Hi all!
The last few weeks have been a whirlwind, with some of the best feedback (and sales) we’ve seen in the history of the company. Not only are more people using Roon, but people are listening to more music every day, discovering more music than ever before, and participating in this community at never-before-seen levels.
In a user interface “redesign” release like 1.8, we are making thousands of changes at once. It can be very difficult to predict the handful of changes that will cause problems for people without releasing to the public and seeing how everyone responds.
So we’ve been listening. While the broad feedback about 1.8 has been really positive, there have also been some excellent points made about how certain changes have disrupted the way Roon users browse or listen to music, and that’s not feedback we intend to ignore.
Our product team, developers, and designers have been dutifully reading everyone’s comments, and over the last month we’ve discussed, designed, built, and tested what we believe is a well-rounded slate of changes based on the feedback we’ve heard most from Roon users.
We’ll continue to listen to everyone’s feedback, even as we continue to grow Roon and the community. Please don’t hesitate to let us know how Roon 1.8 is working for you!
What’s New
Overhauled Focus functionality
In Roon 1.8 we completely changed how Focus works, and expanded this functionality beyond your library, to the artist, composer, album, and composition screens.
We also changed the logic for how content gets filtered – instead of allowing content to match any of the selected criteria (OR logic), many options in Focus began requiring all selected criteria match (AND logic). This was a more natural fit for Focus’ new look and allowed for more context while adding criteria, since the list updates to reflect your first selection.
We’ve had many requests for shifting focus over to AND logic over the years, and felt that it would be simpler to have a single mode of behavior in 1.8. However–once the feedback rolled in after the Roon 1.8 release, it became clear that both modes were required. So we went back to the drawing board and re-built this feature in a way that allows you to select whether you want to “Match All” or “Match Any”.
Alongside these changes, we took the opportunity to address some other inconsistencies. We’ve restored the “Most Played” option, added “Instrumentation” focus to the compositions browser, and added the ability to exclude criteria on the artist, album, and composition pages. We’ve also changed the interface for focusing on tags to work more like it did in Roon 1.7.
These changes required weeks of work and testing, but we believe this implementation of Focus is the best it’s ever been. Let us know what you think!
“My Library” mode for Top Tracks and By This Artist
Two great pieces of feedback we heard concerned areas of Roon that now rely more on Valence, but which also became less focused on your library. After considering this feedback, we’ve added an “In Library” tab to two of our recommendation features.
On the album screen, the Selected Discography carousel can be flipped to only display the artist’s content in your library.
At the top of the artist page, the Popular Tracks section has a new tab which lists your favorites and most-played tracks from the artist.
In both cases, the tab selections are “sticky” so once you’ve selected one of them, your remote will follow your preference going forward.
Variable Text Size on Windows and macOS
We’ve heard from a number of users that text feels a bit small in 1.8, so we’ve added the ability to bump text size on desktop platforms up a notch or two. You can find this option in Settings, on the Setup tab.
Note that on iOS and Android, Roon will respond to the text size options you select on your device’s operating system.
“More Covers And Images” mode
This release includes the return of the “more covers and images” option, that uses a smaller presentation of albums and artists in library browsers that use a “grid” layout.
You can find this option on the General tab of Settings.
Multi-part Recordings
On the album page, we’ve improved the composition links to show the number of recordings available for that composition. By default, Roon will show you a “total” count of available recordings, including recordings from your library and from streaming services.
We’ve also created a setting that allows you to see the count of recordings in your library, in case that suits you more.
Finally, as a result of community feedback, we’ve returned to an indented presentation of multi-part works.
Classical Performer/Composers
Roon 1.8 dispensed with the Performer/Composer toggle of 1.7 in favor of smarter behavior designed to automatically handle both types of artists properly. However, we’ve heard a lot of feedback about artists who straddle that divide, and there were some inconsistencies in how we handled Classical performers who are also composers, like Leonard Bernstein, Glenn Gould, and others.
We spent some time looking at the examples reported on Community, and we’ve made some adjustments that we think will address that feedback, along with a number of other tricky cases we identified in the course of addressing this problem. Thanks for all the feedback here folks!
Bug Fixes
This release also includes fixes for a number of bugs we’ve heard about from the Community, including issues with gapless playback on Chromecast and mounting of drives that use the ZFS filesystem.
We’ve also incorporated feedback related to search input boxes, user-selected star ratings, multi-part composition indenting, and more.
The complete list is below. Thanks so much everyone!
The Team At Roon Labs
Roon 1.8 (Build 778) Release Notes
Roon Build 778 is now rolling out for macOS, Windows, Windows (64 Bit), Roon OS, and Linux.
Updated versions of Roon for Android and iOS have been submitted to their respective App Stores and will be available soon. There is no update for Roon Bridge at this time.
All platforms and apps should update automatically.
Improvements and Bug Fixes for Build 778:
New and restored functionality:
- Focus supports toggling of “Match All” and “Match Any” (AND / OR) and excluding of criteria on Artist, Album and Composition pages
- Configurable text size on desktop platforms (Large and Very Large)
- “More Covers and Photos” option is now available
- Recording counts are now shown on the album page
(library counts can be enabled in Settings)
- Two recommendation featuresnow support “In library” mode
- Artist screen: Top Tracks In Library
- Album screen: Albums In My Library
- Improved Artist page behavior for classical composers who are also performers (Leonard Bernstein, etc)
- Search history is maintained between runs of the app
- Easier access to Tags focus in browsers
Bug fixes and improvements
- Album Page
- Multipart compositions are indented
- Fixed layout of ‘This album’ overlay
- Fixed centering of images in Image viewer
- Updated treatment of Album type info
- Fixed missing release date information when available
- Disc dropdown and disc numbering persists when using focus
- Fixed cases where tags and playlists links split across rows
- Fixed crash when clicking track info text on Album page
- Focus
- Better layout when many items are focused on mobile
- Fixed visibility of discs selector for non-library albums
- Scroll position doesn’t persist between pages
- Fixed cases where “View More’ link was hidden
- Dialogs don’t dismiss when criteria is selected and have proper loading states
- Cleaned up Storage criteria
- Release date fixes for missing decades
- Fixed incorrect focus counts
- Pinning takes effect immediately
- Layout fixes in import date heatmap
- Fixed cases where header of multipart composition would count as a track
- Mobile:
- Updated design of Search input box
- Updated layout on Collaborators recommendation, Zone Settings dialog, Live Radio header, Qobuz and TIDAL browsers, and Compositions browser
- Fixed missing navigation controls on Now Playing in some languages
- Restored info tab to Composition page
- Radio Feedback popup restored
- Fixed cropped ‘Delete’ button on Selection bar
- Playing indicator restored on playlist page
- Fixed missing iconography in search history on dark theme
- Live Radio
- Graphical cleanup on the Live Radio page
- Fixed treatment of Ad-Free and Explicit on Live radio
- Artist Page
- Better behavior for composers when navigating via “View tracks in library” / “View albums in library” links
- Improved loading performance on Artist page
- Fixed issues hiding albums on Overview tab of Artist page
- “In Their Prime” - Fixed incorrect date and empty recommendations in certain cases
- New Releases For You:
- Fixed issue dismissing albums
- Removed superfluous “More” link on Genre and Composer screens
- Fixed issues using Selection on tabbed View All screens (also fixed in Recent Activity)
- Settings:
- Updated options on the General tab
- Cleaned up language selector and “hover” states
- Fixed bad CC0.1 link on About page
- Composition page
- Fixed empty entries in list of recordings
- All parts are played when playing a multi-part recording from the selection bar
- Chromecast
- Fixed gapless playback for Chromecast
- Improved buffering on slow networks.
- Resolved issues loading content from drives running ZFS filesystem
- Consistent behavior when pressing “X” in Search / Filter input fields
- Increased minimum size of search and other input boxes
- Improved UI engine’s memory management across all platforms
- Denoted user’s stars rating vs editorial
- Fixed missing albums on Discography tab in certain cases
- Fixed layout issues when sharing some artists / albums
- Fixed crash after reconnecting to the Core
- Genres can be selected
- Updated iconography for iTunes playlists
- Fixed pixelated borders on artist photos
- Genres/Artists: more compositions shown when fewer forms are present
- Track credits pop-up has fixed size when switching sorts
- Fixed icon alignment for tracks on many screens
- Fixed overlapping “private zone” icon
- Removed unnecessary dropdown if Play button has only one option
- Selections are cleared after tagging
- Virtual keyboard doesnt open when navigating back to a page with active text filtering
- Fixed behavior of TAB button in Editors
- Onboarding: fixed Qobuz ‘Forgot Password’ link
- Fixed display of incorrect lossy bitrate for TIDAL ACC tracks
- Fixed crash in case of selecting a track on lyrics popup
- Track credits pop-up has fixed size when switching sorts
- Fixed bad layout on the track grouping screen at some screen sizes
- Fixed UI glitches on certain types of NVIDIA GPUs running latest drivers
- Context menu cleanup on Now Playing screen