I suggest a way to edit the Roon Genre Tree cleanly and simply
this would include:
Being able to delete system genres
Building a tree with ease
Remap genres
I feel a simple editable text file or excel sheet (which would allow copy pasting) could solve this issues.
My dream is to replicate the RateYourMusic hireachy (their forshadowed API is truely HiFi catnip at this point). I use a scraped RYM genre tree I found online in excel (happy to share)
While I practice careful tagging - the ghost genres not being removable, and the difficult reorganisng the genre tree could be imporved.
Some screenshots of my current pain
”Ghost genres, Reorganising the genre tree in a small window one by one, finding genres in a small window filled with junk and duplicates”
Glad it’s not just be that finds this HUGELY frustrating
Reiterating some of what has already been said I know, but..
Historical clean up / ghost genres: I have hundreds of useless genre tags from library scans over the years, would be amazing to be able to clean out the list and start afresh.
CSV import / export: The ability to handle the mappings in a CSV file also feels like the most flexible solution for power users.
File genres vs Taxonomy terms: Making a distinction between a custom genre tag in a file and it being promoted to a first class taxonomy genre in Roon. Just because a file contains a genre tag doesn’t mean you want it in your taxonomy. Forcing a user to explicitly ‘promote’ a file’s genre tag to a first class ‘genre/taxonomy’ tag would I think solve a lot of the problems here. File genre tag → User Taxonomy Term (can delete) → Roon Taxonomy Term (can’t delete?) (with only the last 2 appearing in the mapping genre pickers or allowed to have a parent genre assigned; the file page genre would still appear on albums unless hidden)
Roon vs User genres in picker: the genre taxonomy picker makes no visual distinction, they are all lumped together, for users who mainly want to extend or mapto the Roon taxonomy it would be useful if the picker showed a little Roon tag next to each entry to visually separate them out in some way.
Adding a little Roon icon next to each item, like there is on the main mapping space would help here?
The thing that drives me nuts, which I assume would be a low hanging fix / improvement, is if in the picker Roon visually distinguished in the pop-up taxonomy picker which of the genres are the native built-in Roon ones (you get out of the box with nice photos and existing mappings) and which are your own, pulled in from file tags.
A little Roon icon next to the Roon ones in the picker would go a long way here.
A bit of a sledgehammer, but even a “reset to default button” would help, especially if you could import / export to say a JSON file to keep a record of what you had previously.
I think you and some other user might wan’t to completely replace the Roon taxonomy? But I expect most users are happy just keeping the the bulk of the main Roon taxonomy there and extending it downwards or mapping sideways to it.
Being able to visually see the whole taxonomy tree (like a family tree) with children, parent and alias and which node are the default Roon ones and which are your own, would really help.
