Reviving PLAYLIST topic in 2022 - Playlist toolbox needed!

Dear all, Back in 2016, a thread was created by Roon asking for « New ideas for Playlists »
« Playlists are a notorious weak spot for us. None of us at Roon Labs are big playlist users so we’re looking to you guys for ideas on how to nail this. So I’d like to know how you use, think about, and create playlists.
Do you want additional customization (images, descriptions, ect) of playlists? How do you want to browse your playlists? Do you want different ways to add music to playlists (smart playlists, filters)? »
Many users contributed back then, since 2019 this thread has however remained dormant.

Where are we in 2022 ? Roon has vastly improved in many categories.
On playlists, some progress has been made, still today, in 2022, there is a massive room for playlists improvements in Roon. I would say playlist management are still a weakness in an otherwise fantastic software.
On my side I still see several issues, the two first ones being major:

  • upon change of storage location for files, Playlist content does NOT follow (tracks are visible but not located). This is really annoying. Playlist tracks should be location-specific only regarding two possibilities: online or local storage, but local storage should be flexible…
  • one cannot nest playlist in a sub-playlist structure, which would simplify their organisation
  • one cannot perform various merge operations on playlists (split/fuse etc…)
  • I am still in doubt about how playlists are imported. Mine from iTunes I have had marginal success importing.
    So… I think it makes sense to bring this topic again to Roon team attention. They have done much more complicated things efficiently, no doubt they can also assist users on this.
    Why not a Playlist Toolbox, gathering all Playlist operations ?

This thread could be a place to collect playlist toolbox operation. Suggestions welcome then…

7 Likes

Good post, definitely feels like this is something that needs looking at after (or as part of) the next major update — which I assume is going to be around ‘outside the home playback’. Particular as that version/release may solve some of the playback syncing needs/issues.

Below is a bit of a starter for ten / summary of some of the more requested playlist features and a couple of my personal thoughts:

Currently you can only move one track at a time which makes the rearranging of large playlists cumbersome and annoying. Especially as playlists by nature often have 3 or 4 tracks that group nicely together nicely, that you may want to move together. It’s also often the case that you don’t want a newly added track to live at the end of a playlist, which makes the ability to quickly select and move multiple tracks even more vital. The ability to move sections of one playlist to another is ana advanced version of this. Ordinals (playlist track numbers) would also help in terms of dragging or reordering tracks to a particular position.

Currently due to the way that tracks are added to playlist (local vs streaming, different versions of the same album, if you cancel or pause your Tidal/Qobuz subscription, tracks disappearing from a streaming service) it would be useful to have a means, automated or otherwise to tidy up these orphaned tracks.

Folders — calm down, I’m not talking about the local filesystem :wink: But tags (in their current form) don’t work for playlists — at least for me and it seems many others. I expect this is partly due to personal playlist being, well personal …I don’t want to tag them by a generic theme, style, or mood and partly due to the (smaller, relative to albums) number of them. For me it makes more to treat them more as a nested archive where they can quickly be filed and found.

The ability to sync back to Qobuz/Tidal is obviously high on many people list as seen by the numerous feature requests for variation of it [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Short of full integration some level of automated Soundiz integration may be a useful stop gap. But this really does feel like functionality that should be built natively into Roon, at least for it’s two main streaming platforms (Qobuz/Tidal) without having to reply on 3rd party platforms and additional subscriptions.

While not a ‘core’ feature in the way that native Tidal/Qobuz might seem to be. The ability to export (and import) a playlist to/from Spotify does feel like a really useful feature given the prevalence of Spotify playlists out there in the world. If a music magazine or blog makes up a playlist 9 times out of 10 it will be shared/presented as a Spotify Playlist on their site, if a friend shares a play list with me, 9 times out of 10 it will be a Spotify Playlist. If I want to share a playlist with someone, then again Spotify is probably the simplest way. Like it loath it, Spotify is a primary means of sharing playlists in 2022. And yes, I can do this manually with Soundiz, but I’m talking about how Roon could be improved as a product — not what it does (or doesn’t do) today. This wouldn’t need to be built to the level of a product like Soundiz, there is probably a sensible halfway house where you could add a Spotify account to Roon for the purpose of sharing playlists and no more.

Before anyone throws too much scorn on this idea, it’s worth remembering that one competitive edge Roon has over the streaming platforms own apps, that may help keep it thriving long term, is that it’s not tied to one streaming service or audio hardware platform. It’s precisely because of that difference in business model, that it can do things like build in a Spotify import/export feature (if it wanted to) without worrying that it’s cannibalising it’s own market share. In short Roon doesn’t have to worrying about keeping a walled garden to maximise clicks & plays, instead it can look instead how to improve the product for it’s users wider needs and use cases.

Talking of syncing, a minor thing but the Excel export option doesn’t seem to include the original playlist order (ordinals) as a column. The Soundiz export does keep the natural order, but it doesn’t include any other information.

There’s also this thread (created post 1.8) that has tried to compile a bunch of playlist issues:

5 Likes

@michael a good thread for you to see about playlists.

Thank Gawd playlists are getting some attention. My request, submitted before is to be able to Move multiple songs from one location to another. Roon lets you select multiple then when you start to drag, only one moves. Come on guys, time to fix this.

3 Likes

I think they are being flagged, whether roon pay attention is another thing. :slightly_frowning_face:

When I get the opportunity I will dig out previous requests. It really seems Roon team is not very motivated on improving playlists. They should !

Roon has certainly many customers who want to re-listen to certain known pieces (possibly in a given sequence) several times and find them back easily.

Playlists are made precisely for that.

Regards,
CD

1 Like

YES!

Playlists need more attention.

We should be able to filter/focus inside a Playlist, move multiple Tracks at once, organice playlists in folders and AND/OR/XOR Operators for Tags would be nice!!

*edit: spelling

I posted this elsewhere, but it feels relevant to this thread.

Obviously there is a lot Roon could do to improve the handling of playlists within Roon itself (see posts above :point_up:) but another important aspect of playlists is being able to easily share and import them.

I know a lot has been written about Spotify integration at a music / stream level, which for many reasons will never happen, but…

Where Roon could possibly look at integrating with Spotify is Playlists.

I could imagine a feature in Roon where you could login with your Spotify account purely for the purposes of sharing (syncing) playlists.

In much the same way as you’d login to Spotify on Soundiiz or TuneMyMusic to do the same thing there. But instead of having to manually export your playlists from Roon and then upload them to a 3rd party service (which may have additional costs) you could do it directly from within Roon ie. select a playlist in Roon and then share it via your Spotify account or import a Spotify playlist by cut and patting the public Spotify URL into Roon.

Obviously the tracks on that playlist would still stream from Qobuz / Tidal (or your local library) and would rely on those tracks being available. But that’s no different to how things currently work if you used a 3rd party service like Soundiiz outside of Roon. It’s just that you’d now have that feature integrated more tightly within the Roon interface.

You could extend that model to other services, Qobuz / Tidal being obvious candidates. But I think the key benefit to supporting Spotify for playlists is the ubiquious nature of them.

If someone shares a playlist with me 9 times out of 10 will be via Spotify, if a magazine does a ‘genre introduction’ it’s likely to be in the form of a Spotify (or maybe a YouTube) playlist embed in the page, if a festival does a selection of tracks from artists that are playing at that festival, again it’s likely to be a Spotify playlist, if my favourite artist or friend does a mixtape/playlist again it’s likely to be a Spotify playlist.

The same is true if I want to share a playlist, if I send a general friend or work colleague a link to a Qobuz playlist — you can’t even send a link from within the Roon interface currently — they probably won’t know what to do with it. But if I send them a link to a Spotify playlist they can play or save it (and maybe convert it to another platform later) even if they aren’t a paying Spotify subscriber.

Yes I completely agree. About importation too. Of course also ITunes/Apple Music and all other main providers.
Another essential feature missing in Roon playlists is the ability to simply tick out or tick back in any item.
Thanks
CD

Most wanted Playlist improvement for me would be to be able to feet a Playlist from Tidal or Qobuz with tracks I found in Roon from the dedicated services. Not sure why I can add albums to Tidal and Qobuz from Roon, but not tracks to a playlist.
Always going via export and then using Soundiz is not an option on the long run. And only using Roon Playlists makes it impossible to stream while being on the road.

Indeed, and welcome Michael !
Trying to summarise many suggestions :

  • One broad issue is to have easy integration and interaction in/out of Qobuz playlist and ALL of the main providers of streaming services.
  • Another broad issue is to have playlist flexibility and functionalities added to the currently very basic functionalities.

Flexibility and functionalities would comprise, but not be limited to:

  • Allowing a playlist folder tree structure, for much better readability
  • Renaming playlists, moving tracks across playlists,
  • Enabling searches within (a) playlist(s) only,
  • Enabling crossed selection between playlists and tags,
  • Enabling to deactivate tracks inside playlists without removing them or manually defining a queue (actually a queue is somehow an evanescent temporary playlist).
  • Etc… (see other contributions in this thread and older threads on topic)

Once this is done Roon could even start providing more advanced AI functionalities, like making playlist-based suggestions, that could be more accurately targeted than those based on broader listening history. Etc…

Maybe it would help Roon staff to grab the importance of playlists for Roon users, to consider that playlists, for demat. and streaming, is somehow, for listeners, a proxy to what music albums started representing for their authors, already before to music dematerialisation era.

Hope this helps,
CD
PS: two weeks after writing the last paragraph, I see that on French TV, new trendy musicians are openly talking about their new PLAYLIST !

2 Likes

I’m not that much interested in my own playlists, and not at all in AI generated playlists… but I’d more interested in navigating through playlists provided by Roon, Tidal & Qobuz… here slightly advanced filtering or search options would be very helpful. Qobuz for example offers a Genre filter, but it’s also very limited.

I’m not sure if I’m right … but Roon’s playlist search seems to be pretty bad / basic. Does it really only search the playlists that are currently shown in the screen / have been loaded? But even if you scroll down, typing in ‘Jazz’ in Roon’s Tidal playlist search brings no results, because it’s limited to only the latest 30 playlists or so.

Then, with Tidal, Roon seems anyway to show the same playlists forever:

There is a lot of good content in this playlists, it would be great to access older playlists that were curated by hand.

And still no revolution and no evolution from Roon team about this topic. It sounds like they decided to NEGLECT it for an indefinite period of time. :frowning:

Still hopeful,
CD

PS: Don’t know where to put it but it would also be very handy to enable a “Search in Playlists” or a “Search in History” as well as a “Store Search”.

Hello to all.
I normally rip my CD’s using iTunes, and then organize my playlists there (for iPhone, iPad sync.). As I update the playlists in iTunes, Roon does not update its playlist (so I’m left with an old version of my iTunes playlists).
Not a similar but not an unrelated issue, are the TAGS - I manage my tags in iTunes but these are often not recognized in Roon. Perhaps am I missing something.
Kind regards,
Alexander

Hi, not surprising, as far as I have experienced it is at best a static link via one-time read access !
If it were the only limitation, alas the Roon team appears not to be willing yo listen their customers on that particular issue, and this has been the case for years already…

In an earlier post I saw the Roon Admins saying “they didn’t know much about playlists”… lack of playlist tools gives credence to that statement.

Yes but what is needed about PLAYLISTS is… JUST DO IT, guys :hugs:
CD

Indeed,
Incidentally, I created a new topic entitled:

It does not appear in the new topic list…

I’ve been asking since 2015 so not holding out much hope.

Hi Ged,
Me too but I am still pushing, that is exactly why I created the new topic, please go to the above link (Let 2023 be PLAYLISTs quantum leap year for Roon - like it, ask for it!) to post something and like it, if more people do so, it will bring momentum :slight_smile:
Best regards,
CD