Folder Browsing [Never happening] 2019-10

Roon have published there position very clearly. Argument over.

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There’s a perfectly sensible use case in Luke23’s post earlier. He evidently has an impeccably curated collection of classical music which he can navigate efficiently and meaningfully.

By the look of it he has Genre / Composer /// arbitrary number of nested sub-genres/work/artist

How could Roon give him the same functionality? Or what alternative schema could Roon propose that would do as good a job?

(I don’t use folders by the way, but I am mightily frustrated by the poor searching and focusing in Roon).

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The folder structure is a series of filters. So tags, generally speaking, would do it.
To really work best with Roon, it should also be something you could apply to music imported from a streaming service. It doesn’t make sense to have part of your library in folders on a disc that you look at one way, and the other part of your library from a streaming service that you need to look at another way.

7 posts were split to a new topic: Posts about Folder Browsing

I answered that in my earlier reply. It can be replicated using Focus, Tags and Bookmarks. Indeed using Roon provides greater flexibility. For example, with Roon you could identify solo performances for all composers or a single composer.

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Please describe the tags you would use to replicate the functionality of Luke23’s example, and how you would use focus. I can’t see the equivalence. Folders are hierarchical structures, of arbitrary depth and complexity, defined by the user. Some tags in Roon are hierarchical to a limited extent, others aren’t, and they are defined and fixed by Roon. The reason Luke23 wants folders is that he can’t use the limited tools that Roon provide to do the job he wants. If Roon gave him a good tagging and focus scheme then I am sure he would switch to it, as long as Roon gave him a way of converting his meticulously thought out folder structure into tags. But it doesn’t.

One proposed approach is cited by @andybob up in post 26 of this thread.
But you are right, with the current tools, people like @Luke23 are understandably frustrated.

From the directory screenshot I believe most of the drill down could be done in the Composition Browser. It looks like some of the column funnel filters exhibit odd behaviour but it should work sufficiently
> Composition Browser
>> Focus on Composer (or Filter Composer column on “debussy”)
>> (Optionally) Funnel Filter Instrumentation on “solo”
(:warning: “keyboard” or “solo keyboard” may NOT work, probably there’s some issue here which needs fixing)
>> Funnel Filter Composition, for example on “67”

On the Composition details page you get all performances.

Not sure if this would actually help luke23 but to me it seems close (enough) to what the screenshot shows.

Now if not all compositions are recognized properly this needs to be addressed and would be well in scope of the improvements we want / expect from Roon.

This has to be fixed in a first round.

Well, and it’s an awfully big task. I don’t really expect Roon to ever be able to fully deliver in this regard, not without excellent metadata sources - and those seem to be non-existent. Until those emerge I try to get data I care about into musicbrainz. Then Roon can do a few more of its tricks … :sunglasses:

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Yes, looking at your example, I search on “Debussy L 100 Estampes” and I get, under compositions, nearly 150 performances. Then I just use the filter and choose the performance I want by typing in “gulda” for example, or, hit the back arrow and type in “Weissenberg” and it pulls up all the recorded performances by “Wessenberg”.

However, if you want to do it by tags there are a couple of methods. Most basic is creating a set of nested tags, you create a tag called “L100 Estampes” to which you apply it to the albums or tracks in questions. Then you create a Tag call Solo to which you add the “L100 Estampes” tag, then you create a Tag called “Piano” to which you add the “Solo” Tag. After that you could then you create a “L99 D’un cahier d’esquisses” tag, add the albums or tracks and then add that to the existing Solo Tag.

Now when you click on the Solo Tag you get something like this:

Tags can have more than just albums or tracks. For example, you can Tag a composition, and when clicked will bring you to a composition page with all your library performances and then also all those not in your library but on the streaming services. Like below, notice that the image states Composition not an album or track.

Personally, I would go this route. As in just a couple of clicks you can get to the composition and all the performances; with the lowest amount of setup.

And Tags can be applied to Artists, Genres and Playlists. You can even have different types of content under the same tag.

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Ok everyone, it seems you guys want a better answer than “we hate folder browsing”. Unfortunately it’s not that simple.

There is no folder browsing coming to Roon because it promotes behavior we don’t want to exist. We feel that it, like UPnP support would get us more sales short term at the cost of our souls (and future). I’d love to discuss it with you over a drink, but that’ll have to wait. This decision is a strategy. A long-play business and product strategy. If it doesn’t make sense, you wouldn’t be the first it baffled. Everyone was so sure that no-UPnP-support would be the death of us all throughout our 2-3 years in business. RoonReady seemed like a crazy idea that would never take off. We got lucky and it worked out… or we are awesome. I’ll let you decide. Folder browsing is like that for us.

While we are not even slightly against self organization, we are unwilling to go past the track-browser-path-column when it comes to files and paths. Sorry to those who need more and can’t figure it out with tags, genres, and playlists. Ask for help, many have figured out solutions and are content without folder browsing.

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Freedom from UPnP and folder clunkiness is the best thing that happened to my music experience since I went all-lossless-digital 7 years ago (or so).

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@danny thank you for your very timely and more detailed explanation, I can live with knowing it’s due to “strategy” not ability. Work arounds exist.

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Dear forum, dear Roon,
I am to blame of this lively and sometimes obnoxious thread.
It is very nice to see that the Roon moderators address the fairly aggressive reactions about me asking for folder browsing.
Those who don’t care about folder browsing should not add any comments.
The forum should be there to discuss its possibilities or workarounds.

I do have a problem about the statement highlighted above. The behavior that comes with folder browsing is mine to decide on. The behavior is "being too lazy to fix all the tags, or the behavior that I sometimes don’t know the artist or album name but I do know its location.
That is what my request is all about. Nothing more.

But as the British say you ar flogging a dead horse, the Dutch say you are pulling a dead horse.
I know I was doing. Still a pity. (yes that is me in the picture)

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Please provide some examples of what you are talking about here.

A post was merged into an existing topic: Posts about Posts in Folder Browsing thread

Heartily agree with all you wrote. I don’t post much at all here anymore because of 2 things

  1. the protectionist flaming going on when trying to introduce new ideas or get existing stuff fixed
  2. nothing’s really happening in the dev side anyway and hasn’t really since I started using Roon apart from a few cosmetic and ergonomic fixes.

To overcome the folder view problem, I ended up literally renaming the albums (all 12k of them or so) to reflect their folder position (I use a unique numbered folder for each album) so now it looks like this in album view:

PS… Still love Roon and use it constantly :slight_smile:

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Great - thanks! With this, I hope I can find the stubborn tracks that just don’t want to be found by normal search.

I know we have the ‘First Amendment’ Danny, but now you’ve made Roon’s stance on this clear, is it time to close this thread?