Setting it up is all done in Roon. It is essentially just shuffling all tracks in a library using a Roon endpoint and capturing that shuffled library using a playlist so it can be accessible via ARC. Here is a different step-by-step:
In Roon:
create a playlist called “ARC Shuffle”
Choose a Roon endpoint
go to queue and clear the queue
go to your tracks and select shuffle tracks. Then immediately pause the music.
go back to the queue. The shuffled tracks are there as normal. But go to the upper corner and select “add to a playlist”
choose the upcoming items button
place them in your new playlist
In ARC:
once ARC syncs with your Roon Core, open up playlists and find the playlist titled “ARC Shuffle” that shuffled all tracks is captured (of about 6,000 tracks) and is now accessible with ARC.
The function is identical. Until we get native shuffle… this works exactly as if you were playing the shuffle all tracks from that endpoint. You can add or clear that playlist and add a new shuffle at any time. I have been listening to the original capture for a couple days now in both the car and at work. It is wonderful. Definitely a feature I have been wanting since ARC debuted.
Just to provide some insight from our side—this is a feature we want to do and will do. Just a scheduling matter at this point. Work is defined and in the backlog.
I get what you’re doing now. Still, doesn’t Roon limit the queue to ~5,000 tracks? Mine does. So you’re not really shuffling all your tracks, only one queue’s worth.
It is the exact same function. The built queue of the endpoint is a result of Roon randomly building a queue using all tracks. Throwing that queue into a playlist just captures the first 6,000 tracks or so of that all-track shuffle. You can keep adding to that playlist. Just clear the endpoint queue and reshuffle all tracks to repopulate the queue. I generated track shuffle on the endpoint twice and placed results in the playlist. This gave me 36 days of my shuffled library. I can add to the playlist at any time.
Oh, and you don’t need to shuffle the playlist using ARC. I mean, you can, but it has already been shuffled before placing it in the playlist. It is a mirror of the shuffled endpoint in Roon.
We’re actually saying the same thing. I do exactly as you describe except I shuffle in ARC. When my playlist runs through (~5K tracks) I make up another playlist and start again.
FWIW most other music apps don’t actually shuffle all of your tracks as it’s pretty computationally heavy to do so. They usually take a small selection of tracks from a given browser and add those to your queue.
How would you expect this to work? Or rather, how many tracks would you expect to be added to your queue?
Also, where would you expect to see these shuffles?
Thinking about this problem a lot right now, so please everyone feel free to chime in.
kneville
(A feral ghoul cannot abide a chicken. )
53
If I’m not mistaken, a while back there was a switch to the shuffle behavior in Roon (not ARC). The old behavior, if I recall, was that if I had My Tracks pulled up and clicked shuffle, Roon selected a single track to play and put another in ‘next up’ that I could dismiss via the ‘thumbs down’ if I chose. I actually preferred that to the current behavior of Roon (I know we’re talking about ARC, but I shuffle things most of the time, so bear with me) which creates a queue of 5000 tracks or so.
For ARC, I would suggest being able to go to My Library>Tracks (or even albums, ideally) and have Roon choose a single track, put another track in ‘Up Next’ and continue to select and present single tracks at ‘random’. The option to skip ahead to the next track is always there, as is the option to put the next track in the queue via ‘thumbs up’.
For me, there’s more flexibility and more possibility for jumping off points into artists, albums, or Roon Radio with a track, artist, or album as a seed. Additionally, it feels less unwieldy (not sure if it actually is behind the scenes) than a queue of many hundreds or a few thousand tracks, even though it’s not really that different.
Shuffling a subset of the library is fine for me. But what I would like is bookmarks. I have a bookmark of tracks that haven’t been played that I typically play shuffled. With ARC I need to create a playlist from a subset of that bookmark that I can then shuffle in ARC. If bookmarks worked in ARC I wouldn’t need to create the playlist.
That’s roon radio with thumbs etc not shuffling tracks.
You can start roon radio in arc too but it doesn’t have the queue thumbs up down etc.
kneville
(A feral ghoul cannot abide a chicken. )
56
This is what I was thinking of, a change with the transition to Roon v1.8 from v1.7:
Not exactly the same thing, but still the behavior I’d prefer to at least have an option for in order to shuffle a large group of tracks. Another benefit of this behavior is to create a random queue of a specified length. I could do this with a playlist, I suppose, but sometimes I’d rather the software make the choice for me.
I still work from this bookmark and still prefer the old behavior (pre 1.8) to the current behavior. The bookmark is actually albums rather than tracks - it includes about 8200 of the 8800 albums in my library, and I when I click shuffle, I get queue of 5129 tracks. Prior to the build mentioned in my post, I would get 1 in my queue, with the option to add additional tracks.
I agree with this - I don’t even care if the bookmark needs to be created from within the normal application outside of ARC. If we have a way to access our bookmarks and shuffle them, then that works for me!
I just want it to work like Roon desktop app. If it’s a random subset (which it is), that’s fine. I don’t know about other people, but the last thing I’m doing when I jump in the car is specifically thinking about which of the thousands of albums I have that I want to listen to. I just want it to play “something”.
Definitely a feature I have been wanting since ARC debuted.