Hi,
I have a lot of albums and use entries in Comments in iTunes regularly to create playlists and navigate my collection. In Comments, for example, I take note of the album label and other details that are interesting for me. In Roon, however, the comments are not searchable in Focus. Please make all iTunes labelling searchable and allow smart playlists à la iTunes.
Thanks
Hi,
Just curious … is Roon not able to offer alternative ways to navigate via it’s metadata and user tags and the bookmark feature?
If not do you have some specific examples that you could share, I (and I know the Roon devs) are interested in these areas … it’s all great feedback.
What do you mean and which example do you want?
Just to let you get a feeling: I add the music label (e.g. Decca, ECM, Deutsche Grammophon…) in comments as I tend to discriminate between the different music styles publishd by the labels. Now, when I want a playlist defined by a particular label AND (Boole) a certain genre, I cannot do this in Roon.
Have you looked at all of the options available within the pop-up “Focus” dialog box??
Filtering by Label and / or Genre and already there…as are many permutations and combinations of other variables
e.g. Focus on all Blue Note label albums…24/96 or greater…from 1950 to 1965
the above Focus takes about 5 seconds to tick the boxes and complete the search / focus
[quote=“WKW, post:3, topic:10954”]
Now, when I want a playlist defined by a particular label AND (Boole) a certain genre, I cannot do this in Roon.
[/quote]As per Ronnie’s reply … this is possible in Roon … Have a look at all the many options available in Roon’s focus.
I would recommend having a good play-around exploring what’s possible.
If you have a focus filter that will used a lot, then it is possible to bookmark it for instant recall. It’s really a very powerful feature.
Yes, playing around may be a possibility. But please read what I posted in another thread about this problem:
Your way of thinking is heavily biased by the
contemporary tendency to zap through albums, playlists etc. My son does
this also, but those of us in the forties/fifties/sixties who learned to
listen to physical albums (LP or CD, SACD) like to listen to an album
in its entirety and not jumping between songs and albums. This applies
primarily to classical, jazz and other more challenging music. The idea
behind is that usually artists/musicians compose an album by thinking
about the sequence of tracks and their interrelationships in the same
way as they compose the notes and bars of a single track. A symphony has
3 or 4 tracks (sets) that are clearly interrelated. The same is true
for most good jazz and rock albums.
If you guys tried to understand the older generation, you would know
that we are also interested in playlists that contain entire albums.
Our way of thinking and feeling of music is different from the
short-term attention span of the young. We (or I) try to capture the
whole thing in a piece of musical art.
Sorry, but I’m still not sure I understand what you’re looking for here
Personally, about 80% of my listening is done by listening to whole albums…just as I did many years ago after extracting the 12" LP from its sleeve!!
Using Focus allows you to easily filter your library down to a single artist…a single album by name…a group of Albums by label [e.g. Blue Note or Decca]…a group of Jazz Albums from e.g. 1952 to 1957…a particular genre of Classical music…or a particular Ensemble type…or a particular instrument…or any combination of the above factors
You mention Boolean logic above to create such a list…but the Focus options within Roon are much easier to work with and will allow more complex queries to be created and stored for later use
I used iTunes Comments for several years to create Playlists and Smart Playlists and I’m aware of how they can be used…but again the Focus option within Roon is FAR more powerful and allows for more detailed and complex “Filters” to be created…allowing a greater variety of Playlists than iTunes ever could previously
I’d encourage you to spend some time exploring the Roon Focus option and seeing how easy it is to generate some of the Playlists you describe above…there’s really no comparison to the same features within iTunes
I get that you like to play whole albums, I do to, but I’m not getting what you would like to be able to do that Roon’s focus can’t do already.
I use focus a lot to filter my collection to a subset based on multiple and varied criteria.
It might be 80’s progrock, or 1960 Jazz on a certain label. It’s really easy to drill down like and explore one collection.
Are you able to give a concrete example or two of the kind of filter you would like that focus does not support?
BTW I grew up with vinyl, CDs and esp. Music servers came much latter in my life.
Hi Carl,
I just played around with the options available in Focus. I definitely found possibilities I didn’t know before. Thanks for pointing me to this.
But still, for my needs I’d need also a searchable title in focus for key words & also searchable tags in iTunes comments (this can’t be difficult, is it?).
Example: There are lots of albums by Joe Zawinul, Weather Report, and The Zawinul Syndicate. Then there are musicians who produced albums with and about Zawinul’s music (e.g. Miroslav Vitous: Remembering Weather Report; Absolute Ensemble by Kristjan Järvi, etc). If I wanted to produce a playlist that combines all albums by Zawinul including Weather Report, the Z Syndicate and albums where his music is played, honoured or remembered, and maybe only those albums that I purchased from Qobuz (a tag in iTunes comments), I can make this as a smart playlist in iTunes but I see no way to do this in Roon.
And finally, if I want to rearrange the tracks within the playlist according to my wishes, that going to be difficult in Roon I guess.
Does this explain my dilemma?
I know this is an old thread, but I do something similar with the Comments field: I store a label as a reminder that I have a physical copy of this album (optical plastic, such as CD, DVD-Audio, SACD; or even vinyl).
So, I will navigate my collection with iTunes and if I see a comment for an SACD copy of the same album, I will often pull that out and listen to it via my spinner; same with records.
My collection of all of the above is large enough that I can’t remember what I have… would be great if Roon would expose the Comments / Description tags somewhere on the UI and make them selectable via the elegant Focus UI.
My $0.02
i could not agree more!
i imported my iTunes library into Roon, and would like to be able to use in Roon extensive Comments I made in iTunes. If I started from scratch, I could do it via Roon tags, but I prefer not to start from scratch with 5000+ CDs.
I too would like this feature.
Rather than saving the data in the roon database, for example:
Roon: Tagged with 'Female vocalist'
I prefer to keep the meta data associated with the files themselves, for example:
iTunes: Comments contains 'Female vocalist'
There are many benefits to doing it this way, and it’s useful for building up playlists of multiple criteria, using the boolean logic available in iTunes… but it’s not possible with Roon’s rather cramped ‘Focus’ interface.
I too would like the Comments like in iTunes.
Here I put the cat.no’s of my CD, LP etc. Also arranger, country and p date of the medium
Keep posting feedback like this… maybe one day it will happen. Just kidding… they are consumed with artist photos.
By sheer coincidence I discovered that AppleMusic comments are available at a specific location in the Roon menues. But I admit not remembering where that was. I will continue searching.
Perhaps one of the support staff could just drop a note on the (well hidden) location of where AppleMusic’s comments is. We’d apprexiate this.
Again by coincidence I found the “Comments” from Apple Music in Roon. It is visible in:
My playlists > Playlist name > Track view > Ellipsis … on track > File Info (scroll down).
This works only for manually filled playlists and does not work for smart playlists in Apple Music.
Roon has problems with smart playlists also in other respects (such lists cannot be deleted). So maybe they will repair this some time.