This is a poll just for fun! I didn’t include Internet Radio, Bookmarks, Roon Radio, and many other options, you can add in the comments.
How do you typically play music in Roon?
Until Roon incorporates pre-fetching in playback, playlists are a bid of a drag since one is there is often a long gap (up to 30 seconds) between songs while either the drive containing the song spins up to speed or Qobuz/Tidal decides to stream the song.
All I want for Christmas is pre-fetching!
thats interesting… so pre-fetching happens on albums but not on playlists? I assumed for Roon that a next track was a next track regardless if it was from an album or a playlist?
Like most I tend to do a mix of many options depending on mood. I tend to use the heat track feature in Tidal/Roon. Then goto the tracks or focus options and hit shuffle. It doesn’t allow for a particular genre and know it will play a liked track. Overall, I enjoy this way but can be an odd mix when Etta James plays next to Megadeth!
Estimated breakdown -
60% above method
15% albums
15% playlists of particular artist or genre
10% new tracks or artists sampling based on suggestions or streaming radio
I don’t do either, usually.
At home with Roon, it is usually albums.
At work or walk commute and ARC, it is usually library shuffle via saved shuffle playlist.
At home, nearly always playing full albums, either by manuals selection of an album or through the excellente Random Radio extension.
Exception would be when we have guests, in which case I will typically switch to a playlist or shuffle.
On the road with ARC, I use a dedicated playlist in shuffle / repeat.
What do you do sometimes?
What do you mean? I think you mean heart in Tidal but then what?
Guess I need to spell check also - should be heart feature!
In Tidal on any given album if I like the track, I click the heart on the right side.
Then if click on “Tracks” on the left navigation bar, it shows all the songs hearted. Then click shuffle and it will randomly play only tracks which I clicked on the heart.
It works the same on the Tidal phone app, just slightly different looking screens.
Roon is slightly different but close to same.
In Roon, need to add album to your collection if it isn’t already added. Once added will have the same option to heart particular tracks.
Once completed with that can go the left Navigation menu and click “Tracks” again.
The difference in Roon is tracks will automatically show every track for every album in your collection. However, if next to the Focus option, click the heart on and now only shows the hearted tracks. Then in the upper right play now blue icon choose the drop down for shuffle.
Hope that helps or answers your question.
I was pretty sure that’s what you meant but just checking!
I’ve done that once in a while maybe will do more.
I have mood playlists I’ve built over time for the most part. Or I will take other people’s playlists from Spotify or Tidal and use as starting point in Roon playlists and edit as I go.
I might find a new artist and use Roon to add their top 3 songs to a playlist.
As you stated, many variables at play and is def one of those “it depends” (main rig, car, office). Listening to the entire album is my preferred choice hands down. Some, many, most albums => there is no other way really 
that’s what the artist intended.
That being said, one has to have the time, be in the right head space etc.
With 73% - so far - mainly albums, it shows why its so hard to get Roon’s attention to fixing the many deficiencies in their playlist capabilities. I think if we combined these stats with age demographics, older Roon’ers would be in the Playlist category.
I believe that you would find exactly the opposite.
Interesting POV … we need another survey
Honestly don’t know about the impact of starting sleeping spinning disks, but other than that I’m pretty sure something’s not right with your specific setup.
If I look at network activity, I can clearly see that Roon prefetches the complete upcoming song with maximum available bandwidth before the current track ends while streaming from Qobuz and I can detect no extra pauses in playlists or during Roon radio activity.
Oh I can tell you with a high degree of certainty exactly what is not right with my specific setup: I have a very large library (over a million tracks) and Roon does not play nice with such a large library.
Nonetheless the size of the library has nothing to do with prefetching and while Roon may prefetch tracks on Qobuz, Roon does not prefetch local library tracks.
Oh wow…
I see!
I
I would have thought it the opposite. Hence we see an unusually large percentage of users, compared to the wider population, listening to whole albums.
Albums for me - I’d make a playlist as in mixed ‘tape’ (like the old days) for a specific event - such as a party. Otherwise, I don’t do playlists!
I have over 200 playlists in all genres. Some mix, some favs by artist. It’s my way of avoiding songs I don’t like on an album. I started this in the days of cassette recorders (yes, I’m old).
And, as for age of heavy playlist users, it’s possible I’m in the minority
