What is the weakest part of Roon?

Importing music into watched folders. When I add music I want it to appear instantly without having to do a rescan. On a Mac Mini Core watching an SMB folder on a NAS this just doesn’t happen.

Related is an issue where albums in watched folders are skipped and then added at a much later date, for no apparent reason.

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Yes, it is complex. Even for classical. Is a Bach cantata a work? Probably, but that clutters up the Bach composer listing with dozens of cantatas (the man was a hard worker). Harnoncourt has released a series of albums collectively titled Das Kantatenwerk, treating the whole collection as one work.

At the other end, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for orchestra is clearly one work. But what about the version for two pianos, used for ballet rehearsal in the era before recorded music? Is that the same work? And The Bad Plus has released an album that creates several entries for parts of the Rite.

Of course, for jazz and rock, it is common to think of tracks as individual works, but some albums, like Beyoncé’s Lemonade, have a common theme and should be considered a work.

Brian has mentioned that the answer is some form of hierarchical structure, in the future. Complex, but it would have great value. As things stand, I also use only albums. The only value I get from Roon is the social graph of artists – great value, but there is more.

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bold & emphasis above added by me…

If I want to play a jazz or rock album as a work, I want to invoke that myself, not have Roon assume I want to play it as a work every time, which is the current situation. Sure, the Doors’ Celebration of the Lizard could be considered a work, but when a sub-section of it (such as Not to Touch the Earth) appears in shuffle mode, I don’t want Roon playing the rest of the work at once.

[quote=“AndersVinberg, post:22, topic:10137”]
Beyoncé’s Lemonade, have a common theme and should be considered a work.
[/quote]correction: nothing by Beyoncé should be considered, let alone considered a work.

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These things bother me still… after months of use

  • low resolution images in “genres” pages

  • when you add an album to watched folder it’s still not automatically added to library (WD MyCloud NAS) A force rescan is still necessary.

  • horizontal scrolling only…

  • lacking language support… only English at this point

  • no Qobuz support yet

  • profiles should have separate libraries (1 for every family member) Now all is still mixed into one library …

On the Bach cantatas - they definitely should be treated as separate works. Bach wrote them for different occasions throughout his life and all have separate BWV numbers. I don’t agree that Harnoncourt treats them as a single work. I like Roon’s concept of a work for classical, and it mostly gets them right. One of my biggest frustrations is the lack of a mechanism for correcting the ones it gets wrong. But hopefully, this is coming, along with improvements to the way operas are handled.

I do: bad user interface design. Wasted horizontal space, coupled with insufficient vertical space to display running tracks, coupled with an inconsistent interaction model (e.g. playlist vs. album model), coupled with an inconsistent scrolling / swiping model (e.g. moving through a playlist vertically vs. moving through lists of things by swiping horizontally), coupled with redundant visual elements (e.g. two copies of the playback progress bar / audio graph in the queue display), coupled with too many clicks/taps to do basic things (e.g. navigate to an album and try skipping around to different tracks within that album - brutal).

I could go on, but to be honest, playback and queue management feels like it was designed/developed by multiple people, who worked independently - the symptom of that is something that feels “…unresolved.”

Roon is visually very attractive, and the promise of “discovery” within your library is really cool, but the interaction model needs to be re-examined from the ground-up.

Sorry… I know they are working very hard and their customer engagement is exemplary, but I am using Roon less-and-less, because of the UX.

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Roon’s weakest link - for me - is that is has a tablet interface but it runs on a Mac/PC. The tablet interface is great on a tablet but it doesn’t exploit the screen space, multi-window environment of a PC. No pop-outs or new tabs to allow real drag and drop playlist creation. Want to select the next album to play while reading the lyrics of the currently playing album? Close lyrics, navigate to new album, put it in the queue, and reopen the lyrics. There’s a fairly large number of other examples I could give.

Still love Roon. But since somone asked…

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A big help to losing remote connections is to set tablet to keep screen alive.
Then I just minimise Roon and the tablet sleeps. I don’t lose connection so much on wake up.

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Cloud sync would be a stupid solution not VPN. How about local sync to your device(s) while on your own network. Open ports on your firewall if you absolutely need full access when away.

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That functionality is currently available:
In Album view, right click (on long press on a tablet) a track and the Selection menu appears at the top of the screen with the “Play From Here” option
In Playlist view, left click (on a tablet short tap), and you are transferred to the PawMasher screen with the “tracks from here” ready to be queued.

Roon staff have advised that having different behaviour on different screens is by design. I have learned to like the design but it is difficult to discover.

Agree about the White Screen of Death on the iPad. The iPad app definitely feels a little clunky compared to the OS X app. Another frustration is not being able to stream to my Naim SuperUniti, but this is probably Naim’s fault as much as anybody’s.

These all pale into insignificance though compared to the massive frustrations of using most of the alternatives.

@DrTone – Sure, if you have a device with enough storage and battery capacity for that. Local storage should be a cache, with cloud as a fallback. In the extreme case, I may have a library of entirely owned content at home – if the mobile has the library with the metadata but not access to the content, it could compensate with Tidal.

Different devices have different storage and processing capacity. My car system (very expensive) is slow when digesting 256 GB of data on an SD, and can’t handle the highest res, so I have to manage content. Want this automated.

As smart as possible, fine. But get it out of my hands.

@ChrisByrd – Yes, of course the cantatas are separate works, but at the same time the Works listing under Bach is completely unwieldy because of all these works. The fact that they are all cantatas is a meaningful categorization. That’s why a hierarchical design would help: one entry with Cantatas, and you can expand that section.

Ah – and of course we have the Rite of Spring which caused a riot at the opening. And Bolero which had a woman faint during the performance – Ravel said she was the only one in the audience who understood it. And let’s not even talk about Elvin with his hips…

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Elvin…

…and the Chipmunks?

:wink:

Sorry but any male with a pulse can see there’s plenty to love there.

Agree, but there are two issues here: you are talking about play behavior, we can discuss whether it should respect works – if you are doing a shuffle play, would you want all of the Rite of Spring or only one movement? All of Lemonade or only one song?

But separate from play behavior, it certainly makes sense to recognize when an artist considers an entire album to be one work, across multiple tracks, for browsing purposes. Keith Jarrett’s Radiance. Wadada Leo Smith’s Great Lakes Suite. Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town.

I certainly don’t want to look up Jarrett under composers and have 17 numbered entries…

Agreed. This happens with Synology’s DS Audio and is very useful.

Different strokes and all that

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