Using Roon efficiently to listen to my music

While running the Roon trial I loaded up about 200 cd’s of music to test with. Trial went great.

Now that I’ve purchased a Roon license I’m a little overwhelmed as I’ve started loading up additional music - about 800 CD’s worth of music so far (various genres).

I was wondering if some of the more experienced users could provide some hints re.

  • organizing my music - other than using the Roon defaults
  • accessing my music more efficiently. Right now I’m finding the by artist / album organizing, increasingly difficult as I add more music.

Thanks.

How do you normally navigate your music pre-Roon?

1 Like

If those albums overwhelm you probably best not to add Tidal then…

Perhaps it would help (others) to help you if you were able to give some examples of what specifically you’re finding difficult to do now as opposed to pre-Roon?

And just to be clear: when you say “organizing”, are you talking about the way Roon presents your music (as opposed to how you store it on the file system, for example)?

I find the Roon system of displaying by Artist, or Album, quite logical. But our brains may work differently.

99% of the time I use the Artist view.

Also, the search function is highly efficient when you know precisely what you want to listen to.

I’m not sure what’s lacking for you . . .

I personally don’t organise a thing. Just dump them in music folder and Roon adds it and organises it, life’s too short for anality of music library curation. I just use the search engine to find the artist or album I am after and I add tags to ones I use a lot so you can quickly go to it. I hardly ever browse by artist or album or use focus. Or I’ll use discovery to randomly pick something I may have forgotten I had.

3 Likes

My “legacy” system of organizing my music on a hard drive was to create folders for artists, and sub-folders for albums. I do continue to do that, even though Roon is agnostic to it. I’ve had hard-drive based music since 2012, and got Roon this year . . . so I’m not ready to throw old habits to the wind . . . yet!

Let me take a step back. My music library includes a mixture of pop/rock, classical, blues and jazz. And before I go on, let me say that I’m sure that there is functionality that I’m not aware of.

If I use artists / albums, all of the genres are mixed together. As my repository grows, the confusion in these views only grows.

As I am writing this, I have selected genres and now realize that I can display all artists within that genre / sub-genres (can I do the same for albums).

It’s probably just a case of using the tool and trying different methods of finding items.

Focus is your friend

I use TAGs extensively, and bookmarks of combined tagged views. You can combine all these with Focus features; as Evand suggests, Focus is your friend too :slight_smile:

Actually, these 3 features are pretty great to help comparmentalise albums and tracks; there is more work to be done in this area for sure to improve logical combination options, but it’s good already!

Once you start playing around with the tags, bookmarks, and focus, you’ll have more of handle on your collection than ever before.

1 Like

I’ll second the suggestion to combine Roon’s Focus function and Tags. I find that there are artists, and higher rez recordings, that I enjoy going back to most frequently. So first using the Focus function I search for those higher rez offerings for a particular Artist or Group (Rock primarily).

Then I set up a specific Artist or Group Tag for their Hi-Rez offerings. Same could be done without paying any attention to audio quality but I seem to have multiple versions of many of the artists I enjoy. Managing the library in this manner allows me myriad ways to let Roon do its thing.

If you’re feeling lazy or adventurous you can simply let it suggest… “Discover”… stuff you probably haven’t listened to in some time. At the other end of spectrum if you absolutely want to hear a specific Artist, or selection, hitting the Tags button puts all of those items you previously Tagged right in front of you pronto. In alpha order.