Hi. Still getting my feet wet with Roon. It seems that almost every track is also an album. When in album view, I’ll click on an “album” and it’ll only contain one track. This is true for tracks that appear on compilation albums.
Is there a way to get a folder view of my music collection? I’ve become accustomed to looking for tracks by year/decade, gente, then album and/or tracks. Plex allows me to navigate with a folder view option. I feel as if I need to know exactly which track in my collection to search for. I’d like to be able to browse my collection as I have organized it. It certainly came on handy when I used DJ software.
If folder view is a priority for you then Roon isn’t the software you want. Roon’s design from day one was not to use folders to find your music and this looks extremely unlikely to change. It’s just the way it is.
I don’t understand this. I don’t have tracks from compilation albums separated out into their own albums
As others have said, no folder view. However, go to Sidebar > My Library > Tracks. Click on Focus top left. Limit the displayed tracks by year, genre, and more. (Next to the Focus button you can also limit by favorite and tags). Does this not do what you need?
My guess is the metadata isn’t good enough for Roon to identify the album or it might be the way you have structured your folders.
You can use Merge to combine the tracks into one album but I suggest having a bit of a play with it and see how you go.
There can be a steep learning curve with Roon to get everything looking the way you want.
Not that it helps much, but that is certainly (and unfortunately) something I have come to find / feel as well
I know Roon can / should support singles and EP’s but in my mind it struggles when compared with albums, which it’s pretty good at. Maybe that’s just because the metadata available for Albums is better / more available / more consistent.
But you only need to look at a site like Discogs to realise how much music there is old and new that doesn’t fit into an album centric model.
Maybe tighter integration with a platform like Discog might be the solution to this longer term, there’s already a couple of feature requests for this. Maybe worth adding a vote or comment over there.
btw. I’ve read multiple forum posts and KB articles since I have been a Roon user. But I’m yet to find to find a really good & definitive document from Roon on exactly how we should handle singles, EP’s, DJ mixes and the like. Maybe I have just missed it, but I’d be interested to know if there is one other than the general KB article on the metadata and tagging best practices which only lightly touch on non-album centric music. Hope I’m not hijacking this thread, but be interesting to knows is such a (definitive) post or document exists, other that the ones linked to above.
A couple years ago a DJ came in to ask for help but was even in worse shape. He had single tracks, thousands of them, and essentially no metadata to let roon know what was what. It sounded like a complete nightmare and he eventually went back to his directory based methods and he was not seen from again. This path that you are walking with roon has been walked before and I believe there isn’t a good solution.
You are correct that there is lots of non-album based music out there, but the sad fact is that roon doesn’t handle that well. In fact I can’t imagine handling it less well. But for the guys here who think in albums (like me), that really isn’t an issue.
I may just be an old dog, but there is no place in my life for DJ mixes and singles. So roon lines up nicely with my needs.
