I’m considering subscribing again after a number of years using other players. My library is mostly classical, some pop/jazz, but my main concern with Roon was metadata inflexibility. I don’t maintain tags, and have everything I need in my file structure (composer/pop artist->album->track). My questions:
Do you now allow browsing of the library folder structure for playback selection?
Assuming no …
I used to build tags for Roon with dBpoweramp, and populate the artist tag with the composer or pop artist in the format “Lastname, Firstname”. You informed me this format bypassed your “object-oriented” overrides for artist, instead using that literal for the artist sort, which worked well for me. However, you consistently warned me that was not guaranteed to remain. Has that changed? Btw, if I didn’t supply tags things were inconsistently categorized (read below for more on why).
I used to flag everything to “use file” in the library settings, but sometimes that setting was ignored and your metadata was imposed. Because my library contains a lot of unrecognized Japanese releases of classical music, your approach made for a very mixed bag of results for artists, albums, and composition groupings. Does your library manager now truly allow file names to take precedence per the library settings?
My preference would be to use your player with my file structure, or secondly my tags, but my tags only! Thanks for you time. Your detailed answers will help me make my decision.
No, and the answer will remain no regardless of how often you ask. Roon made this abundantly clear. If this is a dealbreaker for you, Roon is not for you.
I’d like Roon to speak for themselves. If you’d managed to comprehend my entire post you would’ve seen this wasn’t a dealbreaker, assuming other things were possible.
This kind of response reminds me there were other problems …
You can wait a long time until Roon responds to point 1. I said “IF” it is a dealbreaker, it’s yours to decide. Anyone can comment, Roon and others, and even I. Goodbye.
Welcome back but If you care to search the forum there are many posts asking the same thing. The same answer is always given and has been by Roons management many times so I would not expect a reply from them. Roon does not and will not support folder browsing for navigation of your library. It’s not something they have ever considered in their vision for the product, infact their loathing of that method is partly why Roon exists. There are plenty of other alternatives that offer folder hierarchy browsing if this is what you require.
As for metadata you can use your own but this may not guarantee it will work as well if as it may well stop it from matching releases to one’s in its metadata sources. It’s best to not fight Roons methods if you want the best experience. They have a vision and a way of working they favour, you might not agree with it but that’s how it is it’s daring to be different you go with it or you don’t. Again there are plenty of alternatives that only use your metadata.
Thanks for the thoughtful response @CrystalGipsy. Roon’s classical metadata was sloppy for years, and absent for the types of releases I described. Roon’s response was often about how great their object-oriented programming was – a useless response to brag about a tool which doesn’t address the requirement being discussed. Oh well, as expected, moving on.