My wishful-thinking ARC workflow

Roon Software Discussion ARC
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Hi,

I use ARC, and I like it. However, sadly it doesn’t integrate well with one of the main ways I use Roon. Given there’s an interest in improvement suggestions right now, I thought I’d just describe what I want to do and then I’m sure I’ll hear that I’m doing it all wrong and it’s impossible… but technically it’s not impossible, so perhaps things will develop.

One: In Roon, my main way of listening to music day-in day-out is to add stuff to the play queue – from recommendations, from stuff I happen to find online, whatever. I discover loads of new music this way and add whatever I like most to my library. I should mention that almost all this music comes from streaming sources, I use both Qobuz and Tidal. Right now my queue has about 5 days of music still to come.

One a: (If I want to specifically listen to something else, usually in the evening, something “out of order” of the queue, I usually export the queue content to a playlist so I can restore it later and go back to where I was the next day. Not optimal… could be more automatic for my taste! How about multiple play queues that can be switched manually?)

Two: When I travel, a short trip by a car or a long trip by plane, I would like to use ARC to jump directly into the same play queue and continue where I left off just before. If I find something worthy of going in the library, I’d do this in ARC and I want it to modify my Roon library. If I access the same play queue again later after my return, I want progress to by synced again.

Three: If I know my upcoming trip will include a timeframe without connectivity, I want to tell ARC “please download the next 8 hours of queued music for offline listening”. As I’m traveling I will then keep listening to the queue using the offline copies of the music, and when I have connectivity again I want the queue state to by synced again.

So… that’s it. Interesting… this is the kind of workflow where my grandfather would have said “makes good sense, what do you mean you can’t do that yet?”

How far away are we? Maybe I’m missing something?

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I’ve thought about how cool this would be myself. Since we can already move a queue from one zone to another, it seems like a natural future enhancement that I’ve assumed will get done at some point. It might be good to move this to Feature Suggestions

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I too would make a long queue for the week but sometimes want to listen to other stuff. This goes back to my iPod/iTunes days almost 20 years ago.

I started using the transfer to another zone option to “save” a in progress Q and use another. That works until the zone you saved to doesn’t exist on the next device you use. ARC is off on its own. And I wish you could use the desktop client to access ARC (at work for example, so I can connect my DAC to the laptop dock instead of my phone which I need to keep unplugging for every meeting I go to).

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Isn’t this really what playlists were made for or am I just missing something. The queue as far as I am concerned isn’t a holding area.

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And how does a playlist facilitate the workflow I described, or improve any detail of it?

For me, the queue makes more sense. I use playlists for things I want to remember and get back to. The play queue is a queue for things I’m going to play… which is exactly what I’m using it for.

For purposes of this workflow I outlined, I really don’t care either way. If a playlist did exactly what I want, I’d happily use a playlist.