Hey everybody, perhaps this is an odd topic, but I find it hard to pick what I want to listen to. I don’t know where to start. I pull up albums and there are pages and pages and pages of albums. I pull up artist and it’s pages and pages of artists.
I used to simply look at a wall where all my CD and records are and see everything ……I’d glance around and pick what I wanted to play. Done.
So, I’m trying to come up with a way to simulate that. Some kind of filter or view…. I don’t know if it’s possible and I don’t know if this is just crazy me, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
Simply put, When you sit down to listen to something from all that music you have, how do you pick it?
I usually start with genre. From there I can pick an artist. If I decide that I don’t want to listen to that artist, Roon has recommendations for similar artists. It’s a lot of collection-surfing, but I can usually find something to listen to.
The only problem I have is finding “Various Artists” albums as these sometimes don’t seem to turn up in searches.
Have you tried a “random” approach? Since switching from a physical collection to Roon, I find that this is one of the fun new things to do. It will usually remind me of something that I would have never picked out if I were making my own selection.
This is how I usually do it: I go to the album page and select “Shuffle” from the “Play now” menu. A random track (or “work” if you use multi-track groupings) will start playing. Then I switch to the queue view and hit “Clear upcoming”. This clears the queue except for what’s playing. Then, I turn Roon Radio on and ensure that the option “Limit Roon Radio to library” is active.
Just a few clicks, and this results in a random tour of my library, pretty consistent in style/genre due to the Radio algorithms, that will surely uncover content from long forgotten albums - either single tracks or multi-track works. It makes for a fun evening of listening!
I wish Roon had a “Random Album” feature. I think there’s some user hacks for this in the Tinkering forum, but I have not tried them.
Thanks. I am trying the “Random” method right now……
One thing I will say that does work is my method to play something my wife will like. That method is I went through all my music and tagged the albums she would not be annoyed by . Then I created a bookmark based on that tag. Then I can simply go to that bookmark and scroll through the albums and pick one and she is always singing along
Maybe I need to get tagging other things. I have thought about that. Tags like “Morning Coffee”, “Rock Out” etc.
Another thing I do is heart songs as I hear them and then filter by that and shuffle. I am building a great list over time.
I guess that’s what I need - time. Just take the time to organize my collection that makes this easier.
I guess a way I’ve tried to create a virtual version of the physical wall of music is when I think of something I know I’ll want to hear eventually, I’ll pop my app open and favorite other the album or artist.
I sympathise with the OP’s problem. Even though I have played music digitally for about two decades, finding what to play (or more “what I am looking for”) is not always easy. With a physical collection, I just have to browse a bit more and normally the brain helps me out to where a specific album is located on the shelf. With digital, that is just impossible.
To assist in the discovery, I am using bookmarks, playlists and tags a lot to be able to easier retrieve specific items. My brain and memory is horrible with names, so even favourite albums or artists can sometimes just disappear for me.
My latest incarnation of this “hack” is in Community Remote, an app that you can run on Linux, Android or Windows, besides the Roon Remote. When browsing Albums or Tracks there is the option at the top to select a random entry. This random entry can be played directly or being added to the Queue.
I posted something very similar to this a few months back. I think some people have a very physical and spatial connection to organizing that is difficult to duplicate in typical digital presentations.
I think roon is particularly powerful as it offers completely different methods of exploring your library or what a streaming service is offering. For me the following work best:
A musicologist’s approach - particular for classical music, Jazz or standard songs, my preferred starting point is a composer´s profile and his or her list of compositions each leading to a list of recordings of that particular composition. It is astonishing what you discover with this method.
Roon Radio and compiling a playlist from it - if I happened to like song very much, I give roon the order to start a radio stream with that song as a starting point. One track after another is chosen by roon and if I like a particular one, I add it to a new playlist which will become my favorite selection of that particular radio stream. In many cases I skip tracks
I use roon as Wikipedia and read with music paused one bio after another using all the links to performers, composers and alike until I read something I want to listen to the corresponding music.
Album coverflow with activated Focus filter - It is the approach closest to going through a physical CD or LP collection and picking an album which looks promising for the moment. I usually set a focus filter for first level genre (i.e. Classical, Rock/Pop, Jazz, Electronic, Stage&Screen) and I like to have albums sorted by release date. Have to grin every time I think of Steve Guttenberg expressing his despise for roon in a YT rant as he is missing his cluttered LP collection with a perfectly sorted digital library - I think this coverflow plus focus in roon is the perfect cluttered fraction of my library, just chaotic enough to discover something and oversee able in size.
Have to admit that method 4 is satisfying only after I have gone through my library and reduced it to a core collection of what I like and would be willing to listen to (if I am in the mood for this genre). Before that it was unusable and maybe still is for people having a vast library and lots of ´back catalogue´ stuff which I keep disabled.
For me, features like Discover do not work at all. With my broad span of musical genres it is confusing to have everything randomly mixed up and shaken. For people with a more homogeneous collection it might work.
You can also create a playlist per family member for her or his very favorites and later expand them by applying my method 2 starting from one of the favorite tracks.
Main system: My approximately 1400 CDs are organized into four playlists of approximately 500 albums each. I start with the first playlist, then the second, third and fourth. When I’m done with that, I start again at 1. The entire album is always listened to. This ensures that each album is listened to equally.
Office: here all tracks from the 1400 albums are played in random mode.
Bedroom: in the evening I take headphones and listen to music from Tidal (playlist, or certain albums. I just look to see what’s new)
On the go: like 3 or, if there is no internet, a subset from my local library (most of these are from the days when people played cassettes in the car)
Just in case you don’t know if you use a bookmark rather than playlist for this it will be automatically updated once you play one, no need to manually remove .
I use Discover on occasion, but I most often will go to the Album tab then use the scrollbar on the side to land on an arbitrary spot. Then I will poke around that area for something that looks good in the moment.
I changed when I moved 100% to Roon so now I goto Artists , Pick one , then Discography and off you go.
I used to allow Roon Radio to go further but recently I have turned it off as it’s classical suggestions are not good enough , symphony following a piano sonata etc
well this turned into a pretty decent discussion with some great ideas, thanks!
One thing I started doing recently is this (to replicate a bit of the old ways).
Remember those 5 CD disc players - I had one and I used to love loading it up with 5 and putting them on shuffle…Easily done in Roon - pick 5 albums, put em in the queue and hit Shuffle…
. Then I created a bookmark based on that tag. Then I can simply go to that bookmark and scroll through the albums and pick one and she is always singing along
