I have tagged many tracks to create playlists of different styles of music. But very often when I listen to my tag playlists one track comes up but plays the whole album instead. It’s only happening for tracks where the album is multi-part grouped.
This is a faulty behavior, only the tagged track should be played. Not the whole album. Please fix this.
Can you post an example of this? Thanks.
I’ve just tried picking a track from a multi-part composition and adding it to a playlist, and just the track is played, not the complete composition…
Are you playing the tag list or a playlist created from tags?
I’m not listening to playlists, I’m listening to tags (My Stuff > Tags).
So to replicate this you can tag a single track from a multi-part composition and then go to My Stuff > Tags and play all tracks with that tag. This will play the whole composition of the track you tagged.
Are you sure about that? A short test of exactly this, using my (Early-Access) Android remote, didn’t play anything at all (does this work as described by the OP on Production?). Maybe you’ve additionally added the whole composition to your tag too (or other content like Album, Composer, …)?
Then how about going to the tracks browser, apply the tag there and then chhose your desired play option? This works for me with the test tag from above flawlessly and as expected (by the OP).
Note: There is usually no point in accessing tags directly for any other purpose than checking/managing their contents.
I have not added my whole composition to my tag, only single tracks from the composition.
If I go to the track browser as you propose I get a different behavior. It now only plays the single tracks from the composition and not the whole composition. However, it plays all tagged tracks from the composition next after each other. This is not what I want. If I shuffle all tracks I expect them to play shuffled, not all tracks from the same album together. Also going to the track browser and filtering on tags requires more clicks compared to just going to Tags under My Stuff.
Here are some screenshots of what I do:
Go to My Stuff > Tags
Click on the tag I want to play (instrumental in this example)
Click Shuffle
First track starts playing with no problems
After first track has finished the second track comes, no problems here
Now the third track comes up and here the problem occurs, it plays the whole composition
If I go the album you can see I have only tagged the tracks “Main Titles” and “Vianne Sets Up Shop”. But since this is a multi-part composition Roon adds the whole composition to the tag and that is wrong.
That’s expected behaviour I believe, for roon.
Go to Settings|Play options and configure your available (and default) play option(s) for the tracks browser. Works like a charm for me and guarantees the result you desire.
You don’t want to do that as then whole albums would be played/considered instead of the tagged tracks only.
How is this expected behavior? When I play all tracks from a tag I expect only my tagged tracks to be played, nothing else.
You misunderstand me. The tracks are shuffled when I play from the track browser. However, when the first track from the composition comes up it then plays the second tagged track from the composition instead of another random tagged track. So in the example above it plays “Main Titles” and then right after “Vianne Sets Up Shop”. Then it continues with the rest of my tagged tracks. So using the track browser is not a solution for this problem.
Which sounds to me like progress over your initial complaint where you stated that the whole composition got played instead of only the tagged tracks.
PS: Keeping tracks of multi-part compositions together (or under circumstances playing whole compositions instead of only a track) is considered a feature by the developers of Roon AFAIK.
I understand that this isn’t the behavior you expect, but calling it a bug is unlikely to change anything about it. You may consider to search the #feedback:feature-suggestions section of the forum for existing, related suggestion and vote for them (or create your own suggestion) instead.
Sure, it’s progress. Only the tagged tracks are better than the whole composition. But it’s still a problem.
How can this be a feature? Why would anyone like the whole composition to be played when they only have tagged parts of the composition?
Roon tags aren’t playlists (a sorted order of tracks to play). They are (unsorted) containers that can hold all kinds of stuff (Artist, Albums, Tracks, Compositions, Genres, …). Roon tries it’s best to make sense of the container contents, but may miss the mark more often than in other cases when playing it directly. This is why users are usually better off applying the tag in the browser for the content they are currently looking for.
You can apply Tags in any of the browsers, independent of its content, and Roon will try its best to “translate” the content (for example a Genre into Tracks).
Different users, different tastes. User who want to play whole compositions usually dont want to hear them in randomized order – also if Roon Radio is active, users may prefer to hear matching multi-part compositions in whole and not only parts of it (or with parts of other works in between and in random order). Think about operas for example.
I am not aware of any other player software that is able to “understand” multi-part composition in this way – surely not back in the days when the Roon devs implemented this feature. They have likely seen it as an opportunity to distinguish Roon from its competitors and it surely suites some users.
Ok, maybe I shouldn’t use tags as playlists then. The reason I have avoided real playlists is because of security. I have 35000 tracks in my library which I have collected since many years back. I have spent tons of time categorizing these tracks into different playlists. These playlists are extremely valuable to me. Until a few months ago I have been using foobar2000 to play and organize all my music. Foobar2000 have a smart playlist feature that can create automatic playlists depending on custom id3 tags. So all my music have specific id3 tags depending on which playlist they should belong to. I feel this is a very secure way of doing it since the categorizing is saved within the actual music file and not the application. Whatever happens to the application my categorizing will always be safe.
So when I decided to switch over to Roon a few months ago the natural way of having these playlists was by using tags in Roon. I edited all my tracks and changed from my previous id3 tag field to ROON TRACKTAG field. This way all my playlists would appear as tags in Roon. I could take it to the next step and create real Roon playlists and simply add all my tagged tracks to each playlist in Roon. This will solve my problem. But then this security thing comes back in mind. By using playlists in Roon the categorizing I do is then tied to the application and not independent anymore. So if my Roon database would get corrupt that means years of work is lost. That is a big risk I really want to avoid. That’s the reason I prefer having my playlists part of the actual music files as id3 tags. Unfortunately Roon doesn’t support automatically adding tracks to playlists from id3 tags.
Actually there is a simple alternative solution to this and that is to just disable multi-part compositions for the album. Then all tagged tracks plays correctly. The problem is that there are hundreds of albums that have this multi-part compositions and I haven’t found a way do disable it for all albums. I can only do it manually one by one. That will take days to do for each album and is simply not an option. But if Roon would have an option to disable multi-part compositions globally then my problem would be solved in one click.
Whatever you end-up doing, it will be additional work if you insist that Roon behaves like other player software regarding multi-part compositions. Honestly, I don’t know if parts of compositions in playlists rvrn behave as you want them to. Maybe you should try them out first?
If they do, you can easily combine your secure route with playlists – Roon supports multi-selection. Just apply the tag in track browser, select all tracks and then add them to the desired playlist.
Roon can also import playlists you maintain outside of Roon with whatever software you want – just be aware of the potential pitfalls and avoid them.
Because there is none to be found. You may want to consider to add your vote to the appropriate feature suggestion then:
I haven’t tried multi-part compositions in playlists but according to Geoff_Coupe above it should work. But my categorizing is a living process. New tracks gets added to playlists and other tracks are removed or moved. So if I would combine the tagging with playlists that would require extra work. First I would have to edit the id3 tag to update the tag in Roon. But then I would also need to update the playlist since the playlist will not update automatically. That means double work. I want this to be a simple process, just like it was when I was using Foobar2000.
Having playlist files is something I have tried before and it’s very hard to maintain. Just by renaming/moving a file/folder also requires updating the playlist file. Also I guess I would have to import the playlist in Roon every time I change something which is a big drawback.
I see two possible routes ahead. Either give up this security thing I have and skip the id3 tagging and do all my categorizing in Roon playlists. Or just live with the problem and wait for Roon to implement the feature suggestion about disabling multi-part compositions globally. I think I will start with the second route and see how long I can survive until this drives me insane. Anyway thanks for trying to help.
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