I agree to a point.
But constantly being offered R&B, hip-hop, heavy metal, or classical titles, for example - if they’re genres you don’t care for or even more can’t stand - isn’t likely to suddenly get you interested. IMO. 
(previously deleted because the black and white text box popped up and made me think i’d jumped to another thread - very clever SJB ;))
I agree to that. But, on a serious and zoomed-out level, also think about how spoilt we are these days. Music just keeps coming. We are being force fed new music and we start to sulk about seeing stuff we don’t like. We used to have to make the effort to go to Tower or Virgin or HMV and scan through a lot to find some new music. You were exposed to R&B, hip-hop, heavey metal, classical and more on the shelves and perhaps get permission to talk to the long-haired shit behind the counter that wanted to tell you that everything you liked sucked and was so last-week.
We are spoilt senseless. We complain about two extra clicks 
Perhaps what is being missed is that the effort IS what made music and finding it special. The ease is part of the devaluation of music. It is just human nature.
For example, years ago if I heard/read about an album, I spent the energy to go to a music store and get it home to play it. Even if at first listen I thought it was crap, I’d give it a second or even third spin; because it cost money, I took the effort to get it. Many times, what I dismissed on first listen, I discovered that I liked. In fact, some of my favorite music was stuff I had to have “grow” on me. Now, with streaming, that is gone. People give music a 10 sec evaluation and then never return to it.
Another example, going through the effort creates life experiences beyond just pressing a button. And that gets entwined with the music. When I was young, I remember taking a bus to the mall to get Kiss’ Destroyer. Walking home from the bus stop, I’d lit a cigarette, which was forbidden, in doing so, I’d lit part of the album cover on fire. I got it put out but the cover still had singes where it had burnt. From then on, when I would pick that album up, I would remember that event and chuckle.
I so much agree to this. I have loved albums that basically would be a miss today. Because it was my pocket money and I had to adjust and defend the investment. I would listen to albums for so long that the track 6 I hated the first three months ended up being a new favorite.
So, yes - the effort was a big part of it. But so many things today make me think of CK Louis and “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”. 
Totally agree with you Daniel
It must be somewhat selective to be useful. Not sure if genres are the answer. But I certainly find zero interest in the “most listened to” stuff on the internet, whether it is Tidal or something else. Yes, I know Adele is hot right now, but I don’t care for Adele.
I wonder if you can leverage cloud analysis, so you can show me community playlists that are somewhat related to my playing history.
So, yes - the effort was a big part of it. But so many things today make me think of CK Louis and “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”.
Well put Pal. (And Louie CK)
Whatever they’re paying you, it isn’t enough.
Tom
There is a story about when Jeff Bezos came up with the one-click buy at Amazon, he told his engineering team, and a week later they demoed the solution. They had added an “Are you sure?” dialog. Bezos had a fit: “that’s two clicks, I said one click!” The point is, the one click is so valuable for Amazon’s business that they have a patent on it, and having it requires that they have to eat the return costs of a lot of mis-clicks.
On a more serious note, @palbratelund, the problem isn’t the clicks but drowning in the volume of mass market data. I agree, we need to have a way to get exposed to stuff we haven’t heard before, otherwise it becomes like the echo chamber that dominates current political discourse. Today I get that from reading articles: some of my most exciting discoveries of whole areas of music come from articles, anywhere from the NY Times to hifi blogs. So I’m not suggesting that Roon should be so narrowly targeted that I see only what I’m used to. But somewhat meaningful, please.
Not easy. If I listen to current jazz, how would you grasp that Kim Kashkashian would interest me? I don’t even know how I discovered her…
But that would be an awesome stretch goal: a playlist function that is so intelligent it finds stuff that I have never heard but fall in love with! Anything less is wimpy, @brian2 !
The only completely blind (unheard) music purchase I’ve made in the last twenty years has been the Joanna Newsome album Divers. It got terrific reviews and based upon them and the review of her earlier work (and her role in that crazy terrific Inherent Vice movie) it never occurred to me that I might need a long, long time to ‘appreciate’ her music. I hope I live long enough. (I see the faintest glimmers every so often.) It must be an acquired taste.
You lit a cigarette and started the album on fire? Now I’m also laughing about that. I mean, how does that happen? There’s a song to be written about it right there and here’s your title: Burning Kiss.
Tom
Love this idea, it’s along the lines of what I posted for a ‘find similar’, but never thought of playlist…
All those great connections Roon has - ‘similar to’, ‘followed by’, etc, combined with genres, our libraries, and our play history, makes it perfectly placed to come up with ‘intelligent’ playlists for us to discover with. Maybe you could have a ‘bravery’ slider. ‘Sissy’ for just wanting safe and similar material, ‘Fearless’ for getting into unfamiliar territory. And learn from how well it goes - maybe ask for a success rating?
Great thinking. “Bravery” slider indeed…
For simple basic playlist/smart playlist functionality, Jriver and jremote are pretty good examples. We discussed elsewhere the ability to save a filtered ‘focus’ as an updating smart playlist…just don’t think bookmark works well in that it doesn’t represent a collection in many people’s mind.
Better playlist functionality would help with overcoming a deep-seated hatred of the disappearing queue which I cannot get to grips with…if I want to play a track again I have to go routing around in the history or remember to add it three times.
It would be fantastic to reconcile the queue as something less volatile by being able to save it to playlist.
When thinking about creating a playlist the obvious UI is … Add to playlist, which playlist … Choose playlist blah blah… Each time one adds a track. We can definitely do better I think how about the UI remembers that you added something to one playlist and offers that as the default choice? Or, if you add a few tracks then offer to go into ‘playlist creation mode’ which could be as simple as a representation of the playlist being created being shown on screen to allow for an easy drag/drop target?
Been thinking more about this. I think @Mike’s central point is important: to many people, playing music is not a queue-centric activity. Like so many other activities–changing the cruise control, car navigation, playing radio or TV, even playing recorded stuff from a Tivo, adjusting the thermostat, adjusting the temperature of the oven–none of these have any implied queue operation, of “resuming the queue afterwards”. And it is not because they are dumb, these systems are all computerized; they just chose not to center it around a queue metaphor.
Those of us who have lived with media server computers have gotten used to a queue metaphor because it is commonly used, but that doesn’t make it natural,
“Play” means play. “Insert in queue” or “add to queue” are queue operations.
I think that distinction is very natural, and the paw masher reflects it well.
That said, improved user interface or defaults for common scenarios certainly makes sense. As Mike suggested, party mode is one, with lots of intriguing implications. A “record what I do” model also makes sense: for example, in today’s system, if you keep adding to the queue that’s fine but anything played disappears from the queue and ends up somewhere else, in the history, so if I spend a weekend playing stuff and then decide I want to keep them for the future, I have to collect stuff from both history and queue and build up a playlist from it, I can see that being streamlined.
I think the central point about choosing defaults is that it is not about what seems “natural”, it really should be about scenarios. “When I want to do this, I want this kind of user interface. When I want to do that, I want that kind of user interface.” A scenario-centric model, as opposed to focusing on actions with more or less predictable side effects.
I’m absolutely awful at remembering my albums, tracks, what I like and what i don’t and on top of that my wife and I havea small’ish overlap of tastes so segregation is the word - so i use playlists quite a lot in order to keep track and to programme material for joint listening
I would like to see more information in the playlist itself - similar to when i go into an individual album I can see if any of the tracks are in other playlists, favourites, how many times they have been played or any other value add metadata. I’m sure others would hate this idea and see it as cluttered, so the ideal would be to be able to edit which metadata columns were displayed.
An example of my use of playlists - i am going through my album wish list i have accumulated in Amazon and adding all the ones that are in Tidal into a “Should i buy” playlist. It would be great if i could see in the big playlist all of the tracks i favourite to see which of the albums is getting the thumbs up.
Genuine question, how?
I like to have a shuffle function for the playlists
Unless I’m missing something I’d really like the option to ‘Play Next’ in a playlist queue. I have several playlists that are the ‘Greatest Albums of All Time’ sort of thing so cover a lot of genres. If you start to like a certain mood of song it would be great to be able to scroll through the queue and push the songs that match that mood to the top. Used this a lot with my old Squeezebox.
I’d also, when clicking on a track, be able to export the whole album it belongs to to a playlist - not just the song.
Sort the Playlist into alphabetical order (this would be reallllllllllly handy) 
I have many playlists in iTunes which to a large extent have been created using individual track ratings. The good news is that Roon can pick up my “historically created” playlists from iTunes. The bad news is that Roon does not support individual track ratings. So if I wish to continue doing similar in the future, I will need to run Roon & iTunes in parallel, which is far from ideal.
iTunes like playlists where you can see a list of artists/ albums not just a long list of songs. Please, and thank you.
Example of one playlist
