I’m not sure I’m on the right sub channel and that I’m doing things as it’s supposed to be.
BUT.
I’m on trial. Love the app. Love a lot of things. But I noticed few pain points that I’d like to share with you on my ongoing trial journey. So I will keep this post live with new comments.
Background:
Core on Mac. Qobuz as the main streamer. Using iOS app and Mac as main controller.
Pain points :
1/ Artists. Seems like I can’t add artists on Roon under library without adding an album or track. I’d like to follow artists without adding album to my collection.
The artists I’ve followed on Qobuz are not referenced in the library tab. I have to go to Qobuz → my Qobuz to find them.
2/ Qobuz playlists are not synchronized with roon playlists making the complete playlists things unusable.
3/ I don’t care about radio and live radio but Roon keep pushing me radio suggestion (and I can see 2 radio tabs on the menu)
1 Like
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
2
As far as #1, all you have to do is go to the artist from say the album page and it will bring up their bio and discography.
All you have to do is " heart" the band itself.
No need to heart or add an actual album.
Then they will appear under your artists tab.
I do this all the time.
Roon is album focused and will only sync albums, tracks and playlists from your Qobuz account to Roon… It won’t sync just artists if no albums are in your Qobuz account, this is by design not sure this is something most users really consider as they are collectors of albums.
Not sure what you mean by your playlist comment. Any playlist created in Qobuz will sync to Roon it will show up at the nextl sync or you can force a sync. You can’t sync playlists back to Qobuz as when in Roon it’s now a Roon playlist and this may contain tracks from your local files and any of the streaming sources not just qobuz. They stop being Qobuz playlists when they sync to Roon.
Roon radio is not internet radio it plays tracks from Qobuz based on what the last album track is.and overtime you listening habits baaed on your library and what others play thats similar, it’s for discovery of new music and to keeop the music flowing. If you want it off turn it off in the play queue menu.
I suggest you read the knowledge base there is a link from app via support. Roon works differently to what your likely used to and it’s best to familiarise yourself with what it does and doesn’t.
Edit: Welcome to Roon, btw. Nice to have you here.
Roon’s concept of playlists does not play well with others. This makes a certain amount of sense when you think about it. You may have tracks from TIDAL, Qobuz, your local files, and even files on Dropbox in the same playlist. Generally speaking, it’s impossible to share such a playlist with others since they may not have access to the same streaming accounts and (hopefully) do not have access to your local files and Dropbox account.
When I want to create or edit a playlist that I can share with others, I do this using tools from my streaming service (TIDAL, in my case). When Roon syncs with the streaming service, it will pull down a read-only copy of the playlist for your use in Roon. But, to make changes, you have to return to tools offered by the streaming service.
I’ve actually found tags and bookmarks to be more useful in Roon for building up collections of stuff that I want to listen to than playlists. I can tag various tracks as favorites and with whatever mood they put me in and then create a bookmark with a group of tags selected. Tags can be negated also, which offers greater flexibility in building up the set of things I want to hear and then bookmarking them for later. I encourage you to give these features a try.
The best way to ignore what Roon is pushing you is to spend most of your time on the Albums or Artists tabs instead of going to the Home. I hardly ever visit the Home tab since I don’t care about my recent activity. Sometimes I’ll scroll through “New release for you” and find a gem or two, I mostly drop directly into Albums, find something I want to hear, and click Play.
I second the above recommendation re using tags and bookmarks. What with the search engine being somewhat temperamental, they are Roon’s most useful feature for finding albums you know you have locally, quickly.
Thank you all for your quick reply, help and warm welcome
All you have to do is " heart" the band itself.
It just doesn’t work from my side. There is no heart on the artist page (from Roon I mean), except is the artist is already in my library (which doesn’t make any sense to me). But I can do this in Qobuz of course.
this is by design not sure this is something most users really consider as they are collectors of albums.
Maybe my need on this topic is different from other people. Usually when there is more than 1 album I like from an artist, I tend to like the artist itself and not different albums / discography.
By the way, It doesn’t make any sense to me that if you want to add an album to your library, you automatically add the artist. And then, once albums or artists are inside your library, you have a heart filter. I’m not gonna heart them, there are already in my library. I don’t have anything I don’t like in my library…
Roon radio is not internet radio it plays tracks from Qobuz
My mistake : I meant Live Radio. I see them everywhere in Roon: from the menu (twice), in each tab, blah.
When I want to create or edit a playlist that I can share with others, I do this using tools from my streaming service (TIDAL, in my case).
It’s gonna be a no-go for me. I understand how work the Roon playlist, tags and bookmarks and it makes totally sense. I can have local Roon playlists that I use at home to listen to different music sources. But what I need is to be able to add a track (played from Quobuz with Roon) to a Qobuz playlist (synched with Roon) without going out of the Roon environment. At least until Roon is available “on the go” with a cloud core and with hard downloadable playlists.
In your case, you can make good use of it as a workaround.
Add an album/single of an artist you like . Artist will remain known to Roon if you remove the album from your library.
Dirk
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
9
Very odd as it most definitely does show a heart to like the artist with artists that I absolutely do not have in my collection including many I had never even heard of before.
This is directly within Roon itself.
Sorry that does not show for you and no idea why it does not.
I was curious about that and just tried it. It does show a heart, but the heart is greyed out and cannot be selected, as long as there’s no album or track by the artist in the library. So it seems as if it were not possible to heart an artist not known to the library, nor can you make him known independently from at least a track or an album.
Doesn’t work for me, only works if the artist has been linked to an album you already have in your library in some way. I have no Kanye West yet I can heart it as he’s featured or linked to some other albums I do have. Tried with an artist I have no links at all can’t heart. I guess this is why you can as they are likely linked to other artists/albums in some way already.
I think what he wants in #1 is to be able to add an artist to My Library>Artists without having anything by the artist actually in his library. That way they would display with those in his library, making it an “all in one place” experience. Your method works very well, but i don’t think it’s what he wants. And for me, “hearting” an artist not in my library does not make them appear under MyLibrary>Artists. If it does for you, I wonder why it doesn’t for me.
AceRimmer
(Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast!)
13
I am not at home this week so cannot review it to check but my memory says it worked as I stated.
However it could also be due to @CrystalGipsy says that the artist might be linked to someone/something else that is in my library.
Will not be able to check physically until Saturday so no further comments from me on this one for now.
When you add an album, Roon adds any credited artist, etc to your library. So if you added Thriller to your library any artist credited to that album would also be added like Eddie Van Halen.
I think what he wants in #1 is to be able to add an artist to My Library>Artists without having anything by the artist actually in his library. That way they would display with those in his library, making it an “all in one place” experience.
YES! 100%.
I understand (after few days now) that MyLibrary is just a way for Roon to sort out your Albums through different criteria including Artists (exactly as @Rugby mentioned)
In a different perspective, we could have something called “Follow” that would just work as MyLibrary but for Artists. When you Follow an artist, Roon adds any credited albums, tracks, etc to your “Follow”. So if you add Sia to your “Follow” any tracks & albums would also be added like Titanium from David Guetta.
My thoughts in general…every piece of software works a bit differently to others that perform a similar task. Google Sheets works differently than Microsoft Excel. Emacs is different than Vim. Capture One is different than Adobe Lightroom. Golang is different than Java. Audirvana is different than Roon.
When picking up a new application, the first thing one tends to notice is what’s missing or different from how they used to do things. It takes effort, time and patience to discover the new features and their unique benefits.
Many folks here tend to think the engineers and UX designers at Roon Labs are idiots. Let me assure you they are not. They have built the system that they wanted for themselves to explore and enjoy music. Although there is a place on this forum to submit feature requests, this isn’t a democracy.
Music library software is not life or death. My advice is to find the patience to learn and appreciate how Roon does things or move on to something that’s more aligned to your preferences.
Didn’t mean to call anyone idiot and even less Roon people. If I thought the product were ■■■■ I wouldn’t have take time to post anything.
I work on product development for software companies. I know how valuable clients feedbacks and especially from new comers are valuable. If not to build new features, at least to better explain the why of the existing ones. Being able to deeply explain your key differentiators from a competitor is what prevent people to churn.
That being said, I now understand the point 1 and 3. I’m still not sure about the 2 regarding Qobuz playlists synchronization.
Well, either a playlist is “in Qobuz” or “in Roon”. Roon displays both and if the playlist is “in Qobuz” there will be a Q displayed. You can import a Qobuz playlist to make it a local Roon playlist, the option would be “Save a local copy”. There is no backwards syncing.
So, you can only edit local playlists, aka “in Roon” and cannot export a Roon playlist to Qobuz. I am only describing how it works. If you want it to work differently, then I would encourage you to add a vote to one of the existing Feature Requests for this ability.
2 is an easy one. Roons playlists hold content from your library not a particular service they are Roon playlists. They can be a mix of local music from numerous sources, Tidal or Qobuz. To do what you ask requires that playlists are either segregated out to thier respected services like how other apps do it. This is not Roons way of doing anyhing and goes against their integrated approach. Ot It could be done with some very clever matching algorithms I guess like Apple do with match but that’s not a simple task for a small team but then not all the services have all songs so it can fall flat on its face very easily and miss out things.
No disrespect intended, I’m truly curious. Why would you follow an artist and have none of his/her music in your library? If I’m interested in an artist it’s because I like and have some of their music. I can’t imagine why I would want it any other way. It’s kind of interesting because there have been several comments by people on here who complain that there are too many artists in the collection. When you add an album you frequently add all of the artists that contributed to the album. Many on here want the Artist Page restricted to primary artists only. Adding artists for which you have no music would drive them crazy I’m sure.
