Roon 1.8 - where can I see tags & playlists for a track? [Solved]

ROONTRACKTAG data no longer displayed with tracks.

3 Likes

Yeah, wow - just felt this issue; opened an album to see “have I already put this song in XYZ playlist?” and confusingly could no longer see it right there appended to the song. Seems silly… and maybe it’s easy for someone to say “you not going over and just checking the playlist to see seems silly” (clicking the three dots net to the song gives me no indication in what playlists it is present), but that’s a clunky workflow and this is actually something I do often when it comes to the curating of playlists and wondering if I already put a song somewhere (or multiple places). So, just adding another voice, FWIW.

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Seriously?! Yeah. Bring that stuff back. Hopefully this is just a bug? But if it’s not - who the hell thought that was a good idea? Bring back my tags or I’m demanding a refund and peacing out. That’s not a threat, just the way it is. My tags are indispensable. I’m clearly not only one who’s upset. Maybe it’s a bug?? Pretty egregious bug, if so.

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@brian @support it’s been 3 days now and no comment on the tagging. Is it a feature being removed or just a blip? I tag and use tags every minute of Roon use so this is now dragging on a long time to not know the intent here. If the new form is staying then let us know and i’ll find a new app. If it’s a blip then let us know how long - if too long then faciliate the ability to roll back to 1.7.

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+1 to pretty much all of the above in this thread …

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Here another “fully agreed” to the above. Changes in App’s are norma,l like or dislike is a matter of taste and getting used to the new thing. Removing stuff people never complained before and actually used a lot is madness.
In my playlist I could see all individual tracks with the album covers. All album covers now have been gone :scream:
Most people are visual oriented, so those album covers were much faster to find the right track. Now I have to read every single track in a list.
Very disappointing

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Here a picture of how it was…

For those who wanted to see the difference :joy:

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Just wanted to add a final description to elaborate on the problem. Sorry if this is already very clear (I promise this is the last and I will not keep complaining :slight_smile: )

Here is a track I have in my library: ‘Another chance’ by Above and Beyond. This is actually already added in a playlist called ‘Electro 1’. This is quite a big playlist but there are others (e.g. Electro 2 etc.) and I have an ‘Electro’ Tag on them.
I then use a focus on this Tag in order to listen to music that has not been played in the last 6 months.
You can see the aim here… I have a few thousand tracks I love and I would like to listen to all of them (instead of repeating the same tracks).

I used to be able to click on the album and that would show me which playlist / Tag the song is under. Not so any more:

I used to see the playlist right next to the track name. Why was this useful? well, I could choose to add the track under a second tag / playlist. Or perhaps I could decide to move the track to a different tag / playlist. There is no longer a way to do this. If I click the tree dots on the right of the track I can choose to ‘add to playlist’ or 'add to tag… If I select ‘Add to playlist’ I then see this:

I already know the track is in my ‘Electro 1’ playlist but this is not indicated here either. Same thing happens if I select to ‘Add to Tag’. What is worse, If I select to add the track to the ‘Electro 1’ playlist, I get no warning that it is already there. A duplicate entry is created without a warning on this. There is no way of knowing that I have duplicated the track in my playlist unless I access this playlist and then opt for ‘show duplicates’.
And of course, no way of moving the track from the current playlist / tag as I have no info at all on where it is currently.

Maybe I can let Roon to do its thing with Genres and completely forego my own tagging and playlists. That could work but unfortunately I have this additional issue:

that means that about 50% of my library is unidentified so not ‘integrated’ in Roon. For these tracks there is mostly no genre identified so my own tags / playlists is the only way for me to listen to them.

In summary:

  • No way of knowing which playlist / tag a track belongs to.
  • Adding tracks now means it is likely that duplicates are created (with no warning).
  • Moving a track from one playlist to another is only possible by first finding it in the playlist that it is stored in. As we no longer have the information, I would have to go searching each playlist separately to locate the track.

So to conclude, I cannot see a way to manage my library any more. Maybe I have missed something (I hope I have).

Sorry for the lengthy post, I just wanted to share this in a bit more detail in case I have missed something.

17 Likes

In fact, after a huge anxiety in the days before the 1.8 release, for a new version, a “cold water” came with this issue of T A G S. I think someone from the organization should come here, to clarify and not let this issue escalate and take on proportions of dramatic displeasure. Unless, AND I HOPE WELL THAT NOT (for me one of the essential points of the roon), they are thinking about dropping the TAGS on the music tracks. Please say anything…

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Great explanation and keep posting until someone from Roon responds! It’s easy to sell people something and take their $$…customer service is where many companies fail. hopefully not Roon, we’ll see.

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Agree with these posts and appreciate the productive tone!

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For a couple of days now, since I had to experience the missing track tagging and playlist features on 1.8 – which are really necessary for me to make productive use of my music library –, I was trying and tinkering with restoring all my systems via backups to states pre February 9th, 2021 and just now, after maybe 20 hours of trying and failing and trying again, I finally succeeded to have Roon 1.7 back and running again on all my devices :pray: (I have a Macbook, an iPad and an iPhone I use with Roon).

I actually don’t know why it didn’t work out in the beginning and then did in the end. Restoring on macOS was pretty straightforward, since I only had to grab the 1.7 version of the macOS app from a backup, rename the Roon folder in ~/Library like the Roon team told me once when I had a broken system after an update (I’m pretty sure you can delete that renamed folder if the restoring process went well), start the 1.7 Roon app (which creates a new Roon folder in ~/Library) and restore from a Roon database backup pre February 9th, 2021.

Getting the Roon 1.7 app back on my iOS devices didn’t work that smoothly because in the beginning iOS always seemed to download the most recent Roon version. So even when restoring a pre February 9th backup on my phone, I would end up with the 1.8 version installed. Maybe I did something different in the end than in the beginning. Maybe in the beginning I didn’t always immediately turn off auto updates in the App Store settings and didn’t have my devices connect to the internet only after that (and denying every connection attempt of Apple’s restoring dialogue). The thing is, iOS always seems to restore apps from the Apple servers because it makes the backup smaller if it doesn’t have to contain every application’s code. So there still must be a 1.7 version lying around on Apple’s servers. I always have to allow a connection to the internet for restoring the Roon app on iOS, without internet it just won’t restore.

But yay, finally it all worked out and I honestly wouldn’t want to go through that again (I did countless restore tries with iMazing and they always took at least half an hour). I’m so glad to have a usable and running Roon 1.7 system back again on all my devices.

I was even surprised to find that the old design all of a sudden looked pretty modern to me and also pretty pretty. Really well balanced in colors, font sizes and font weights. Maybe it’s the contrast but I didn’t feel that so strongly before.

In the end all this silence from Roon about the tagging and playlist issues in 1.8 really made me feel stuck in the middle of nowhere and I felt like I had to do something about it. I’m glad I could.

―

For some the following might look cluttered. For me it’s really essential being able to quickly get a rough idea of how a track sounds without having to listen to it again.

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No this can’t be the solution! I hope the roon team is on it. :crossed_fingers:

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Complaining is OK but I also want to mention the complain I had with not showing album pictures in play lists have been sold. New update and it’s back again.
Thanks :pray:

Now it looks like this again:

I completely agree with you. I wish I wouldn’t have had to go through all of that.

Several people are concerned about duplicates being added if you can’t see if the track is there.
This applies to playlists, a playlist is an ordered sequence of tracks and can certainly have duplicates.
But tags do not get duplicates. A tag is a categorization.

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Thanks for that Anders, it is quite helpful :slight_smile:
I tried it just now and I can indeed see that if I add the same track direclty to a Tag then duplicates are avoided. This certainly helps as duplicates are avoided. The issue with not knowing where a track is categoriesed (in case of Tags and playlists) remains. This means that re-categorising tracks remains a challenge (e.g. if I want to remove some tracks from a range of tags and then create a new categorisation).

Another thought I had was to replace playlists with Tags so as to take advantage of what you mention (avoiding duplicates). This could work but I ran into a different problem. Playlists display tracks in a space efficient manner:

Tags show tracks in this way:

As displayed above, scrolling through hunderds of tracks is unfortunately a challenge when using Tags, especially when using a phone or even a tablet. Playlists are much better for that but they suffer from the above issues.

Still, the tags may be a better compromise to avoid duplicates (as long as I never try to recategorise or change tags). The other limitation with using Tags directly is that they don’t offer sorting of tracks (e.g. via playcount) as playlists do. Bookmarks would have to be created for every single Tag in order to achieve this but then we would run into another problem: bookmarks are not sorted and their display is a bit limited in space.

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I held back from the 1.8 update as it was clear the GUI was being massively revised, and alarm bells sounded when the promo video mentioned “museums” as a design influence. While I could live with some of the design regressions that have been reported by many users, the omission of the playlist info at the track level would be a massive step back, as it’s such a cool feature. For now I have to be careful that no-one accidentally updates my iPad to the 1.8 app, as the downsides of 1.8 seem greatly to outweigh the benefits.

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Yes. Albums show tags, but tracks do not.
I can see the problem, even though I never use tracks or playlists myself.

Wrt the differences between tags, playlists, genres, queue and other groupings: computer guys pay a lot of attention to these differences and choices are carefully made, a playlist obviously has to be ordered and a tag obviously should not. So if you choose the wrong type things will become ordered.

I hope you get back some way of seeing track membership from the track listing.