Making Roon more like physical media

[miguelito (Miguel Barrio)]

I have been giving this a lot of thought… IMHO, one of the key features of physical media is that you’re forced to grab an album to play, and more often than not we play the entire album. Another feature is the visibility of it all - clutter adds in rediscovery of good stuff. A very important one - to me - is album art.

For starters, I have one suggestion:
In the “Sort By” pulldown, add a “shuffle” or “random” sort. So for example, if I go into Albums view, and I focus on Blues not Played in the last year, I would like to go to the Sort By toggle and choose “random” or similar.

I think this is a fairly simple feature request… If this thread becomes hot, I (or anyone else obviously) bring other forms of adding the features of clutter to the Roon experience.

[Martin_Webster]

In the “Sort By” pulldown, add a “shuffle” or “random” sort.

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, but why would you need this when there is the Shuffle play action on that screen?

I’ve gone to Albums and used Focus for +Blues and -Played in the last Year.

[miguelito (Miguel Barrio)]

Perhaps I’ve misunderstood, but why would you need this when there is the Shuffle play action on that screen?

Because I don’t just want to shuffle all of the tracks that came up. I want a shuffled view of all my albums with the focus I chose, and then decide I want to play that album I used to play in the summer of 2007 because it became visible in the shuffle and play that.

I care a lot about playing albums and I (fergodsake!!!) DO NOT want my album tracks shuffled.

[BrianW (Brian)]

There’s an old thread - but still current - about this

I'd like for Roon to choose albums randomly

I’d like for Roon to choose albums randomly. It’d be fun for evenings at home.

The thread also mentions a Roon extension which “may help if you’re feeling adventurous”.

Roon Extension: Random Radio v0.2.0 (do the album shuffle)

Short Description Roon Extension to play random tracks or albums Description Within the Roon Community there are quite regularly queries regarding the randomness of shuffle and the lack of the option to play random albums. After reading about this I asked myself the question if it can be done via the Roon API and I thought it was worth a try. This is what I ended up with, I hope it fills a gap. Just Random The extension uses the Browse API to get access to the tracks and albums in your library a…

[miguelito (Miguel Barrio)]

Will look at that, if anything to understand how that works.

But I don’t just want to shuffle all albums… I want the shuffle to dig up something I don’t see in the sea of albums. And then I would like to pick that album I had forgotten about, or that I never listened to but looks interesting and somehow is in my library, and play just that.

[miguelito (Miguel Barrio)]

Does anyone know if it might be possible to do this via an extension?

[SKBubba]

I have been giving this a lot of thought… IMHO, one of the key features of physical media is that you’re forced to grab an album to play, and more often than not we play the entire album. Another feature is the visibility of it all - clutter adds in rediscovery of good stuff. A very important one - to me - is album art.

You don’t have all your albums sorted alphabetically?

[miguelito (Miguel Barrio)]

No. But even if I did, this would make it BETTER than clutter-finding.

[Charles_Peterson]

I get what you are saying having just switched from an external to an internal HD on my ROCK, the album sorting got all messed up (date added and most played). Which is okay because it forced me to discover things I’d forgotten about. So a random album sort (or artist) would help get away from the always feeling stuck at the beginning of the alphabet syndrome.