Please display full text

Hi

This is not really a feature request, but more of an “ergonomic bug” report.

As example…

When displaying album tiles, wherever, PLEASE can we have it so the complete title is displayed. It’svery frustrating to identify stuff without them, as one has to open the album to see what’s in it.

Even a hover highlight of complete text would be a step in the right direction!

There seems to be this “aesthetics over ergonomics/praciticality” rule prevalent in the industry which is a mightily annoying thing to live with on a daily basis. :slight_smile:

Thanks!!

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And here, I am trying to overcome the awful genre system in roon by applying my own tags for genres, but i can.t blooming well read them!!! Grrrrrrrrrr

Thanks for reading

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Got round it temporarily by using abbreviations, but it aint pretty!!

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Are you aware of the Focus feature and that you can Focus by Genre?

yes but the genres are a mess, sorry to say. It’s why I’m using tags to generate my own genres. Going well apart from the display of them :slight_smile:

How’s that?

I have explained it in another thread:

I’ve decided to use custom Tags to avoid any modifications to the Genres completely. I’m using Tags to create genres of my own which I can easily add and modify, expand on, etc. Im about 150 albums in now. Labour of love as ever.

There are 3 main reasons for me ditching the whole genre thing within Roon (some of these overlap, so forgive me in that regard :slight_smile: ):

Genre modification is clumsy at present. To modify genres involves selecting, editing, scrolling down deselecting “wrong” genres, typing in what i would deem as being correct genres, but not knowing the nomenclature means this is very hit and miss; ie not having a complete list of available genres and subgenres means I’m in the dark at what ultimately is available on that front

The whole layout and listing of Genres to select as addable genres is really a mess; there’s literally 100’s of cats and subcats, it’s almost impossible to know where to begin to add genres to albums.

The whole thing needs some serious rationalising, re-structuring and displaying in a more logical fashion. I use ROCK - Subgenre, CLASSICAL - Subgenre , COUNTRY - Subgenre and the number of obscure categories is mindblowing, Post Punk - Neo-Disco? Alt-Country- Witch House? The you’ve got Alternative Country-Rock as it’s own genre which is not a sub genre of Alt-Country. I mean… It’s pretty dire. That was just in a couple of seconds of browsing one small part of the list. To find what one is looking for, on a deep level, is nigh-on, impossible. Actually, am scrolling down the whole list now… it’s mind blowing!

The original gripe of wanting to remove a displayed genre and simply not knowing that it forms part of a main genre (and then trying to locate it within that small scrolling window of “millions” of genres) was the deal breaker for me. Enough’s enough.
The whole Roon genre thing needs some serious discussion. It’s a right old mess :slight_smile: - it’s so bad that I don’t want to touch it; I’d rather just ignore it and rebuild my own genres completely out of the Roon genre system.

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I dislike the genre browser, it’s anaemic in respect of exposing the sub-genres. Other than that I don’t mind the genre classifications too much - some are very informative whilst others are all over the show. I do find them useful for Roon Radio or for exploring a corner of my library. I’ve learned to live with the disagreements re genre assignment, life’s too short. It probably helps that I’ve been using allmusic.com’s genre and style tags from day one.

My main gripe is that the genres are not all-encompassing, albums slip through the net, many are not given a genre at all, and to assign/reassign genres is very awkward to say the least. As I say, I’m quite enjoying assigning genres via my own roon-tags :slight_smile: , have done around 500 albums so far.

I think it’s true to say that since allmusic stopped being allmusic the quality of metadata has declined, in some cases significantly. I still do my own tagging even though to a large extent it’s duplicating what Roon does, here’s a typical track:

Nice1

is that where roon gets the genres from? Allmusic?

Pretty much, I think it’s their primary source, albeit these days someone else owns the metadata master and how/why allmusic.com continues to exist is a mystery, albeit it would be a tragedy if it disappeared.

Ok, i guess it’s logical as most of the Roon album reviews are from Allmusic :slight_smile: - I must admit I’ve been using Allmusic for years to get ideas for listening. It’s still a great source.

If you want to decode their genre tree, browse their genres and you’ll see how it all devolves.

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Hi Sallah-

Here is one idea. Assuming you only need to go 2 levels, then consider tagging tags. I tried it yesterday and it worked well. Instead of “Rock - Country Rock” and “Rock - Blues Rock” you can create tags names “Country Rock” and “Blues Rock.” Then create a tag called “Genre - Rock.” Tag the “Country Rock” tag and the “Blues Rock” tag with the Genre-Rock tag. Now, go to the tags page, and filter by “Genre” - now only your top level Genre tags are displayed. Bookmark this.

Now you’ll have a bookmark that shows only the top level genre tags. You can drill down to each subgenre from this page.

There are options as well - for example if you don’t want to use the word “Genre” in the top level tag, you can manually left click on all the top level genres and tag them as “Genres” and drill down that way - this would require more manual updating but maybe give a cleaner look. I like to use bookmarks since the tags page is flat and shows tags from every level, but if you filter correctly and then bookmark it, you can get right to the screen you want.

EDIT: One more thing: wouldn’t it be nicer if we could embed this data, given the hard work it takes, into the files rather than into only the Roon DB? Then it would be portable! It wouldn’t be that hard to do, if we could get some support from the Roon team on inter-operability.

Thanks James.

I was toying with integrating the Bookmarks into my workflow somehow, and you advice is welcome!

Ill have to check further and experiment. I like my way of having single tier so I can tick off sub-genres in track view and make up an instant playlist of “liked tracks” - eg Rock - Pop - Tracks or Blues - Electric - Guitar will only contact tracks which I have vetted and are in my mother of all playlists which I am calling simply - “Good”.

Thus I can select for example Blues Guitar only, or a compo eg, Blues Guitar OR Blues Harmonica OR Blues - Jazz for example or New Age and Classical - Neo, or any combination of the 50 or so subgenres I have created thus far. Ill have to see how easy it would be to combine stuff using the Tags+bookmarks method.

It’s very cool, once Ive made a quick tailored playlist in this way, to then export to an SD card to pop into my player and have a great selection on the go. Am thinking of making a series of cards with different combinations of “good tracks” from different subgenres - Eg a blues card, an Alt folk and Alt Rock card, a classic rock card and so on.

Ultimately it gets a little tedious having to apply such work rounds because of ergonomic oversights.

And as you say, it would be nice to apply these Roon mods to meta-Tags one day, ho hum.

Having said all this… Im much more at ease investing time into Roon now having successfully backed up on one PC and restored on another using a duplicate hard drive setup. That’s a game changer for me. Til now Ive been crippled by having 2 independant setups of Roon on PC and lappy. Now I can make master changes on the PC back it up regularly and periodically wipe the Roon Database on the laptop and restore one of the main PC backups to it.

Now, we just need a portable version of Roon to see chunks of our music repetoire at any one time but still have access to bookmarks, and tags per the main PC setup, applying them to the stripped down chunk of musin on the device.

Hi Sallah - sure, your workflow makes sense. I think your overall goal is different from mine - you want a Roon curated set of tracks to take remotely, whereas I want dynamic ways to program my media player to be my perfect DJ at home, drawing from the entire library.

What you are doing reminds me greatly of the FILTER feature in columns UI, in Foobar. I used that for almost a decade, with a series of columns, left to right, that were different attributes of tracks - Format, Genre, Artist, Album, etc., and included my own custom album ratings (hits to deep cuts to deeper cuts) and also moods (mellow to Friday night adrenaline). The custom attributes were in custom metatags I embedded in the files. Foobar would pick ALL this up in filters and I could select, left to right, and winnow down exactly what I wanted until it will do something like “Play all high resolution Progressive Rock tracks that are high energy from the lesser played albums from these artists” and it would shuffle perfectly.

That would be possible in Roon, IF there were boolean logic in the tags, albeit I have not gone to the trouble of moving these tags into Roon because I want tht team to build an automated way to do that.

Good luck with your Roon configs!

Hehe, all good fun. It must be said that most ALL TRACKS become “good tracks”; i’d say about 80%. But there’re always some real crappers which you just don’t want to hear popping up, or are a bit too idiosyncratic, or just plain hard work for general listening.

It’s why i split my “genres” into 2 halves… eg Blues Acoustic will contain ALL Blues Acoustic tagged albums and ALL Blues Acoustic tagged artists; so I can get full access to all the goodness in my collection on a genre basis as needed. The “-Tracks” tags/genres are more for the on the fly playlists.

Ah… the old Foobar days, remembered with nostalgia, lol

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Yep same here. Roon of course has many advantages over Foobar. But I miss Foobar’s flexibility. You could make it do anything if you rolled up your sleeves, and other than screen configurations, most of that work would be portable and inter-operable with other solutions.

But Foobar never introduced me to a single band or album…

Goodness me, no, I don’t regret moving over to Roon. Foobar was the best all rounder and free, of course, for its day. I used it primarily for the fact that it could handle bit perfect whatever hardware I threw at it, and could play DSF’s and ISO’s of course. Still use it for converting stuff :slight_smile: - sorry, waaaay off topic now!