Roon is an excellent system overall and I’m able to manage my music and listening quite well with it for the most part. I’m saying this first lest you get the impression that I’m nothing but complaints. I’m not. Roon is, so far as I know, by far the best on the market. That being said, Roon could stand improving in several areas as outlined below.
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Focus-> Genres. Like many classical users, I started ripping my CD collection using the MusICHI suite of software. I set the Genre in my metadata using the (very imperfect) drop-down menu for Genre in the MusiCHI Tagger, which has perhaps 40 or so entries. My import of tagged CDs has mapped the metadata Genre tag to your GENRES list for Focus. The problem is that Roon’s list is limited, making it unusable for focusing on almost any of my Genres. Could you please add a “View More” like you have on many of the other Focus selections. This would let me choose things like double concerto, chamber quintet, solo piano, and lots more. I think a large number of Roon’s classical listeners would also benefit from this change, as I have often seen references to MusiCHI in the online Forum.
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You need to greatly improve your support of album identification. As you know, identification is essential for connecting with Wiki and other features, as well as expanding the information that appears on-screen for each album. The current methods for identification are too limited, time consuming and difficult to use.
a) When I click Identify Album, it comes up with a short list of (usually) 6 suggested albums. If the album is in the short list, all is well and it’s easy. Click on None of These Look Right and we’re into never-never land. It repeats the 6 from the initial list at the top of this list – please suppress that; I already rejected those possibilities. The list that appears seems to have a limit on the number of suggestions. I would like to see more than the present limit.
b) Continuing with Ident: If I don’t change the Artist or Album boxes at the top, the result often seems to latch on to some irrelevant word in finding suggestions. For example, if the album title is something like “Tchaikovsky Arrangements by other Composers”, I’ll get nothing but Tchaikovsky albums as suggestions. Most of the suggestions seem to have little to do with what’s in the boxes above. Another example, a search for Album “Karel Boleslav Jirák Piano Sonatas 1 & 2” pulls up a bunch of Chopin, Rachmaninov and other composers’ albums with those 2 sonatas. Utter nonsense! The search for suggestions seems to use the “dumb” approach of matching single words to single words without trying to be intelligent about it. I seem to have the best luck by erasing the Artist and Album entries and typing whatever appears in Bold on the album cover into the Album box. If you’re not going to be intelligent in the matches, at least give me some options to help guide the search. A group of words surrounded by quotes should only match the entire phrase. “Starts with…” and “Ends with…” options could be useful. There are certainly many more possibilities.
c) Ok, suppose I’ve found the album that appears to match. I click on that. Sometimes this works well, but often the tracks aren’t in the right order or the right place. I can indeed correct that by moving single tracks up and down, but when I “pass through” another track that I previously corrected, it’s now out of place again. The one case that drives me bonkers is when my album tracks are at the top of the match list but the same tracks from the Ident album are way down at the bottom. Ugh. I can move those down to match in small groups, but it is very time consuming. You could make this easier by making the track matching smarter. 1) Tracks from my album should appear in the same order on the Ident album in at least 99% of the cases. 2) Make more use of the track timing. Try matching on a “majority rules” type of scheme when working with the bunches of tracks. I know there is often an outlier or two in terms of timing, but you can ignore those while keeping the group intact. 3) Match words in my track to the same words in the Ident track. If one is contained in the other, they match. If there’s a (say) 60% match between the two, count that as a match.
Let me just add that I have about 8000 albums and 13% of them aren’t identified. If you gave me the tools to do the job more easily, I’m sure I could knock that down to around 5% fairly quickly. I’ll never get down to 0% since at least a few are private recordings of my own concert performances.
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Some album labels (Studios) seem to be mostly missing from Roon. The one most pertinent to me is Acte Prealable out of Poland. They have over 500 albums in their catalog, but I seldom get a match when doing an Identification. Dutton seems to be fairly sparse too. There are others.
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Ratings. You have two options, Editorial and My Ratings. I only want to see My Ratings. Give me an option to do that. The Editorial ratings are probably related to quality in some sense. My Ratings are based on whether and how much I like the album. Those are two distinctly different beasts, and I don’t want them mixed.
For me this comes into play because I use My Ratings to select what I want to hear each time I create a queue or playlist. If there’s an Editorial rating of 4 stars on an album and I haven’t rated the album for My Ratings yet, I won’t see the album when browsing through albums without a rating (negative 1+ stars).
While we’re on the subject of Ratings, I can rate an album using ½ of a star, for example as 4 ½ stars. Under Focus, I can’t select 4 ½ stars, only 4+ stars or negative 5 stars. Neither gets me what I want. Either add the ½ star options or let me make two selections (4+ stars AND negative 5 stars should get me 4 ½ stars).
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Last Played date. I know you have this date since you need it for Focus. I want to be able to see it. I asked for this feature a long time ago via a formal change request, but nothing has come of it. I work around the lack by editing the play dates for each album into the album’s metadata. Because I know from my own efforts when I’ve played each album, I’ve discovered that your Sort option for Albums of Most Played is a farce. For example, Iolanthe pops in near the top of the list, but I’ve only ever played it twice in Roon. There should be many other albums in front of it.
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Can we have at least “2 years” and “3 years” as choices under the “Played in the Last” for Album Focus? I use this Focus in building a queue or playlist. The “1 year” isn’t enough. It leaves me too many albums to browse through.
