsolete. In fact, since 2016 (!) playlist functionalities have remained a notorious weakness in Roon.
Now we are in 2023, playlists are ubiquitous in Internet music and a quantum leap of Roon playlist functionalities has become more than desirable! If Roon team would gather and make a synthesis of all suggestions, they already have enough material to create something like a quantum leap in playlist possibilities, and to make Playlists another strong point in Roon.
If you would, like us, see the quantum leap or steep progress needed to really get there in Roon in 2023, say it in this topic please!
To trigger Roon team’s attention, the number of contributors to this topic will matter: let alone with a small comment or like in this topic, or another suggestion, everyone can help trigger attention and speed up playlist software evolution for Roon in 2023!
Best regards,
CD
Anyone wants to start ?
Today I made a topic search for Playlist topic in Roon.
It says over 50 but after browsing over 200, the rolling list stopped and I was told to narrow my search… What appears from this quick browsing is a large number of user requests for more functionalities…awaiting a proportionate response beyond some bug fixes, as real software enhancements!
I am a heavy Playlist user. Here my 2 main concerns:
1 - My biggest concern with Playlists is the inability to click and drag “multiple” songs in a playlist to reorder them. Current capability requires doing this one at a time which is a horrendous waste of time.
2- When using Playlists the filter option is not frozen at the top, so if I want to change filters I have to scroll back to the top rather than it being pinned for quick changes.
#1 is a critical deficiency, #2 simply an irritation.
Yes, please put some effort into playlist management tools, Roon team! My top request would be the ability to organize playlists into folders/subcategories in order to reduce the clutter in the “playlists” section, where I have dozens of playlists that I’ve had to attempt to organize by putting non-alpha characters at the beginning of their names (because at least things prefaced with “+” float to the top).
Having been able to move multiple files in Windows File Explorer for decades, a few years ago, I found Roon’s deficiency in moving multiple tracks in a Playlist shocking!
Also today, I ran across this interesting oversight/deficiency. After sorting files in a Playlist, you can’t play them in the sequence sorted…again pretty shocking.
Exactly Sir!
The current and longstanding inability to make a selection of items in a playlist to move them at once is just one deficiency among many, in an increasingly obvious negligence from Roon team to … address a longstanding sollicitation to make a strength out of a persistent weakness.
Roon could easily change that and make PLAYLISTS a versatile playground for users, who should be able to manipulate and curate these at will and with flexibility : group and nest, modify and refine, cross and merge, address uniqueness of tracks, make searches within playlists and/or tags, etc…
What have you, that could be done with a minor programming effort compared to the vast amounts of improvements made recently on other grounds !
I read a long time ago, a Roon Admin stating they don’t know playlists. That is very obvious in these deficiencies. The limited complaints about this indicates playlists are not a priority for their main demographic. But playlists are a current Roon capability so it baffles me it is so much below the rest of this otherwise great product.
I do the numeric prefix too for genre and sub-genre and it works fine. 040- Mainstream Jazz, 041 - Soul Jazz, 042 - Modern Jazz, 043 - ECM, 044 - Jazz Fusion, etc
It seems that the Roon team almost has been consistently refusing to listen to these repeated requests. Two years have passed and the playlist weakness just appears weaker as many other strong points are being reinforced.
Now, is it a person’s or team vision issue or a business model thing ? Could Roon think that if you have superbly working playlists, you are possibly happy with the music you have and less inclined to exploring recent ones, possibly leading to less active subscriptions of streaming ?
Arguably, at least for Apple Music - iTunes, there has never been an obvious antagonism between having playlists that are easy to manipulate and use, and streaming new music !
So, I like to have my Playlists and I really would like the building, manipulation and usage of these to be efficient. Sometimes I am in the mood for exploring new music via streaming. Sometimes I am fully happy with my oldies but goldies best grouped in my playlists.
No opposition between those usages of Roon !
Rather, a good PLAYLIST TOOLBOX, beyond being useful to the listener, because it would also facilitate the construction of consistent playlists, could in turn greatly assist innovative AI tools to provide more accurately targeted individual recommendations!
I am also a Qobuz subscriber. I stream AND I purchase music, stored on a local drive.
With Harmon’s recent acquisition, maybe Playlists will get a much needed review and overhaul. As a heavy user of Playlists, there is nothing I would like to see more than perhaps a reduction in Roon’s yearly rental fee.
@Christian_DEPLANTE Good argument in an attempt to understand the Roon team’s lack of addressing some of the Playlist deficiencies itemized in this thread.
While the inaction re Playlists, may have been a business decision based on monetary rewards for user numbers, from on-line streamers; I would rather guess that the deficiency was simply someone’s lack of giving a bit of priority to the Playlist question/issue.
Also, I would assume that ARC’s development consumed much of Roon’s fairly recent resources.
For example, I posted AudioStyle’s founder, Chris Connaker’s not-so positive comments, among his positive ones re. ARC and those were summarily removed. I should add that nothing was in poor taste or compromised community standards. (However, with the recent events surrounding the U.S. government’s undue influence and censorship insistence over social media providers and they in turn terming anything they didn’t agree with, as being “hateful”; hateful can be a classification applied to anything not liked and as such, summarily quashed and removed! So much for the 1st. amendment!!). But I digress…
From the removal of the cons provided by someone with Chris Connaker’s industry influence, I surmised that ARC was someone’s “baby” and nothing against it would be tolerated! So much for a free expression of thoughts and ideas. This knee-jerk reaction also suggested that a significant amount of in-house love and labor was directed at the programming and the introduction of ARC. I like the idea of ARC. But I value my LAN security more than convenience. And I don’t understand how to 100% button-down outside access to my LAN, so I have declined to use ARC.
For improvements to be made, new users to be acquired and long time users maintained, comments pro and con from a user’s perspective should be allowed, if not encourage and preferred.
Since the acquisition, the Harmon gang has been encouraging user feedback. Well an analysis and prioritization of Feature Request’s (such as this one) and the Feedback Category should pretty much suffice.
What I’m sure is difficult, is the prioritization of requests and modifications. For example which requests:
Have been made the most?
Will result in keeping and attracting new users?
Can be done with the least labor and which requests will require the most labor?
As primarily a critical listener and audiophile user, my prime directive for Roon is sound quality!
My being disabled, the software being Rock Solid, is a close 2nd., (which has always been my biggest PLUS for Roon) – i.e., Roon just works!Playlist modifications fall somewhere thereafter.
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Playlist modifications fall somewhere thereafter.