Still coming to terms with Roon so forgive my ignorance but I’m unclear about random play after reading other threads on the topic.
I see that random play is considered uncouth with classical music but I beg to differ. My particular love lately is Baroque and Early music (which I cannot find listed as a genre) BUT a whole album of some of the B&E albums can be downright boring. However random play of B&E albums is great, something I had set up in Sooloos via tags. This feature of Sooloos is imperfect as odd tracks not B&E are sometimes played.
And I also sometimes choose random play of piano, or guitar or … via Sooloos. This is not really sacrilegious as even many albums of say Chopin piano music have a variety and are not necessarily all waltzes or etudes or … but a mix. Similarly not all albums of orchestra music are from the one composer and/or complete works.
I guess what I’m wanting is is random play of Sooloos with all the added goodies offered by Roon. So, suggestions about how this could be set up with Roon would be appreciated although it might have to wait until 1.3 release with more editing facilities?
POSTSCRIPT: I’m in the process of editing and creating my own list of 22 tags (a laborious process for over 11,000 classical albums) so guess I can random play from any of my selected tags?
As with Sooloos and elsewhere the allocations for classical music can be inconsistent and completely wrong with e.g. a classical item labelled as jazz while another album in the same set is more correctly labelled.
At this stage I’m ignoring the tags put in by Roon, even duplicating in some cases (e.g. an album correctly labelled “chamber music” is ignored and I’ve added my own “Chamber”). Please note I’m not criticising Roon in this as I appreciate what a nightmare of classification classical music presents.
So, as I’ve posted elsewhere, this impossible task ultimately relies on our personal grooming so the library is accessible in an acceptable personal format.
It is interesting that Roon does recognise some sets so editing in a tag for one album has all others in the set similarly tagged. Unfortunately however finding this situation is rare and I would not have thought it a difficult task for software to recognise a set where the album name and artist are the same.
I’ve asked for the ability to randomly play classical albums before. I can understand why it’s considered ‘uncouth’ to break up a ‘Work’ and not listen to it in order and in its entirety. But as you say, there are lots of times when a whole album of organ music is too much, for instance, but a little is good. Also, I’d like to learn more about classical music and to have my whole collection playing randomly in the background whilst I worked would help to find stuff that I’d like to give more attention to. As it is, I’m filtering out the classical genre.
I too get fed up when a whole classic album starts playing when I really want random tracks. I like the idea to filter out the classical albums and the other thoughts in this thread.
I have relatively few classical albums, around a hundred, so some sort of work around is acheivable.
Also I do think it is sheer snobbery by roon to imply that one can only listen to a classical piece in it’s entirety as it is “special” whereas a rock opera, for example, can be randomised because it isn’t proper culture. I think the software should give a choice.
Roon considers rock operas as works in the same way it considers classical works as one item or work for Random playback. No snobbery here just a design decision that many don’t like.
