When Open with… is chosen for a music file within an OS, Roon offers to add the folder the music file resides in to its library; but that’s all!
If I choose not to add that folder, nothing happens at all.
The usual behaviour for a music software player would be to play the music file with the application selected in the OS.
I believe the user should be able to select the default behaviour for this within roon settings as follows:
Open with… from OS behaviour
1/ Add the folder which contains the selected music file to the roon library and begin playing from the selected music file.
2/ Don’t add the music folder; but play the selected track through roon (this might involve adding the track temporarily to the roon library then deleting it once playback has stopped.
3/ Just add the folder containing the music file; but don’t actually play the selected track.
Right now, you can only play music that’s in your library. We could conceivably offer some kind of “preview” mode where tracks could be queued up without being imported, but it’s not as simple as you might be thinking.
For example, let’s say my laptop is running as a remote – my Roon Core is running on the other side of the house. If I drag and drop a song into Roon, it could potentially be added to the queue without it being imported, but what if I then sleep my laptop? If the file wasn’t added to my library, how does my Core access the file to continue playback?
What if someone else in my home hears the song playing and wants to add it to a playlist? The song isn’t actually going to be available once it finishes playing, since I never imported it to my library.
There are a huge number of little cases like this we’d need to consider, and almost all of them require some version of copying the file over to the Core, even temporarily. We haven’t received a lot of requests in this area, but feel free to make a thread in #feature-requests describing what you’re looking for.
Thanks Mike. I understand the temporary queue part is difficult and probably not even that desirable for Roon users.
Will add a feature request for the user to be able to choose the behaviour to have the folder and its relevant contents added to the her/his roon lib and for playback to commence from the music file selected in the OS, once these files have been added.
I’m new to Roon and I so far I absolutely love it. I’ve installed it on a new laptop with Window 10 and even though I’ve associated Roon with all my music files I cannot seem to play them through Windows or WIndows Context Menu. Clicking on a song opens Roon but it does not play the track. Can music only be played in Roon through the library built by the program itself?
[quote=“Luke_Storms, post:5, topic:15660”]
Can music only be played in Roon through the library built by the program itself?
[/quote]That is correct, see above discussion.