Quite “simply” the app provides hyperlinks to discography page which displays “all” discs in reverse release date order. The discography page also contains hyperlinks to those discs & they then also have hyperlinks to an album credits page & eventually hyperlinks to the disc on Amazon should you wish to make a purchase.
The screen shots in my earlier post illustrates this.
Paul
Thank you. Where in that do you select an album to stream? How do you know if it’s on Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz or whichever you have signed up to?
Sorry if we’re at cross purposes here.
Brian, I think we may be X’D as I’m no longer sure what your “topic goal” is?
I’m referring solely to the metadata associated with and artist/album, FWIW I subscribe to Tidal.
This thread is, I hope, discussing metadata it’s availability & visual representation.
Maybe if you could clarify your goal we can progress 
Paul
Sorry if I seem to have wandered a bit…
I was trying to follow up @Sloop_John_B’s post above where he pointed out the complications of discographies that covered both Tidal and non-Tidal.
One attraction of the current set up is that whenever the metadata leads you to an album, you can play it. I was merely interested in whether or how Naim’s setup solved this. In particular what visual representation it may have used to distinguish the categories.
Hi Brian,
It appears I missed the point, however similar levels of metadata are available from either Tidal or a CD rip stored locally (that said the local rip offer more detail).
Here’s a screen couple of shots off Tidal via the Naim app (they have been cropped slightly to reduce the file size, play controls are therefore missing).
(Apologies, I updated this days ago & forgot to post…my memory is going…
)
Personally, I would love to see the original full artwork and inserts. This is nothing to do with wanting to go back to my teens 
music is art and the image work and photography that accompanies every single album in physical form frequently tells as much of a story as the music itself does. Judging a book by its cover it may be, but I can’t tell you how many previously unknown albums I’ve listened to or purchased because of the cover art alone. There is something very special about listening to music, with the original artwork in hand, with photos, lyrics and even the specific fonts of choice all telling a wider part of the story. I’m definitely in the camp of those who purchased room lifetime wishing that one day Roon would make all the original artwork available, natively, full screen in a “page flicking” experience similar to the modern webs virtual page turning PDF brochures. Personally I’d have the entire now playing screen on a horizontal slider or tabbed screen with the first slide/tab the now playing view with the queue as it is now and lyrics besides, the second full screen original artwork and inserts in a digital page turning booklet, the third, all the background meta data displayed in an eye friendly fashion and if I was really pushing my luck the forth, (which I know most wont support) the accompanying music video when available (without censoring) and a spectrum analyzer display if not 
+1, I must admit I have pretty much the same experience.
Hi Grump.
I would add that I don’t begrudge Roon at all for the lack of dev in the areas we’d like to see. It’s just that I’ve lost interest in making suggestions. It’s just not worth the time viz the results. And so often suggestions here are met with strong negativity anyway so what’s the point?
Hi @Sallah_48, that would be a pity and the death of a lively forum. I think most negative reactions are to be found in the MQA threads, although I do agree a bit with you that I’m also losing interest a bit. My personal view is, that Roon is obsessed acquiring new customers with MQA, Chromecast etcetera etcetera.
The unfortunate result as I see it: an exclusive fixation on the technical/soundwise aspect, resulting in an almost complete neglect of UI en UX. The picture from their website (the foldout vinyl album art) has been posted here as a reminder a few times already. I think that currently, Roon is not only not living up to expectations here, but also abandoning one of their first promises and in some ways even their original vision.
Hope this changes soon and becomes more balanced. The balance as I experience it now is 90% tech and not even 10% UI, which of course than can only be minor improvements. Don’t get me wrong, I also like better sound and more features in that respect (native room correction for example), but as I stated there is no balance right now.
Guys, the Roonies have stated a number of times that a major UI redesign is in the works, so don’t lose hope! This is not something that can be done quickly. There’s also the fact that the shift to mobile/cloud and support of those devices is important to Roon Labs. They only have the resources that they have, and Rome was not built in a day. The Roonies do read all feature requests and the use cases in them, even if they very rarely react publicly to a request.
Personally, I can understand why MQA has been tackled (even though it’s of little interest to me), and why it looks that Chromecast support is in the pipeline. It makes good business sense. The UI is good enough for the majority of users, and has evolved since Roon’s introduction (look at the major shift for queue handling, for example). I’m prepared to believe that the next shift in the UI will be major, and I can wait for it. As far as I’m concerned, the sky is not falling, and I’m enjoying the music… 
Hi @Geoff_Coupe I know it’s in the works, I also know it can’t be done quickly. The same goes for MQA. As I stated in several posts, I too understand MQA has been tackled and how this is also of interest to me — Roon future wise — even though it’s of little interest to me.
I’m merely addressing the balance of priorities. Indeed the sky is not falling, but should that be the only legitimate reason to address UI requests instead of SQ updates? Happy Sunday!
@Grump and @Geoff_Coupe
I think there is so much more that could be done to make the Roon experience fun and engaging, exciting even, but I think it’s also a question of playing it safe in that the UI is left alone and hardware addons developed. Add another piece of hardware integration with an established and accepted front end, and you risk nothing but to get more bums on seats with the adoption of potential customers’ favourite bits of kit within the Roon culture. Making mods to UI seems to result in praise and scorn in equal measure. To this end I just don’t think it’s worth making suggestions any more; it’s such an uphill battle.
However, that’s not to say I don’t appreciate Roon and its work. I am very pleased with my Roon experience and like you…
Geoff Im not quite understanding you here:
Not sure what you mean about the minor improvement? You mean tha UI can only be improved slightly?
I’m completely with you, @Sallah_48. And I’m not saying the UI can only be improved slightly. On the contrary, I’m saying the UI has been improved only slightly, due to a non-balance, whereas I think it can (and should) be improved drastically if not radically.
Fellow Roonies like @Nyquist have made some interesting suggestions in this respect. I know Roon is working on it, and I know it takes a lot of time to do it right (and I appreciate “doing it right” is one thing Roon is all about), but as stated several times already, personally I think the balance is completely lost, for too long now, way too long if you ask me.
Always the case with UI (and more appropriately UX). Hence the 10 day rule… After you introduce a change to the UX, ignore the feedback for the first 10 days
Ah, yep. 100% with you on that Grump. I’d honestly prefer to see incremental changes rather than promises of “big changes” which don’t really live up to hype anyway (only IMHO, of course).
Just a little tweak once every couple of weeks would satisfy my desire to see the project move forward. Even if it’s (what I believe would be) a simple thing like duplicating a button from settings to appear more prominently in the UI. Here are just a few which I can rattle off without a pause, without even looking at Roon:
Gosh there are so many little things which Roon could make a broohaha about each time with a new version.
Actually, I think it should be the case that some “interface guy” should be allocated to permanently work on these tweaks and refinements. Problem is, and I know this from personal experience, when you get a design up and running, so much of it is “Ok it’s working (to a fashion) so lets move on and we’ll come back to that poor interface issue later” and that stuff never gets refined.
ps… darn it , i feel the need to start a thread now!!
Even making the transport icon clickable would be a huge boon. It’s already there! Make it clickable even when nothing is playing! (UX pet peeve: it’s not possible to see shuffle status with nothing playing/in the queue. This setting even persists between reboots. )
A lot of these bullet points strike me as examples of the old adage: the perfect is the enemy of the good. A feature is deemed not worthy of tweaking because of an impending major redesign and yet months later…
Daniel, just to clarify your objection, why isn’t Roon’s use of your default PDF program good enough?
Not shooting darts, just want to understand. Is it the boot time, the lack of tight integration, what? Thanks.
I’m with Daniel on this one I think. Spawning out to an external reader for handling PDFs gets the job done, but it’s not really elegant.
It can certainly be argued that aspects of Roon’s UI have rough edges, with unfinished features. The PDF reader, the “Now Playing” screen (which has not yet acquired proper “screensaver” functionality) and Internet Radio are prime examples of this.
We know that the Roonies continue to work on the UI experience (e.g. Brian has just posted that a major update of Internet Radio is in the works), so I’m hopeful that the PDF experience will be improved. But in the meantime, I can live with it. It certainly isn’t a dealbreaker.
There are 2 quite different approaches to software development, the Big Release and the Agile small but frequent release. Clearly Roon prefers the former.
The latter can have a tendency to introduce bugs but with short sharp releases they can be fixed. Google takes this approach (and in our arena JRiver)
Horses for courses. At least it gives you something to look forward to even though you don’t know when …
Mike
Hmm… the “big releases” just don’t really feel that big either to me.
I say all this with a strong caveat that I’m happy with what I’m using; it’s all in reference to @James_I question as to why there’s not much activity suggestion-wise.
