Living without folders - help me work out a strategy

I know Roon now has some focus capabilities in the Track View, and they work quite well, but for me I would need this functionality in the Album View, so I’ve been considering finding another way. I’d appreciate some help and advice about this, particularly concerning how to set it up.

Let’s say my music folders look like this:

/storage/music/pop
/storage/music/rock
/storage/music/dance

At the moment, I’ve added /storage/music as a watched folder in Roon and it analyses everything in all the subfolders too. If instead, I add the individual folders, presumably I will be able to pick them from the Album View Focus Inspector, and select (for example) all albums within my /storage/music/pop folder. Does that sound like an OK strategy?

Second question, if I’ve had Roon analyse /storage/music and I want to switch to having the individual subfolders as separate watched folders, is there any way to get there without Roon having to re-analyse everything?

If I’m able to do the above, I think I might be able to drop the bone about folders.

Thanks,

Simon

Roon is doing some analysis as new features are added.
I don’t think there is an escape not to do the analysis

More info can be found here:

Hi Simon,

What I’d suggest is making

Simon,

You can focus in Album view, there is no need to re-import your folders individually.

You can use genres. If you are not happy with the genres roon selects, you could tag all the files in the folders with the “rock” tag using an editor such as mp3tag etc.

I think you can focus on location now too but, not too clear.

Hi Andybob,

I seem to be unable to read your post. I’m on tenterhooks :slight_smile:

Thanks,

Simon

Hi Matthew,

It looks to me like focus on location requires multiple separate locations to be listed, hence my idea.

I don’t really want to have to tag everything I put into the folders in future. Much easier if I can get focus by location working.

Thanks,

Simon

Well I did it. I removed my single watched folder, and added in the genre folders individually. It had to readd the music, but it DIDN’T have to reanalyse it, which is fantastic!

I now have bookmarks set for focus on each folder, and I’m now happy to survive without a folder browser in album view. Brilliant!

I do now realise that the classical stuff doesn’t get organised very well, but TBH classical doesn’t get as much listening time from me as most other genres.

2 Likes

You can also Filter By Path in the new Track Browser, and bookmark each view.

Additionally, if you tag all the tracks in a folder, you can then focus on the tag in the album view to see all the albums.