Could there be some kind of “saved for later” queue? A bit like Amazon’s “saved for later” when you are not quite sure whether you want to make a purchase or not. Integration with community recommendations and live radio would be great as well (is that technically possible?).
At the moment there are a flood of recommendations coming in. I like this because personal taste tends to stagnate without it but it is a bit overwhelming.
Community recommendations (“what are you listening to”, etc)
If you have a queue, shuffle or radio playing most of the time, this constant stream of recommendations is quite awkward to handle as pressing the wrong button will destroy the queue you have already spent time building. We can all argue whether these recommendations are much use but personally I do find diamonds in the rough and would just like some place to park them so I can listen at a later time when the mood strikes me.
I’ve got into the habit of handling this by adding the recommended album to my library and then tagging it with “Discovery” (for instance). Not perfect, but it works for me.
For me, the most instinctive thing when browsing various discovery or recommendation screens is to click on the image or link and press play. That automatically destroys the queue I am listening to, and chances are 50/50 I won’t like the recommendation anyway.
What I have to remember to do, is either switch to another zone and listen to the recommendation there, or alternatively “add next” and then delete from the current queue if I don’t like it. There are normally others in the household listening so in practical terms I cannot do this anyway as it is so annoying. So that means I tend not to use the discovery and recommendation features at all except in the dead of night when everyone has gone to bed.
From a few responses it sounds as if something similar can be accomplished with tags and/or bookmarks. Now, that might be intuitive to you, but you can see that what is intuitive to me is something quite convoluted and nine times out of ten is not accomplishing what I want. It’s interesting that something similar can be accomplished with tags/bookmarks but it never occurred to me, I have no idea how, and is maybe not really very intuitive to others as well. After 2 years or so, for example, I have never used the bookmark feature. No doubt there is even a third “workaround” that someone else has thought of as well. That is not what I am asking for. What I am asking for is a usability feature which integrates more intuitively with the way in which I and I hope others use roon on a daily basis.
What makes sense to me is to click on a recommendation from a link or an image and get the option to “save for later” or go to the play screen (where I can play now, add next, add to queue etc.). Something similar would make sense on radio as well. At the moment, you have to decide to “add to library” the entire album on the basis of a single track. If you could “save for later” and review the album at your leisure, maybe you would decide just to add the single or a remix or whatever instead.
Seems we have all come up with different solutions. I think that is the 4th in about 6 posts. Another one that never occurred to me.
I did imagine integration with playlists but it was more a workflow through an unsorted jumble of recommendations from all sorts of different genres I had saved to a “dustbin” of a queue for later. It would indeed be very cool to work through that and save or discard albums to library, tidy up the tagging and save specific tracks to playlists like “new classical” or “new pop”, or even on the main queue, or whatever. I get that, so thanks for the suggestion. I do like to listen to a lot of genres but not on the same playlist.
I usually use either the option of adding to (the end of) queue, or making a bookmark for the album, artist, or search results that I’d like to explore later.
Feature request: Auto-fill new bookmark names with album name, artist name, or search term – assuming one of those apply. I know, it’s not a big deal to type something descriptive into the empty text field when adding a bookmark, but software’s supposed to make things easier / more convenient, right?
Several have mentioned bookmarks. I have never used them. So I I just tried from curiosity but I cannot see any obvious way to group bookmarks. So, for example, my instinct is to create a bookmark called “Save for Later” and then add recommendations to that for later listening But I cannot see how to do that. Have I missed something?
I would create a Tag ‘save for later’ and add this tag to albums/tracks.
You can then select albums/tracks with this tag, and add them to your bookmark.
All albums/tracks that you tag later on, will automtically added to your bookmark
Dirk
Grouping bookmarks is not currently possible, but that’s already been raised as a feature request for a future update. One that I agree would be a nice option to have.
How does that work in practice? Do I sequentially follow this algorithm:
Create the tag
Add the album to my library
Add the tag to the album
Create the bookmark
Add the tag search to the bookmark
Search for the tag
Play the album
Delete the tag (if I want to keep the album) or delete the album (if I don’t like it)
Add the tag to subsequent recommendations
Repeat from 3 and goto 6
If it’s something like this, then I admire your inventiveness. I would rather that roon used there servers to do this. That will also be the reason why it never occurred to me. I just think usability with something like roon is important and they should offer something much slicker.
Thanks. I can see how I could use that. It’s less risky than what I do. But I was hoping for something a bit better, a bit slicker. Grouped bookmarks would go a long way.
This is exactly what I do except mine is called “To Investigate”.
One thing to be careful of, if like me someone thinks in terms of albums, is what you add to the playlist. If it’s something that Roon Radio has selected then it’s pretty straightforward, add the track now playing. If however it is a whole album discovered some other way then I add just the first track from which I can explore the rest of the album when I want to. On occasion I have accidentally added a whole album (all the tracks on the album) to my “To Investigate” playlist rather than just a single track from the album which for me makes my lTo Investigate” playlist too cluttered so I then delete all but the first track of the album to keep my list of potentially interesting stuff to explore more streamlined.
I approach this from the other direction, at least partly: I assume that anything in my library is relatively unknown to me, until I’ve tagged it differently.
I have the following tags:
Keep (Album)
Keep (Artist)
Maybe (Album)
Maybe (Artist)
Going to the Artists page, I can show any artists that don’t have either of those two tags – meaning they’re new to my library. If I know I like the artist, I tag them with Keep (Artist), and if I’m not sure they get Maybe (Artist). Same thing with albums.
I just found this discussion because I had the same problem. I have a few comments on existing suggestions, and I was wondering if there’s any feedback from the devs at this point to indicate whether they’re looking into things? I believe that the existence of all the different workarounds suggested here certainly means that a built-in feature would be a good idea!
Now, I have tried the “add to playlist” idea. I don’t like this - I added an album I wanted to remember, and ended up with lots of individual tracks in the playlist. When it turned out I didn’t like the first couple of tracks later, I had to manually clean out all the other items from the list. I don’t actually understand why playlists appear to always be track-based - but if they are, then they’re not a great tool for those of us who want to remember to come back to an album recommendation.
Second, I tried to use tags because that sounded like a good idea to me. I’d never used them and the “add to tag” options was grayed out. (Side question - shouldn’t it be “add tag”? Surely I add a tag to the album (I mean, just visualize the whole idea of “adding a tag” in your mind!), not the album to the tag.) There was no indication what I needed to do to make the button available. Eventually I remembered that I had seen tags elsewhere. I found them in the “my stuff” group in the sidebar, and there it was: I don’t have any tags! Okay then, created one: “check out”. So far, so good. Back to Norah Jones’s new live album, which prompted my whole research… hm… button is still gray! Now what? After some reading of the previous posts here, finally the realization: I need to add the album to my library first! Why? That’s weird! Albums in my library are supposed to be the ones I actually know I like, not the ones I’m not sure about - right? So at this point it becomes obvious that I’m abusing the tag system if I tag things to remember to check them out…
Tagging is perhaps a workaround for me - at least it allows me to tag albums (not tracks), and removing an item from the tag later is one operation, plus removing it from the library is another. But it’s still way more complicated than necessary for the simply purpose of marking an item “check out later”, and it’s not very discoverable for all the reasons I described. How do we get the Roon guys interested in this thread so we can hope to see a better solution in the future?
The Roon Labs team read all Feature Requests, but they very, very rarely respond directly in a thread.
How do we get the Roon guys interested in this thread so we can hope to see a better solution in the future?
By giving additional detail on the particular use case (as you have done) to indicate to the team what is meant by the request, and why it is important to you. The information helps the team prioritise their work.
Often when I play music and «surf around» on Roon, I come across an album or artist that I really want to listen to, but not necessarily right in that moment. And of course, this is forgotten in the next listening session unless I actually take note and write it down.
Would it be possible to add a «To play» or «Wait list» category in the Browse section, and the ability to easily add/remove artists/albums/tracks in this category?
I realise that we can create playlists, but to me this is a different feature - more of a reminder than something to be replicated for future use.
