I’m not sure where to post this. I’ve been on ROON for a year now and love it but the one thing I cant figure out how to do is make a playlist from previously tagged tracks. For years I used JRiver and I meticulously tagged everything. For all of my Christmas Music I gave it the Tag: Christmas under Genre. For Life of me I cannot figure out how to find all those tracks in ROON and compile them into different playlist. This whole “Focus:” thing still confuses me a year later. I’d really be grateful if some one could help me get this.
If you go into Tracks or Albums, you can filter by tag by pressing the little tag icon to the right of the heart icon:
From there, select your “Christmas” tag.
Then, you can save that as a Bookmark, which is dynamic, like a Smart Playlist, but a little less confusing (although Bookmarks don’t work in ARC; only Smart Playlists do.). If you do need to convert your Bookmark to a Smart Playlist that works in ARC, choose this button after selecting the Bookmark:
When you say tag, do you mean the built in tagging system in Roon? If that’s the case it will show in the menu to the left under “my tags”
This is how I have sorted my Xmas music. Easy access when I need. Can also use Focus as mentioned and save as bookmark.
If it’s tagging using mp3 tag software then someone else need to chime in, but I do think it’s possible to import those in Roon.
When I said I tagged those Christmas tracks, I used the term incorrectly. What I actually did, from within JRiver I used ID3 tags to change the genre of the Christmas music from whatever it was to “Christmas” As you know, genres in Roon don’t carry over. Now when I click the tag icon and insert the word Christmas, only 5 Albums with the word Christmas show up, likewise if I use the search or filter, none of those tracks (or Albums) show up.
I came from JRiver also, so maybe I can help here. Roon and JRiver are so different, both in operation and terminology, that it takes quite a while to catch on to the other’s ways if you switch between them. For example, it took me a while to understand that in Roon, albums have a genre, individual tracks do not. This was the key to understanding how to handle this situation.
I made sure all my Christmas albums had a “Holiday” genre. Then, I created a tag called “HolidayMusic” and gave all my Christmas tracks this tag. I tried calling the tag “Holiday” originally, but this seemed to confuse the software (or maybe just me!) and produced inconsistent results.
This made creating a playlist - whether using albums or tracks - easy and reliable. It also makes it easy to hide Christmas music during the rest of the year. Under “My Albums,” I exclude all with the “Holiday” genre, and under “My Tracks,” I exclude all with the “HolidayMusic” tag. Works like a charm!
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When you create your own tags in Roon, do not re-use an existing Roon genre tag; it has caused issues for me in the past. At the moment, “Christmas”, “Holiday”, and “Holidays” are all genres in Roon. Use “Xmas”, “MyHoliday”, or “Holiday_Music” as tags instead.
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In MP3tag, you need to populate either the ROONALBUMTAG or ROONTRACKTAG. See this section of the Roon Tag FAQ:
https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/tags#ROONALBUMTAG__ROONTRACKTAG fields.
If you add a tag in the file, then Roon will see and pick it up. Careful not to double tag an album in Roon and in the file metadata as that can cause an issue.
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