I use an iPhone most of the time to access roon as a remote from my couch. I’m enjoying the 1.8 release for the most part so thanks.Now for the little gripes from my point of view of some things that have bugged me in the ‘New Releases for You’ section:
When I’m looking at new albums it takes a couple of clicks and a scroll to find out what genre the music is. I find myself going through new releases, clicking on the album, clicking on info, scrolling down a bit to reveal what genre tags the album has. For some reason my brain goes through mental gymnasitcs everytime I do this, as I look at the cover and I wonder “What kind of music is this? Electronic? Classical? Neo-Folk/Soul?” I eventually get there, but my preference would be to have some kind of genre right in the home page pane. There seems to be enough room to have at least one tag shown so I’d know if it’s speed metal or ambient music before I click play. It just feels like there’s too much investigation and scrolling around before I’m confident that I’d want to play the music, and having the genre placed more easily visible would help eliminate that friction. I know you can click the ‘more’ button for the New Releases album list and sort by genre, but this page could also just use genre indicated along with the title and artist.
And then if you do have it sorted by genre on the New Release page, once you’ve scrolled down the page, clicked on an album, and then gone back, the page completely resets and scrolls back to the top and removes the genre selection. It does this on the mobile and desktop version.
For me the review is another thing I want to know about in the, but I have to click and scroll a to find out if there is one there (and on the mobile it’s buried in the ‘info’ and you need to scroll down even farther past the genre tags). Could there be a symbol to put on the top level album view or home page that indicates a release includes a review, along with genre?
Lastly, the ‘Sort by Newest’ and ‘Sort by Relevance’ toggle here has been removed from the front page on the desktop version, and I actually would like to know how I’m seeing the front page sorting. I have always wanted that toggle visible on the mobile version as well, there’s certainly enough room for it.
I know the designers are trying to make it feel ‘airy’ in this new version, but I’d rather have functionality where it’s needed so users don’t find themselves needlessly flipping back and forth between one view and another, or clicking and scrolling where less clicks/scrolls could get to the same information or functionality. Where the pre-1.8 Roon did that with a denser UI, I’d honestly always prefer that to a ‘magazine-like’ appearance.