Shuffle classical movements

Hello.
I am new to Roon and thus far I managed to get everything working the way I want with help of earlier topics and faq’s. One thing I have not found an answer to is how to stop Roon from keeping movements together when playing in shuffle (random). It is annoying to have to manually skip 55 parts when an Opera happens to come down the playlist.

The question is asked before (long time ago even) but I can’t find the answer if there is one.

Regards,

Rene

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I haven’t seen any responses that this has changed, still lumps them together I think.

There are several long standing feature requests for this. There is a very similar issue with radio where you may want to hear a single aria or movement alternating with other single arias and movements just like a real physical radio station.

An attempt is being made in the link below to group together commonly requested classical feature requests that are otherwise being scattered all over the forum. You may want to add your request to this list so that it is easier for the roon team to track and prioritize classical feature requests.

I do wonder, however, how such a shuffle function would be beneficial for Opera… If I look at my Opera collection, there are a lot of tracks that I would not want to listen to out of context. How should Roon know that you want to shuffle only the “famous” arias and not any of the connecting tracks with recitatives and such?

I trhink that’s a case for setting up a playlist of favourite opera tracks and then shuffle on that.

Shuffle while keeping compositions intact is one of my favourite features…

I don’t think the request is to shuffle the movements of a work. I cannot imagine why anyone would want to do that. And the ability to shuffle entire works in the correct order should remain. The request is an additional capability to shuffle single movement playlists. At the moment if you manually construct a playlist of favorite arias, for example, that is not what roon plays. Instead it plays the entire operas back to back.

Similarly if you seed radio with an aria (or movement etc.) roon will not automatically program a sequence of complementary single arias and/or movements. Instead it will intersperse single pop songs with entire operas and or symphonies. That is not a radio experience. If I have a couple of hours spare which is the typical length of a real radio show, roon will often end up playing a single work all the way through. I do not need a roon AI to figure out how to do that. I can do that all by myself.

So whether roon plays a work all the way through or not needs to be context aware and/or user configurable and that is what the feature request is. You are right in the sense that with some works it is not obvious which single movements are candidates to be treated stand alone depending on context. But I am assuming that eventually roon should be clever enough to figure that out. In the meantime ROONRADIOBAN could be used in an opera for example to exclude everything except the arias if that is what you prefer.

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ah - ok. I was not aware of this behaviour when shuffling from playlists.
Thanks for the clarification, Tony

I’d like to see a an extra option/choice somewhere: play a random track in the list/playque and disregard the grouped movements. So, just shuffle all tracks. Or choose the option so that it is as it is now with the grouped movements together.
I mean the group thingy is a nice feature ( preferably as optional extra choice) but every other player from iTunes to audirvana to Aurender conductor can play random tracks. So why not Roon?

Speaking for myself only, but the fact that Roon keeps compositions together is the one “killer feature” that drove me to Roon in the first place. I always hated how pretty much every other player out there shuffles individual movements of multi-part compositions like symphonies, sonatas or concertos.

@Klaus_Kammerer1, the way I personally solved the issue you state for operas, oratorios and other long works is to tag them by acts (if not too long) or scenes, using work/part tags. That way, Roon may place a scene in the play queue which may be 10 or 15 minutes long, and then move on to something else. Works great for me and it has led to discovery and appreciation of great moments of opera that wouldn’t normally be what you would sample if you were to manually play the CD or even the rips via manual selection.

Granted this approach takes manual work for the tagging, but the results are more than worth it in my opinion.

Sounds like there is a third requirement to also be able to shuffle, depending on listening context, not only at a work and part level but also at an act/scene level as well. That is:

  1. work
  2. act/scene
  3. part

However, roon only supports a two part composition hierarchy at the moment. So for various use cases there have also been several feature requests for 3/4 or more composition level hierarchies. If you want to queue at an act/scene level in addition to a part, work level there are dependencies between all these sorts of requests it would seem.

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Hello together,
is there any news on this ungrouping in a playlist? I just added a few soundtracks to a soundtrack playlist and obviously I do not, when I play shuffle, expect to play all Jurassic Parc (45 minutes) before going to the complete Donwton Abbey OST… another 45 minutes,- that is not useful. I really would like to see these blocks, which roon interpretes as “movements” which belong together…

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OK, it took me a while to find that what I needed is deeply hidden in the album properties:“Mehrteilige Komposition Gruppierung”,- tick it off and it does exactly what I wanted it to do.