Print Playlist and Library (export to PDF) [export to excel]

I just did an export on my Mac. Yuck.

Yuck? Did you open it in Numbers or Excel? The format we save can only be opened in excel properly

Well that’s an issue for us Mac users then. I have numbers and not MS Excel.

Print to PDF - Problem solved! :wink:

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@danny

Any fix coming for this? :smile:

@danny

I just tried this again and it doesn’t work on my MacBook with Numbers. Any idea when this will work or even better you have a Print to PDF option?

8 posts were split to a new topic: Export To Excel Not Working

I too would like to not to have to install yet another program. Why can’t this either work in Numbers or Print to PDF?

Hi @jtwrace – I moved a few posts over to the Support section so we can gather information and investigate these issues with our Excel export.

This feature request is still open, but I should mention that adding support for PDF export isn’t a quick addition – it would likely involve a significant amount of development work and QA testing for us, and it’s not a request we hear very often.

We’ll keep an eye on this thread, and it’s absolutely something we can look into if there’s sufficient interest.

@mike OK but I’ve been asking since February and all emails and posts here have virtually gone unanswered. While many not ask for it, I’m not able to use the feature whatsoever. At least fix it so Numbers can be used and then the Print to PDF can be put in the development queue.

Pointing out the obvious, Numbers is not Excel. It tries to be Excel, but it’s no where near the same in terms of format support and functionality, including the very relevant limitations of it not being able to support the Excel XML formats.

That’s why this is being prioriztied like a feature request. You want totally new functionality.

I had another go with this (ROON core running on an iMac) and I think the problem is that the file outputted by ROON is a .XLS file while current Excel files need to be .XLXS in order to open in Excel for Mac (or even in Numbers).

So in reality it is not new functionality which is needed but rather a proper file format.

There is another thread with this same issue so I will also post this there as well

The XML files open fine in Excel for Mac AND Excel for Windows.

They just don’t work in Excel clones that don’t implement everything Excel does.

The file Roon outputs is called XLS but it is really XML. This was the only way I could do this reliably on both platforms.

There is no speculation needed here. I’m quite aware of the many flavors of Excel out there and tested most of them. I also tested Numbers and made a concious decision to not bother supporting that program. That program can’t open so many things that Excel can.

This is very cool and exactly what I was looking for. Worked like a charm on my MacBook Pro (with Excel).

errrr… nope: you can export to “csv” and every user will be able to import it into the application of his choice :wink:

using a strictly proprietary format is not the way a truly cross-platform application should go :roll_eyes:

CSV does not support column widths.

I’m not sure what one has to do with the other. Roon is also proprietary AND cross-platform.

Additionally, the format we export is XML in a manner than Excel can read it. Rename the file with a .xml or .txt extension and take a look.

so… that’s the only reason you are using XML?
columns can easily be adjusted once imported into user’s app of choice

anyway… ok: I’ll just keep ignoring the export (to excel) “feature”

thanks

Over csv? No. Csv has no standardized escaping for commas and quotes.

Over xls or the zipped xlsx? No. Those formats are seriously more work to export.

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What features in Excel are required to output the Roon Library. I would think a CVS file would do it. That is pretty much standard everywhere and all spreadsheet programs read that.

Hi, I wanted to follow up on my last post. First, the good news. There is a simple solution for Mac users, that may also be valuable for other users.

OPTION 1:

  1. Follow Danny’s method to output your tracks.

  2. Use any one of the many free online XLS to CVS file converters and there you go. Numbers reads these files just fine. I also looked at the raw XLS output before conversion and the output CSV file. I could not find anything that suggested there was information degradation in the conversion to CSV.

I have worked on projects for years that used open source software to do this kind of output from commercial projects I worked on. Perhaps Roon might do this?

OPTION 2:
(this option and option 1 are not mutually exclusive, both may have value)

  1. Follow Danny’s method to output your tracks.

  2. Install the Java JDK which is free and available from Oracle. You will need an account first. This is easy to do and free (for our individual purposes).

  3. Install Open Office which has been around for many years. It is a fully developed office automation environment including spreadsheet, word processing, database, and other facilities.

  4. Open the file that was created by Roon. It opens in the Open Office Spreadsheet function. This approach may be better for those that don’t want to play with file converters, as easy as they are now.

THE BAD NEWS:

No matter which approach you take, Roon outputs a subset of the meta data associated with files whether they are your local files or from a streaming service, I use Tidal. The data that you get - this is directly from the unmodified XLS file produced by Roon:

Album Artist
Album
Disc#
Track#
Title
Track Artist(s)
Composer(s)
External Id
Source
Is Dup?
Is Hidden?
Tags
Path

My purpose in doing this was to be able to search my library with more flexibility than Roon provides. There are lots of posts on this topic. It is a start.

An alternative that I may take that looks a bit more promising is to output a play list from JRiver Media Center. There are lots of problems with this approach, but it does output a tiny bit more data that I am interested in like conductor information.

I hope the above approaches are useful to Mac users. I am happy to answer any questions about what I have posted.

Please let me know if I have made any mistakes regarding Roon output fields.

It would still be nice to have a very simple feature within Roon to print to PDF. :wink: