I’ll say, I’d never really worked with bookmarked focus previously or tags, despite being a six-month-ish happy Roon user with 2 ROCKs in different homes.
Based on wondering what all the fuss was about, I set out to create a few new focus & tag set-ups, and I’m psyched. If they broke because Roon reverted I’d be really miffed for a couple hours and then I’d rebuild them. But for me, this big upset has been value added because I’m now aware of a great feature I hadn’t been using before! So on that front, thank you!
Well, now that you know about it, start working with it, spend time and passion (maybe) then wait for 1.9 to break it again (by reverting back to OR for example) and then (maybe) you’ll understand all the frustration.
That being said, it looks like roon is going to fix this, I just sincerely hope they’ll implement all the cases (AND, OR, NOT) and be done with this once and for all…
I’m a long time annual user who uses Focus a lot. I liked the previous UI (at least for Focus) better, but I wouldn’t be too concerned if the functionality remained intact. Unfortunately, with the switch from OR to AND, Focus has become all but useless to me, and all my lovingly constructed bookmarks are worthless. I don’t want to use workarounds in order to shuffle lossless tracks by the Beatles, the Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. I want it to be seamless as it used to be. PLEASE consider either rolling back to the previous functionality or (better) allowing the user to configure the boolean conditions as they see fit. Thank you so much in advance.
Colorblind like purple and pink as it gives color. Outside of this I cannot think about any other reason. Blue would be my personal choice. A palette box in settings would not be difficult to add, though.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
110
Roon makes some head-scratching choices sometimes. When I first discovered that Roon had switched the logic from OR to AND I was thrilled. But…
(1) this broke everyone who was using it as OR. How could this never have been considered? Does Roon include enough power users in their betas? Or is it just all the fanboys? Why wouldn’t Roon just implement a choice of logic?
(2) the switch was only with albums, not artists or tracks, which is really bizarre given there is no indication of that difference on the pages where you use it. So tag focus on albums is AND but tag focus on artists or tracks is OR. Without the pages looking any different. That can’t be a deliberate design choice.
(3) Roon removed the ability to focus on a tag or set of tags and then view all albums or tracks under that focus. If you are on albums, you are stuck on albums alone and cannot view all tracks, or on artists, stuck on artists alone and cannot view albums – you cannot navigate levels with related objects. (Why the heck would Roon remove this ability? Seems a step back). This causes the next problem…
(4) Apply tags to an artist. Then view all albums by artists with that tag. Some will be various artists compilations. Then shuffle those albums. You get tracks from OTHER artists from those compilation albums, which can definitely break up the mood. You might be able to avoid this problem with a Tag AND Tag focus at the Track level, except that Boolean logic is still OR at the track level (see #2)
(5) While the functionality choices seem inconsistent and a little half-baked, it really doesn’t matter, BECAUSE Roon freaks out and simply gums up when you push it with decent sized tag queries. It’s the same behavior as when too many searches hung Roon and made it act very strangely. There is clearly some processing overhead with these queries that makes them go somewhat slowly but more importantly once you run one, Roon is like Tim Conway making a hot dog for Harvey Korman on the Carol Burnett show - gets confused, moves slowly, spend most of your time waiting for Roon to do something. You have to close Roon, let it calm down, and reopen.
So, please, Roon team, can you just make tags work? Just?
For much the same reason, roon can end up treating all Classical composers as essentially interchangeable because they have appeared together on large Classical compilation box-sets. Leads to very bizarre results in several views, with roon unable to make simple distinctions amongst famous composers. Mostly I find 1.8 a considerable regression to 1.7 as a Classical music manager so I don’t understand the pre-launch claims to the contrary.
Thanks for confirming that Tracks still use OR. I had been tagging a bunch of songs in a playlist when 1.8 rolled out and was fuzzy on where I left off. Since, ya know, you can’t see that anywhere on the track anymore.
So I selected all the songs in that playlist, tagged them with the name of the playlist, went to tracks, focused on the newly created playlist and then added all the rated tags, fully expecting the list to dwindle to a handful as I went though each star rating. Instead I got an unmanageable list of 1000s of songs.
I did see in a post that @brian is on the ball and looking into the best way to hopefully address all of this tagging shenanigans. So that gives me hope that we can get back to, at the very least, what we had in 1.7, if not a solution where all the “OR” and “AND” supporters can be happy.
I think actually it would be so simple to use 4 colors and have on the focus ‘tag’ +AND, -AND, +OR, -OR . Then all of this would be eaten and to satisfaction of everyone complaining for days, months, and years. Is this so difficult?? I guess not.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
114
But:
I mean, I agree with the idea that Tags should work as they did and I would certainly love to have them also empowered with flexible boolean logic.
But seriously, when you combine multiple tags, are you getting good performance? My Roon hates it, freezes, stops, starts, goes slow, doesn’t load songs and images, and all around just nearly crashes once I submit a combo tag focus using any logic. It have a quad core 3.6 with 16GB and the database on a 250GB SSD. It should not be happening.
Well-designed software doesn’t require a manual for everyday operation. Roon doesn’t provide a manual, only a KB. KB’s are notorious for being unwieldy and incomplete. But… apparently, manuals are passé.
One of the most baffling features of Roon is that the features for finding stuff are scattered throughout the UI and that there is little or no consistenty to them.
1.8 makes finding stuff a little easier for me than before, so I’m relatively happy.
On the other hand, with all the analysis that has been done ln this forum of tags, search and retrieval, one would think that the devs would finally grasp that it’s high time for consistency.
I still don’t understand why Roon is so dismissive of requests for efficient data retrieval, After all that is a basic requirement for a music player: you can’t play what you can’t (easily) find.
I like the “new” Focus and I’m finding it to be a great way of navigating my collection. I would hate to lose it - so perhaps it could be renamed and the old focus brought back as Focus. (The new one could be “Refine” or something like that?)
You can Add Genres to a Tag and then that Tag will contain all those Genres. Pull up that tag, select Show Albums and there you go. All the albums in your library that are in either of those genres.
It is actually more complicated than that… Yes, with Tracks, you can select multiple Tags, and it will use OR, so it will give you all tracks in those Tags. But if you use a different criteria, e.g. Performer, you can only select multiple Performers who are on the same track, so it uses AND. There is no way to select two Performers and make it OR… For instance if you select Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan you will only get tracks they are on together, you will not get all the tracks with each of them separately.
Yep. I pulled up all albums in jazz genre (3037 albums), selected then tagged with a new Jazz&Blues tag. Did same with blues (1286 albums). Combined tag is 4323 albums, 98 apparently in both sets. The albums in the tag are sorted alphabetically by artist name.
Filtered “Christmas” to remove these from the Tag. Right-clicked first one but couldn’t select all from the “Selected” indicator top left as I expected. Control-A did not select all either. (Have these actions been removed from the Tag screen?) Right-clicked on each of the 52 to select, clicked[…], clicked Remove from Tag.
Clicked shuffle play and did not see “shuffling 5000 tracks” message. Queue shows current track, next (single) track with thumbs up/down. Working fine.
Clicked on a non-jazz/blues album, clicked on play dropdown and the queue is counting down just the current single track - does not show a gazillion minutes in queue. So I’m guessing the 5000 limit is related to the queue display?
Any other removals from the queue to be played will have to be on the fly with a batter’s circle thumb down. Otherwise, this seems to be working well.
