Shuffle from a Tag that includes a Playlist

To be clear, this question is not about randomizing the tracks within a playlist.

If I include an album within a Tag and then navigate to that Tag, then hit “Shuffle” then Roon will shuffle all the tracks within that album among all the tracks in the other albums within that Tag. It splits apart the album into constituent tracks and shuffles those.

Roon does not do this with Playlists. As far as I can tell, it simply ignores a Playlist in this scenario. Should it? Shouldn’t it either treat a Playlist like an album in this scenario or at least play the Playlist through when it gets to it in the queue?

Seems like Tags have relatively little value when it comes to Playlists - just a way to index them but not play them, if the above is true.

I"m not sure what you are exactly doing or expecting. A Tag on an album is inclusive of all tracks on the album. A Tag on a playlist is inclusive on all tracks on that playlist.

Lets say you have a Tag called Led Zepplin and have tagged Led Zepplin II and III and then you make a playlist called “Later Zep Favorites” and include tracks from Physical Graffitti and Coda. If you then add that playlist to the Led Zepplin Tag and hit shuffle, it will mix all the tracks from the two tagged albums and all the individual tracks from the playlist in a shuffle. It will not go out and grab tracks from Coda that were not on your playlist.

I don’t see this as the behavior. I created a “test” Tag and added (1) one Tidal playlist and (2) one album from my local collection. Then I navigated to that Tag and hit “Shuffle” and it played every song from the local album in order and then want to Radio based on the album. It NEVER played a single song from the Playlist.

This was certainly not my expectation. My expectation is that it would shuffle in the tracks included in the Playlist. It does not appear to do that.

Edit: tried it again. Same behavior. Shuffle the Tag played all the tracks from my local library and completely ignored the playlist.

It works the way I have shown. The issue is probably that the playlists are made of Tidal Tracks which are NOT part of your library. Tracks that are not in your library are ignored. I just tested this with two playlists, one with tracks from albums added to my library from Tidal, one without, added to a tag of local albums. The playlist containing tracks from albums added mixed in the shuffle, those not added did not.

Thanks. Yes, that may be it. I added the Playlist to my library, but not each individual track (nor the album the track is on).

What would be so hard for Roon to actually not ignore the songs in a Tidal playlist? It would be great to be able to Tag and use them. A great way to mix in new stuff I haven’t heard, without having to add them to the library until I know I like it.

Means that tagging a playlist with Tidal tracks has little value other than finding that playlist. I mean, it will play the playlist if I just play it. Why not allow it to be shuffled with other content?

I guess since Roon does not allow tagging of albums until they are added to the library, they just ignore them. However, it seems it would not be that hard to code in some useful function for Tidal playlists so that we don’t have to add each track or album within a Tidal playlist before being able to do anything other than just listen to the Playlist stand-alone.

EDIT: I just discovered that at least one can “bulk add” the contents of the playlist to one’s library. That doesn’t solve the prospect of shuffling in the tracks before you commit to adding it to your library, but at least it is not that hard to add playlist contents. I’ll have to play around with that to see what it does to the library, and whether the add is just tracks or whole albums. I probably would not want a lot of orphan tracks floating in the library…

EDIT2: bulk add with multiple tracks selected only adds the track to the library. While this is probably the correct choice relative to the fact that only the track is selected, it creates a bunch of orphan tracks that look like albums in the library. Don’t want that, so bulk add doesn’t really work to remedy the problem that Tidal playlists don’t shuffle within a Tag.

So go back to my original point. Tracks in Tidal Playlists should be recognized and shuffled.

Hey James!

When you add a track to your library from Tidal, Roon will then treat it as a local file and then allow you to do things that are currently only available for local files, like favorite it, etc. , including being included in a shuffle. I can only tell you what I know, not necessarily why. One guess is that there needs to be a boundary between your library and Tidal. As to the why, we could ask @mike . The closest reasoning I found was in a closed thread in Feb of 17, talking about the inability to favorite a track not in your library. reference link below.

I suspect that your issue may get resolved as a side effect of the work being done to include non-library Tidal material in Radio play. But, that is only a guess, I don’t know for sure.

However, until there is another solution, you could just Hide all those individual tracks in album view. It is pretty easy to do, in Albums, go to Focus, Inspector, Track Count. Set it to 1 -1. (This will give you all the albums which only have 1 track) and choose the option for Hidden and invert. You can then select them all, hit Edit and select Hide; and then save the focus as a Bookmark. Then you can choose the bookmark again next time you bulk add a playlist.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/why-cant-i-favorite-tidal-tracks-in-a-playlist/21240/2?u=rugby

Thanks Daniel! That is good info,

My suspicion is the same - there must be some technical reason that Roon cannot fully “get its hands on” a track until it is in the library, at least with the level of coding they’ve done to date (I mean, if you can add a Tidal track to the queue without adding it to the library, I’m sure there would be a way to code what I’d like to happen, but it hasn’t been coded yet).

And yes, it might be that the new Radio that can dip into Tidal may create a greater “grip” on Tidal tracks in a playlist.

The hidden idea is a good one. Until, that is, I am looking for that whole album and I cannot find it because it’s in my library but hidden and thus not showing up anywhere. The end result is that right now if I want a playlist to shuffle I’ll need to add the whole album for each track. A fair amount of work, probably will just ignore the whole thing until I run out of other ideas to curate music…

Hide is a 2 step process. You set the album to Hidden status. Then you use the Settings Option to either Hide or Display Hidden albums. Kind of like Windows.

Yes, got it, thanks. I probably won’t do it this way, but it is good to know that at least I have a method of not displaying orphan songs as albums.

I have my own thoughts on the simple duality of hide vs unhide relative to how Roon identifies albums (or fails to) and that I think greater stratification of multiple versions should be offered (should be able to classify them as original CD release, remastered, SACD rip, needle drop, etc.) and then to be able to choose a preferred version once that is done. But that is a rant for another day.

Back to trying to figure out how to effectively re-create the John Hughes movie soundtracks through Tidal without buying $99 CDs…

Which one is $99?

The vinyl versions are not too expensive, but somewhat time consuming to convert to digital.

Weird Science and Sixteen Candles were both really $$ on CD. Amazon has the Weird Science CD at $99 and Discogs was similar.

I had hoped to re-create these albums using Tidal content that I assembled as a Playlist and then included in a Tag. I could also just Tag them and embed that in a sub-Tag of sorts. But…Tidal also doesn’t have some of the critical tracks from those soundtracks.

This has been addressed in Build 831: