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”.
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Ok, one more time:
- Tags cannot replace all automatic functionality that you can do with Focus, I didn’t say that.
- 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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Alexander, I did not mean to say you were proposing this was a great fix. I did not even know, until you mentioned it, that you could have a tag of tags. You are right, that does solve some of this, and if people used tags extensively rather than focused bookmarks it’s probably a pretty good solution. It is just annoying though because the focused bookmarks worked well, and dropping the OR logic does not seem to make sense.
The handling of Boolean logic is complex from a UI perspective. But the fact that Roon’s implementation has changed with no heads-up or comment in the release notes makes me think it is clearly an unintentional bug. @Support - what say you about this? (Or if you already have, can you point me to it?)
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But if you’ve already added those albums to a tag, you can only select that tag in the Focus section of My Albums page and get all 1350 albums. The downside to this approach is that you have to manually add albums to the tags, but sorting and everything else on My Albums page will work.
Just to clarify, the old logic was not all OR.
For the whole pre-history and history, the focus logic has been:
- Within one category, like label, its OR (so you can include all the ECM sub-labels)
- Across multiple categories, such as label and genre, it was AND (so you can see Deutsche Gramophone choral)
This matched well the common cases, without having to get into Boolean logic.
Changed to all AND.
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It will take some years and a lot of frustrated users (me included) and in the end maybe they’ll realize the power of views customization (JRiver)…
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I see what you mean. It’s a partial workaround, but as you mention yourself, it hasn’t got the functionality of the bookmark.
My bad - Bookmarks cannot be negated (I was not at my PC when I offered that idea). So this won’t work 100%. I’ll tinker some more to see if there’s other potential workarounds. Regardless, this should definitely be raised as a bug so at the very least they put it back to OR as it was.
Long term they should really expand the functionality so the user can choose AND/OR/NOT as needed. Not holding my breath though…
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I have something like 40 Genres of music defined in my collection. About 5 relate to Jazz.
I wanted a focus group that includes all my Jazz, and nothing else, so I needed to make a group with 35 negative genres.
Then I have to save it as a “tag” and make a bookmarked focus group that includes that tag.
This is instead of just directly making a focus group with 5 positive genres - which is what I could do if there was an OR option in Focus.
Please tell me how this makes sense.
You need to bring back at least the option for the OR operation.
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I am probably over-simplying and under-thinking it, but it seems the following could satisfy everyone:
Default: Show all albums that I own in CD AND Vinyl
One click: Show all albums that I own that are either CD OR Vinyl
Two clicks: Show all albums that are NOT CD and NOT Vinyl
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Why are you blaming beta testers for not finding this stuff? The CEO of the company couldn’t even be bothered to use the app before releasing it to hit bugs like shuffle and find his bookmarks broken. Does Roon even have a QA team? Regardless, this is such basic stuff that either it’s slipped in at the very end or they just don’t care. I have a strong feeling they won’t address how they miss these obvious bugs that make them look unprofessional.
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That would be great.
Because I found this issue within 3 minutes…
Yes, and what dev, designer or Roon employee using 1.8 didn’t hit it in 3 minutes either? What are you defending here? Only beta users are supposed to hit the most basic bugs a 5 minute basics checklist would reveal?