We’ve been using JRiver Media Center for years. Pretty much have everything the way we like it. Been hearing so much about Roon that I thought I think about switching over. Most of my questions are around doing playback the way we like.
Our library is 950+ albums with nearly 11,000 tracks. We like to listen to everything so we were building smart playlists in Media Center to do that. For example, I have multiple time based playlists like the following:
Not played in a year
Not played in 6 months
Not played in 4 months
Not played in 3 months
Not played in 2 months
Not played in 6 weeks,
etc.
These playlists were global in nature in that the only criteria was when it was last played.
There was also a playlist of music added in the last two weeks that hadn’t been played in the last two days.
I would then create, for example, a Jazz non-vocal play list. This might be everything in the 3 month playlist and the new stuff playlist with the genre “jazz” and not the genre “vocal”. We’d do the same with other genres as well with the time based stuff based on how often we’d play that list and how much we had.
I’ve looked into the focus feature but it appears to be album centric. If I focus on the genre “jazz” it seems to include any album that has a track with the genre “jazz”. That’s useless to me. That defeats the purpose all the work I did categorizing the music.
How does one achieve the type of playback I want? This is a deal-breaker for me.
I get what you want to do but I am not sure you can do it with roon. I, too, came over from jriver but had my music sorted not by time but by type. I created my playlists in jriver, exported them and put them in the upper folder of my music and roon would find them. But, in your case, they would be good only on the day they were imported since it is searching via time (which will change as soon as you hit play) which i dont know if that can be done in roon. You will need someone with a lot more indepth knowledge of roon or someone from support to answer this question. Dont hold your breath hearing from support, though.
I had an open answer for almost 4 months with them and never got an answer and why, i left back for jriver. Mine wasnt a deal breaker as yours is but i learned that if you need support help, unless you scream really loud or have an easy problem, be willing to wait. Hopefully that wait doesnt impact your listening (as it didnt in my case)
Jriver’s support is just as atrocious (maybe worse when you consider the attitude of their leader) but at least they have a bunch of unorganized written documentation from which to start. Roon, you just have the good folks in this forum that step up. Documentation? Uh… no.
For the most part, jriver can do everything that roon can for a fraction of the price. The upside of roon, is the ui and experience. Not much different than a crude apple (roon) vs microsoft (jriver) comparison.
Best of luck in getting a solution. Good news is if you do switch over, you still have your jriver license to fall back on. May not be as slick a solution but its reliable.
If I am understanding what you are looking for, It looks like you can do some of what you want to do using “focus” by track or albums
here is focus by track:
Then you have to highlight all the tracks (long click on top track, scroll to bottom, shift click on last track, then click three dots and then add to playlist.
You can also make a bookmark so it is accessible without having to go to the playlist menu.
Caveat being that I think this a snap shot of results not a dynamically updating list?, not sure of that, although one would think that if the filter is active it would update each time you click on it on the playlist or bookmark?, not sure.
Alternatively, you can just use focus each time to get the “list” you want if it turns out it does not update each time from a saved playlist or bookmark???
I was hopeful but not exactly. Despite picking a genre, I’m getting stuff that I assume Roon is assigning to my selected genre, which definitely doesn’t match. I’ve set Roon to only use genres from file tags, yet it insists on matching tracks without that genre tag. This is rapidly becoming a problem. Am I missing something?
In my short period of use, Roon’s song selections and playlist management are not very robust and quite lacking. After reading, this is nothing new to them and it appears as if they are working in both these areas to improve the software
I “removed” the ones in red by clicking on them and turning them to “minus” and added the “country” genre manually.
The new view of the album looks like this in roon:
Not sure if this is the “correct” or “right” method but it seems to work???
You can selectively “revert” edits (by genre only if needed) back to the original settings, if it does not do what you need.
This doesn’t seem to work. I went to one album in question and took off the genres that I didn’t want – specifically music genres (there are other “genres” like DSD, HiRes, etc. that I use but I took out the Jazz, Choral and other music specific genres as they didn’t globally apply to the album). However, when I go to tracks, and focus by a particular genre like “Jazz”, nothing shows up for that albums despite having tracks tagged with the “Jazz”. Roon seems to be too album-centric and that doesn’t work for me. It’s looking less and less likely that I’ll be able to use it.
Here’s another example. I have one album (a sampler) that has one track of Christmas music on it. If I want to focus on Christmas music, I don’t want to hear the other tracks from that album.
Why is this so hard? With both Media Monkey and Media Center this is a no brainer.
