I struggle as well - paralysis of choice. When you can listen to just about any music that exists (effectively), how do you choose?
I use a combination of methods, many that others have discussed.
- Most often I use a Roon Extension called Random Radio. It takes a bit of tinkering - I have a virtual Raspberry Pi running on my Roon server, a 2014 mac Mini, and that runs the Roon extension software. Random Radio does what you’d expect - selects random tracks, one at a time, from your library. However, it has another feature that I think Roon is sorely missing. With the Random Radio extension I can shuffle whole albums from my library. You can set it to shuffle by track or album on a per endpoint basis. Pretty great.
- Sometimes I do just go to Tracks and shuffle them all. Often when I do this, I’ll see a track coming up in the queue and decide to play the entire album instead.
- I have a bookmark that is all my albums that have not been played in the last 3 months (minus holiday, spoken word, etc). Shuffling that is another good way to go and gets me to things I haven’t listened to super recently.
- On ARC, most of the time I use a playlist that includes every track, album, or artist in Roon that I have marked as a favorite and just shuffle that. It’s on the large side, about 3500 tracks, but ARC still manages it pretty well.
Bookmark support in ARC would be great! I’m sure I could do more with playlists, but I so enjoy hearing things I haven’t listened to lately that I feel like my playlist approach would lead me to listening to a lot of the same music over and over. Nothing wrong with that if it’s music one enjoys, I suppose.
Lots of ways to listen, that’s for sure! Enjoy the music, everyone!
