Make Focus an "OR" operation instead of "AND"

It does not work for me or I am doing something wrong

Same here :frowning:

Put me down as seemingly the only guy that likes the new logic. Was pleasantly surprised when I found it had changed. It just seems right to me that, when you add criteria, the number of results is reduced. But I understand why people would be annoyed.

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I like it - like you I think it makes much more sense - but it has messed up quite a few of my bookmarks. I think that’s what’s causing the frustration for now, not that it’s changed for the better, but because it messes up the way people have organised things up till now.

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But, tags aren’t dynamic. They must be manually updated. Bookmarks are updated automatically when you add new matching content.

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I think I’ve found temporary solution to live with it right now! Actually we still can make tags consisting of tags and use it instead of bookmarks. I’ve tried it and it works for My Albums page. Like that:

Moreover if we activate shuffle from Tags page it works like before and not just these ridiculous 5000 tracks.

No, if you make a tag of tags and update inner tags their parent tag automatically updates just like bookmarks. Because it’s connected just with another tags and not directly to content of these tags.

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Tags must be applied manually. They are not dynamic like bookmarks.

Exactly, all my tabs have stopped working. You have to remove and check one by one.

Can you explain how this would work in my case? My Bookmark worked, because it organised all 1350 ECM albums chronologically. I could switch from new to old or old to new with just one click. This made searching easy. I have all 1350 albums in a Tag. But this is a random mess without any possibility to sort the albums chronologically. This makes searching an impossible task and makes the Tag useless to me. Or am I missing something?

And here…

But you’re right, the problem is that we can’t add to tags such things like labels, just albums, artists, tracks and composers. And in that case they will not update dynamically. Actually the problem is broader and I’ve been thinking about it for a long time that we need full-fledged section for Labels like Artists and Albums.

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Yeah, I’ve already written about it that unfortunately that doesn’t work with labels since you can’t add label to a tag directly. :frowning:

It works just for those items that you can directly add to a tag. I mean if you add several albums to “85” and several to “86” and want to dynamically filter all albums with these tags you can use another parent tag (e.g. “85+86”) consisting just of “85” and “86” and not the albums directly. And then use this tag instead of bookmark. In that case if you add another album to “85” it will automatically appear in the Focus under the “85+86”.

R_Neal, I feel your pain. I’ve seen the “negate the entire” bookmark explanation twice now and no one has explained how to do that. The logic of negate the genres you’re looking for, then negate the selection that comes up makes sense, but there is no explanation of that second step.

I’m glad some folks are happier with the focus using AND instead of OR, but if Roon were going to add the AND functionality then this should pretty obviously have been a choice left up to the user. I also have several playlists that were bookmarks of focused selections (e.g. hearted songs in the Dream Pop, Shoegaze, and Ambient Pop genres). Also entertainingly, it seems many other users, like myself, had a focused bookmark of albums from ECM Records and ECM New Series, or some such ECM focused bookmark… I find it funny ECM, a stellar label btw, might get a tiny amount of publicity form this problem.

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I totally agree that we need back this functionality with “OR” logic. But such temporary solution may be helpful in some scenarios and use cases: when your bookmark consists only of the tags that you manually handle, then you can use another “parent” tag instead of a bookmark and it will be updated automatically, and as usual you should handle only “children” tags.

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The problem I have with the Tag solution, which I think others might share, is that tags took a hit in this upgrade. You can no longer see what tags or playlists an individual track belongs to on the album page. With the subtraction of the add tags button next to the tags under an album or artist, tags became a bit harder to handle. Also, tags are a manual process, whereas a focused bookmark automatically updates based on some other piece of metadata.

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Roon should revert this back to the way it worked in 1.7 (“or”) for now. The change introduces something nobody was using and breaks what everybody was using. (How did this get past beta?)

If they want to implement “and” it should be optional/configurable per bookmark, and old bookmarks should default to “or”.

If they want to implement “and/or” per element (would need to somehow have parentheses, too?), they should convert old bookmarks to all “or”.

@danny

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Ok, one more time:

  1. Tags cannot replace all automatic functionality that you can do with Focus, I didn’t say that.
  2. This solution just for those who’re already used to manually manage a lot of tags and use bookmarks for filtering albums by ten tags at the same time: to be more precise, want to get union of sets. Now such bookmarks are broken because use now “tag1” AND “tag2” logic instead of “tag1” OR “tag2” logic and show us not union of sets but intersection of sets. But we still can get union of tags with “parent” tag that we don’t need to handle manually.
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How do we negate the whole bookmark?

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