One core - his and her library

Hi I have the dilemma that my wife wants to use Roon…I put her mp3 library on the folder structure and now the Roon has amalgamated the lot…doh. So … I appreciate Roon = 1 core… however is there any work around i can use to manage things…I was thinking that maybe I could use huge play lists for his and her…but this looks as if it would be impossible to use.

Roon need to look into this … and develop some way managing 2 librarys on one core…or have there been developments i am not aware of???

You could have “His” and “Hers” tags and then make bookmarks for displaying His or Hers libraries. Or even just a “Mine” tag - it can be used to display the library in either the “true” or “false” states - and making bookmarks for each of the selected states would allow you to quickly switch between the two virtual libraries…

Thanks for the reply … when you say tags … is this something I would add externally with say mytag… or is there a utility within Roon??

I mean the Tag feature in Roon.

Great … I will check this out tonight…:+1:

I think the “user profile”-function really should delve down to library selection (or option to disable parts) and also make it possible to use only certain aoudio devices for it to be of any proper use.
That would solve this scenario as well as many others.

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Hi Mikael … thanks for the reply …using a ‘user profile’ would this work with the tags…so that all you would need to do is hit the user tab … and all the taged files would display??? …

Including fear of deletion/making changes and such. So definitely a +1 from me!

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More functionality in the User Profiles has been asked for (many times) in the Feature Requests forum. The Roon team are definitely aware of the need, but as is their habit, they are unlikely to comment publicly about what they are working on and the timescales.

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Sorry, haven’t tried that meself. I only use the option to get familiar with it. But, i didn’t see any real use for it in my scenario. (Which very well could include a User profile for certain occasions/views such as party’s etc.)

I’d be concerned that mass use of such tags would not perform well within Roon. Big tag searches, especially for related objects rather than the tagged object itself, have not performed well on my system.

I’d suggest two cores.

I think you worry unnecessarily James. I realise my collection is small in comparison to some (1,636 albums), but I’ve just created a Tag (“Mine”), assigned half my collection to it, and two Bookmarks (Mine and Not Mine), and flipping between the two is instantaneous.

That’s great I hope it always works for you. What I have found is that tag queries like that are quite fast when you are searching for the object to which the tag has been applied. But when you are querying on a page of objects that are “related” but not the tagged object (i.e. you have tagged the album but are looking for tracks, or have tagged the artist but are looking for albums) then performance slows to a near unusable halt.

I’ve not come across that, but then I’m not into using more than a few tags. I see that you’ve reported this elsewhere, so I assume that the Roonies will be investigating the particular situations in which this performance hit arises.

Yes, I and a few other users have reported it. I think the upshot is that as Roon is designed, tags are good for organizational purposes – i.e. to tag something directly so you can quickly find it later – but not necessarily usable to create playlists by applying multiple criteria.

I assume that is not a common use case in listening. It’s too bad, it worked incredibly well in Foobar, but I don’t want to go back to Foobar from Roon for many other reasons.

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Using tags to show a subset for a user works fine - until you try to use, for example, search functionality which looks at the whole library.

Ideally, the subset tagged for a user should affect all functionality (search, focus etc.) but that would, I suspect, involve maintaining a different database of each user because some of the links that Roon adds (e.g. in reviews) might point to albums not in that users’ tag list.

So, I think that such a feature (tag albums -> link to user -> have option for all functionality to use the subset) would be wonderful but I can also appreciate that it’s not as simple a task as it might first seem.

An alternative could be for Roon to provide a low cost (or even free) option to run two cores but restricted to the same IP address.

There’s a distinct difference between Search and Filter/Focus. Search will look at everything in the library as a whole - Focus/Filter just looks at the current subset of objects… So a subset tagged for a user does get limited to just the tagged objects for Focus/Filter operations.

No need to start thinking about running more than one Core, IMO

Hi Geoff.

Apologies - I should have checked about Focus / Filter before posting. However, I would still argue that use of filter / focus is not sufficient - especially if the using an iPhone where (unless I am missing something) filter and focus are not available. Also, as soon as you select one of the options from the main drop-down menu (discover, albums, artists, genres …) then you are immediately back into the full library.

I have a relatively large library (over 7,500 albums) and, while I find Roon to be great for my own use, my partner and also guests find the sheer amount of music somewhat daunting - especially when a search or a link takes them to some of the more obscure stuff e.g. the 118 King Crimson live concerts!

So, I stick with my suggestion that the best way to provide user-libraries would be either (a) option to apply tag selection to ALL Roon functions or (b) ability to run more than one core. Option (a) would be much better - (b) would be much more fiddly because it would need separate folders on hard drive and couldn’t apply to Tidal albums).

Mike.

Actually I think the idea of a discounted price for more than one core by the same user would be pretty fair. Maybe there is a danger of commercial use if not tracked well, but the discounted price would, in a sense, compensate for the limitations that Roon currently has in terms of use at different locations or in this case users wanting different libraries.

To address the quote above, it really just depends on performance relative to what the user wants to do. If the user is fine tagging all albums “his” or “hers” and only does tag queries from the album viewer, I suspect that will always be fine and usable. HOWEVER, if the user wants to see all songs from albums tagged “his” or “hers” or all artists with albums tagged “his” or “hers” and if the library is a significant size, then the user will likely run into the performance problems I have seen.

Then when you add the WAF to the situation (i.e. my wife won’t use anything that has a workaround or any performance issue - she will just tell me that I tried to get her to use something that isn’t fully baked, no matter the explanation) there is the danger that such performance actually negates the entire usage scenario.

That’s all I was saying. If it works, great, but tags are not going to approximate a two-core library with anything but direct tag queries on a sizeable library.

Roon’s data is contained in a (complex) database. Ideally, you should be able to create more than one database, one for “him”, one for “her”, and then switch between them. This shouldn’t require running two instances of the “core” program, or extra licenses, etc. I would appreciate this functionality for other reasons, such as keeping my classical music in a different database than everything else.

One workaround to this problem is to make sure each collection of music you want to segregate from the others (him/her, or classical/jazz/whatever) is on a distinct drive or network share or even in a separate root folder on one drive. These collections are added to roon in the “Settings | Storage” dialog as “folders”. Once all folders have been added, you can enable only the folder you want to access (say, the “him” folder) by disabling the other(s). Disabling a folder just makes its contents invisible throughout the UI. Re-enabling a folder doesn’t appear to cause any delay or disk re-reading.

Thanks,
-Eric

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