Option to create compilations or playlists that feature on/are accessible from the artist page

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

I have been using Roon for a couple of months now in combination with Tidal and I absolutely love it, especially because I also have a lot of local music files and the seamless integration is fantastic. There is however a feature that I would love to have and I’m sure many other users would agree with me. Let me first explain what my usage case is.

As so many music enthusiasts do when they are a fan of a certain artists; they collect every song the artist has ever made. This includes adding every non-album song that’s available on a streaming service of your choice (soundtrack songs, remixes, b-sides, loosie singles etc.) to also adding own files of rare promo’s that are not available to stream. At least I do this, I love having complete discographies in my library.

What I really don’t like is having all these “loose” songs show up as separate releases in my library. So that whenever I want to listen to one of these songs, I now have to scroll endlessly on an artists release page to go to a usually 1-song release and play it from there. I would much prefer to have all these loosies combined in a compilation album I can create, but one that shows up on the artist page, together with the albums and other releases. Now there are of course a few ways to sort of already create this now but I’ll explain why they are very cumbersome, incomplete and user unfriendly.

1. Make a playlist instead

Of course this works but it would also mean you end up with 100’s if not 1000’s of playlists depending how many artists you would want to apply this too. Considering that playlist folders are not a thing on Roon this would just completely oversaturate your playlists page. And wouldn’t it just make so much more sense to have these compilations show up on the artist page?

2. Merge the separate releases to an album on a metadata level (you could call it “Loosies Collection” or “Remix Collection” etc.)

This is do-able but has so many caveats;

  • All original metadata disappears when you do this, so you would have to manually add the information again like composer, songwriters, additional main artists etc - time consuming and pretty much undoable if you ask me
  • The original release info disappears too, you can’t see the source anymore which takes away from the user experience
  • Original artwork disappears which again, takes away from the user experience and is just a big shame
  • Every time you want to add a release to this “album”, you have to retake all the steps from the beginning with a lof of manual metadata adjusting - again, very time consuming and unwanted
  • Changing this type of metadata comes with a high change of mistakes so it’s unwanted to begin with

You can understand above methods are far from ideal and it would be so much more elegant to have this “artist compilation” feature added to the application.

The Roon app would basically need two new features; 1. A “create compilation” option on the artist page level 2. An “add song to artist compilation” option on a release level.

*EDIT now that I know playlist folders are a thing - it could perhaps even be implemented as “pinning a playlist” on the artist page. This way the internal structure doesn’t have to change, you can create these compilations just by making a playlist like you normally would but the added feature is to add these playlists to the artist page and it will basically just be a re-direct from the playlist section.

You could create multiple artist compilations like already hinted at above; “Loosies Collection”, “Remix Collection”, “Best Features Collection” or even “Greatest Hits - My Selection”. You could even get creative and add a compilation of “Best Productions for other artists” when an artist is also a producer (Timbaland for instance).

I hope this can be considered, and if you fellow Roon users agree with me I would appreciate if you dropped a comment here so we can let the devs know! :slightly_smiling_face:

2

Playlist folders ARE a thing in Roon. I even nested 525 folders just to see how far it would go.

1 Like
3

Ow wow I didn’t know this! Is this a fairly new feature or did I just not know about it yet? :face_with_open_eyes_and_hand_over_mouth:

I still stand behind my suggested feature though - being able to create your own compilations on an artist page level would be a game changer for me.

4

It was in the past several months when all the playlist changes were made, with more on the way.

Here is a pic of the new playlist page

folder playlists
folder playlists1139×543 32.4 KB

The playlist sitting by itself called Carr has not yet been put into a folder. Qobuz or Tidal playlists will be in their own section(s).

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5

Ah yes I haven’t been checking for it lately so was unaware, a very welcome feature indeed! Already started organising my playlists. I even see folders within folders is possible now - great!

Are there plans to make it possible to start a play and shuffle from a folder so that all songs from the separate playlists within this folder are combined when playing? That would give the ultimate freedom of playlist management :heart_eyes:

6

Yes and not the way you are thinking of it, but, in the way you can always play multiple albums. Roon never “plays a playlist”, it copies the playlist into the Queue and the Queue plays the content. A subtle but important difference.

Anyway, to answer the question, Playlists in folder are sort of like albums. In a folder, you can right click and select one or more playlists and then play them all or shuffle them as you like. See below, I went under the 23 playlist folder and selected them all, now I could hit Play, or use the drop down on the button to choose Shuffle.

afasdfasdf
afasdfasdf1198×919 97.5 KB

Please note that you don’t have to select all of the individually, you can just select one and then use the selected dropdown to the left of blue play button to choose ALL. Also, after selecting one, holding the Shift or Control key also allows multiple selections, on Windows; not a Mac user.

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7

Ah yes I didn’t think to try this yet, works even better because you can specify which playlists combined you want to play - more flexibility :slight_smile: Thanks for explaining, much appreciated!

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8

I sometimes think I should do a Roon tips and tricks video. :smiley: Glad it helped enjoy the music and keep your ear out for the things happening with playlists in Early Access. :wink:

1 Like
9

I think you should! :grinning: Going to play around with this now, excited :innocent:

My feature suggestion still stands though, so hopefully this gets brought to the devs attention - I really think it would be a big hit with the users.

Now that I know playlist folders are a thing - it could perhaps even be implemented as “pinning a playlist” on the artist page. This way the internal structure doesn’t have to change, you can create these compilations just by making a playlist like you normally would but the added feature is to add these playlists to the artist page and it will basically just be a re-direct from the playlist section.

The only possible issue is that the number of total playlists is limited now - or are the 525 folders you created not the limit but just where you stopped your test?

10

Where I stopped testing. I am not an employee so there is only some cutting and pasting I’m willing to do over and over again, LOL.

11

Fair enough! LOL