Roon 1.8 minuses
Ok. Just to make it clear. Once again. Let’s get it all together. All the things that ruined my user experience with Roon.
- No more tags and playlists information about tracks in an album view.
- Broken “Add to tag” modal menu — no more checkboxes.
- No more “OR” logic with tags in Focus. Ability to use “AND” is good. But bring back also “OR”. Because half of bookmarks are broken now.
- No more track numbers in playlists.
- No more working shuffle feature — just instant adding of first 5000 tracks from an album list to the queue. It’s useless in so many cases. Let’s say “play all 1970s”. Now I can’t do that. It was so good before when it worked like a radio limited to library but without relevance — pick one track, then another and so on. And except the disability to take into account all chosen albums, that’s totally inconvenient to have 5000 tracks in a queue.
- Ruined box set view. Before I could select the desired CD (let’s say “Disc 11”) with just one click and after that press “play now”, “add next” or “queue” just for this disc.
- No more “albums by this artist in my library” in an album view. “Selected discography” is not the same.
- Irrelevant release dates options (1920s, 1930s, etc.) in Focus menu when everything else is filtered. And much more slower Focus feature in general. 15-20 seconds after opening, really? And 20-30 seconds of waiting every time I open “Focus on tags”?
Is there anything I forgot?
New design and exploring possibilities are fine. But it seems that so many disadvantages in basic everyday functionality overwhelms all good. Very frustrating. Unfortunately this release (with all the hype around it) will be remembered and will remain in history not as a great breakthrough, but as an epic fail in UX.