More music in Roon = better?

Roon Software Discussion
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I’m getting the hang of Roon, and find myself wondering about how to approach building my library. I realize different people will have their own preferences so I’m curious how others go about it.

Thanks to Roon, TIDAL, and “select all”, I can add thousands of albums to my library in very little time. Then thanks to Roon’s focus, I can ask for “west coast rap songs released in the 00’s produced by scott storch”, or “jazz albums that I’ve never listened to, that aren’t by Miles Davis or John Coltrane” which is really cool.

(that might have just answered my question for me, but I’ll press on…)

The question is, do I add everything that could possibly be of interest to me? TIDAL is currently recommending 477 albums for me. There’s no way I can systematically and enjoyably explore those 477 in a reasonable period of time, and of course TIDAL will recommend new albums for me next week. Plus I’ll hear about albums from friends and blogs, jazz and classical artists can have hundreds of albums each… you know the deal.

What I can do is use Roon’s features to zoom in on a set of of albums / tracks / artists and use that as a starting point for shuffle or radio to explore music in the library that’s “in the ballpark.”

It seems to me that with Roon, more is better. It’s more raw material for Roon to work with, so I can get more precise with queries, and Roon can find more relationships.

At first I was worried that I’d get overwhelmed with junk that I don’t want to listen to. But it’s really easy to work with favorite albums, artists, and tracks. And if I really hate an album or artist, I can ban them.

Anyway, I’m curious how others go about exploring music with Roon. Do you add a ton of stuff and then use Roon to filter it down? Or are you more deliberate with what you add to your library?

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LOL I nearly fell off my chair. I salute you Pat and the Roon HipHop Community (I think it’s just me and @lorin ) welcomes you. Please do share your favourite selections in this thread whenever you get the chance.

I’m very deliberate myself, otherwise all that ‘other stuff’ could come up in Roon Radio mode and I’ll be needing to hit ‘next track’ more often (too often).

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Thanks :slight_smile: I am pretty thrilled to find a tool that caters to my music nerdiness, and a community that likes to engage with music in a similar way.

Yeah so this is super interesting to me… specifying some constraints seems to do a pretty good job for me. Shuffle stays squarely in those constraints, radio can get outside of it a bit. One thing I haven’t figured out is whether doing a Focus & then Radio uses the focus settings for radio or not. Sometimes if I try Radio from my tracks, it just hangs – even if focus shows just a few tracks, and the radio bar says “Playing music similar to Your Library.” So to be safe I select the songs and start the radio from there.

I have also noticed some weirdness with metadata, like a Beethoven piano sonatas album assigned to “New Age”, and a Miles Davis album as “Electronica.” So it seems worthwhile at least to examine the metadata a bit and see if it makes sense before adding it to the library.

I am leaning towards a more deliberate approach as well. I love the related / influenced by etc artists, seeing which albums I’ve not yet added, looking up composers / producers. So I can start with stuff I know I like and branch out.

One other piece for me though is speculative stuff – like suggestions from friends, or Spotify’s discover weekly. One idea I had was to add stuff to a “Check This Out” playlist, so that it’s stored in Roon but is not actually added to the library. Only problem there is that playlists allow duplicates (seems silly) and I can’t really navigate it very well.

Which leads me to this idea: add speculative albums to the library, and tag and hide them. When I want to explore that music, I can search on the tag and unhide the albums. Then when I’m done, I hide those tagged albums again. That way I can use Roon’s full power to explore that music, but without “polluting” my main library.

I don’t want to overthink this (too late) and I feel that Roon is powerful enough that I can just move forward without getting into trouble down the road… but I also want to share my thinking because I’m sure I’m not the first person to think along these lines, and I would like to benefit from other peoples’ experience.

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I tend to add and prune in spurts. Sometimes I’ll add 5-10 Albums from the Listening to Now thread. Other times I’ll Focus on Tidal content not played in the last 6 months, Shuffle it and delete with merciless rigour anything I no longer like.

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Hi Pat

I currently have around 10000 albums in my collection, accrued over the last 30 years or so. With the addition of Tidal as a source it sort of seems like we have free access to the biggest music shop in the world and “adding to library” is like a free purchase.

I would still advise a little caution when adding, just so you can mentally assimilate what you are adding even in passing. Spending just 5 minutes or so when adding an album to listen to snippets and reading bios/reviews, is worthwhile. Then you can have at least some ongoing working knowledge of what you are acquiring.

Additionally, recently I’ve taken to tagging and bookmarking in Roon to highlight genres more accurately to my taste and marking New Albums, Artists and Tracks, for easy future retrieval. This might be something that appeals to your “nerdiness”, it certainly appeals to mine!

By personalising your collection, even virtual, it can give you a sense of ownership which we just don’t have when faced with an anonymous and enormous, unthinkably large library to tap into of 30, 40 or even 50 million tracks.

In principal you are right, however, more music in Roon is better :slight_smile: - I see Roon as applying an encyclopedic overlay to my collection. It’s brilliant!

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Ps… Pat… you might want to check out my thread here…

It’s right up your street!

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Thanks for the replies everyone. @Sallah_48 I did see the “How do you Roon” thread, and I think I will continue the conversation over there…