Me too! And Banning is a great way to influence Roon’s music discovery features. For instance, I listen to a lot of blues and blues-rock, and because of this, Stevie Ray Vaughan regularly appears in my daily mixes and on Roon Radio. I don’t want that; being of a certain age I have been thoroughly fire-hosed with SRV’s music.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s a phenomenal player, but one I’ve been saturated with and don’t need to “discover,” - so I banned him. That doesn’t mean I don’t ever want to hear him. It just means I’ll only hear him when I dial up Texas Flood, Live Alive, or The Sky is Crying, and choose to.
And now, those slots that Stevie Ray might have taken have been freed up for new music I may like.
It would be odd to ban an artist or album you bought, but I can see a reason why you might (You never want it in your curated music selections). I think what’s odd is the way this USED to work. To ban an artist you had to actually add them to your library. Talk about counterintuitive. (Programmatically, I know why it was necessary though)
Good question @Menzies! If you ban an artist we won’t include them in your Collaborator’s carousel recommendations. But ban icons won’t be extended to other albums or tracks per se - you’ll only see ban icons on the stuff you’ve physically banned. You can find even more details on the expanded banning functionality in our blog.
OK well it is not one-click banning, but it did not take too long to ban everything by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers after “Blood Sugar…”, everything by Eric Clapton after he left Cream, and everything by The Who except “My Generation” and one version of “A Quick One…”. For people with detailed unreasonable prejudices this new feature is very useful.
The only thing I can think this is useful for is the Roon Radio feature which would pull from outside your favorites and possibly the recommendation section.
So far I’ve only banned one artist - Red Hot Chili Peppers. Every time I played Nirvana or equivalent, the goddamn RHCP was the first thing on Radio after the album ended.
Use Focus > Banned (in library) in the Artist browser and in the Track browser…
For bans outside your library, I don’t think Roon will give you a list itself - you’ll have to make that list. All the Help article on banning says is:
To unban content outside your library, search for the specific content you banned and click “Unban this” from the context menu.
I create a tag named “BANNED” and apply it at the same time that I ban something, so I can find it in the future. But it makes the whole banning proccess more cumbersome
