Power tip: Use smart playlist with tags

When I read that smart playlists were finally coming to Roon, I was excited. It was probably the feature I missed most after switching from Apple Music to Roon…
When I started seeing forum posts that suggested that smart playlists seemed to be nothing more than a different way to store a bookmark, I was somewhat disappointed…

So tonight I updated Roon and stared exploring smart lists myself. After only 30 minutes of exploring, I must say that besides the availability in ARC that has been mentions several times, I have discovered that smart playlists in combination with tags offer a lot more than bookmarks ever did. While a bookmark allows you to have a specific focus filter, smart playlists with tags allow you to combine several focus filters.

In my particular user case, I want a Smart Shuffle playlists which plays random tracks so that I can listed to all music in my library, but that lets music with a higher rating be played more frequently.

I had already create 5 different tags to assign 1 to 5 starts to a track.
Using the smart playlists functionality, I created 5 smart playlists, one for each tag, with an additional filter on Last Played. The 5 star tracks are filtered on Not Played in the Last Week, down to the 1 star tracks Not played in the last year.
Next I created a “Smart Shuffle” tag, and added this tag to each of the 5 smart playlists, not as a filter, but as a tag on the playlist.
Finally, I created a Smart Shuffle playlist, which filters on all tracks with the “Smart Shuffle” tag. The result is that this playlist contains all the tracks for the other smart play lists.

I still need to test all this out and see how Roon handles the smart playlists when playing music, but in theory, the changes in the sub smart play list should cascade to the higher level. Definitely not something I was ever able to do with bookmarks.

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Thanks @SvenM for this creative input on how to nest SPLs. I will try this out when back home.
Another improvement in addition to making this available on ARC would (hopefully) be the organization of the SPLs across profiles and Roon/Remotes which is not optimal today with bookmarks being common for all profiles and sorted differently on all Remotes.

all that work and creating many new smart playists, is unneccery work.
i think it could all be done within a single modal:

or even:

but i gues that reasons from the kind of architecture that roon is build in.
otherwise there would be nothing wrong with such a modal like the apple one.

Thanks for your tip but i discover a bug. I f i create a tag to SPL1 and apply to the target SPL and if SPL1 evolved then the SPL target don’t. I have to re-apply the tag to refresh it.

I can’t figure out how to start a smart playlist. After reading the blog post, it seems pretty clear however, when I go into Roon to do what it says to do (for example,hit the plus sign to the right of “Playlists >”, there isn’t one for me on multiple devices operating as Roon Remote connected to the server).
If I go to “About” in Roon it says “You have the latest version installed.”
I am running Roon Server on Linux
Any thoughts?

Chomping at the bit for this loooooong over due functionality.
Thank you.

It can’t be a phone. Did you try a PC? Under My Playlists, the new + will be on the right. When you click it, one option is for Smart Playlists… like below

Or, better yet, go to the Albums screen, click Focus, set some Focus criteria and once done you should then see a Smart Playlist option pop up like circled below…

Restart the Roon Server once or twice. This was necessary for lots of people

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A simple reboot did the trick. Thank you. Amazing to me we still have to do silly things like this to get things to work properly.

It might depend on the order of installation / restart. E.g., if a mobile remote updates before the server, then it can’t show the feature yet. It’s not simple stuff if apps on several machines need to work together.