I am not looking for “opinions” from other users but if you share my view, please chime-in on this thread. I believe there is a silent minority of thousands of Roon users, who like me, are very frustrated and baffled by its grotesque, ponderous and perplexing search dysfunction!
I use Roon ONLY because it provides the best sound quality and stability in my 2-channel system that I have experienced. For that, kudos to Roon.
It is abundantly clear from the many complaints I have read from other Roon posters, that like me, a large number of them want FOLDER BROWSING but thus far, Roon wont provide this simple function!
Last year, I implemented a “work-around” to speed-up the search process by copying album or track names directly from my music storage files and pasting them into the Roon Search Box, but this function does not work lately. I must assume that Roon Developers purposely eliminated copy & paste to force users to “search their way” and enjoy the “rich user experience” they are so proud of.
I just want to quickly choose and play music! I am an audiophile - NOT a so called “music lover”. If the sound quality of another bare-bones music player with no “art” at all was equal to that of Roon, I’d use it! Why can’t Roon be for BOTH “music lovers” AND audiophiles?!
I am using a Windows based Surface Pro as my “remote control” that performed cut & paste last year but since I “upgraded” to the latest Roon version, it does not work. I just tried a brand new Acer (Windows) laptop and it too cannot perform this function. I use a two-button mouse to control Roon. Its seems odd that only a MAC can do it but I suppose it may be possible.
alex_wood
(Vinyl is still King, but Roon is heir apparent.)
4
If you have searched Folder Browsing on the Forum, you will have seen that Roon are a hard No to implementing it.
Right click paste is not working for me in Windows either. Let’s flag @support so they can look into it. Any reversion here is not part of a strategy to stop people using search; it would just be a plain old embarrassing bug.
Ctrl-v paste is working for me, however, so in the meantime you should still be able to use your workaround with that key combination.
I have to say though that copying and pasting to find an album or track feels like a lot of work to me compared to Album or Track browser. Roon doesn’t provide the browsers or Focus tools to make things harder, but because they genuinely believe that they are a more convenient way to navigate. Many other users (including me) feel the same way.
If you would like to share why you don’t find those tools easier or convenient then it may be that the Community can help you iron out any issues that are preventing your using them fully.
As a “for instance”. If I were looking for Artist/Album, then I would go to Album browser, select “Sort by Artist” and then use the blue scroll bar or alphabetical Quickjump selector (the ABC icon) to find the Artist name and click on the Album I was after.
I’m asking the following to try to understand the challenge, not because I am challenging your assertions.
From my point of view, roon performs the equivalent of full-text searches across a large array of metadata. To my experience, so long as the metadata that I’ve included in the files, or roon has, search works perfectly accurately and simply.
As a few examples:
I want to find an album by a band whose name I can’t remember, but I can remember one of the performers.
I want to find a song by name, but can’t remember the name accurately, so I enter only the fragment of the name I’m sure of
I want to find a classical work, but only know the composer-specific identifier, or only know the composer, or only know the work name
I want to find all the albums by a particular jazz instrumentalist between a given set of dates
In all of these cases, I find that roon search works exactly as I’d expect it to.
What is different about your experience? Can you give an example or two to make it specific (and potentially actionable by the roon development team)?