I’m not sure I follow. The slider will absolutely take you to D or S if that is broadly what you want to do. This works on a a small screen device like an iPhone.
Here I slide down to ‘K’
As for the impact of typing 2 or 4 letters on the onscreen keypad, I can’t really understand the issue. Have you seen how fast kids do text messages on their phones !!
Anyway, not arguing with your view but just showing an option.
@ncpl Nick, the issue is, that e.g. on an ipad in alphabetic artist or composer browse, you could hold the side ruler (bottom ruler that was in horizontal browsing) and browse thru your library. It would give two letter indicators of where you currently are. E.g. „BA“ or „BR“ or „DE“.
All we are getting now is „A“ or „B“ or „C“. For large libraries that is just not precise enough to determine your desired „landing area“.
Would be great to get the two-letter indicators back.
Thanks for pointing this out. Really useful. Also a feature on the desktop app (I’m using the Mac version)
Yes, by laborious, slow, and imprecise (with a large library) scrolling. Please see the other reply by @bbrip explaining how this worked better in 1.7
Please try on a 10" tablet in landscape mode where the keyboard is spread out over the whole screen width. Not as easy then. (And sorry that I am not a kid either. What percentage of Roon customers are kids?)
There is probably a reason why this jump-by-keys option is still in the 1.8 desktop version, because it is useful! Especially when making library/credit edits, I want (rather, need) to be able to jump around the library quickly. If every jump to a different artist/album takes 3 times as long, the whole editing process takes at least 3 times as long
Edit: @ncpl FYI, the Naim Audio app also uses scrolling on Android. However, on iOS it uses what I believe is an iOS standard widget that shows the whole alphabet in the scrollbar when you start scrolling, which is better. I tested the Roon 1.7 app on Android and was very pleased that Roon had a much better way on Android, with the letter bar as in 1.7. So I set up Roon, invested in hardware and a license. And now, poof, the much better way is gone.
On my iphone x, I can get it to scroll; but, during scrolling, it usually freaks out and dumps me to my phone home screen. Roon is still open but I have to navigate to it and, when I get there, I’m back at the top of the artist page.
On the artist page, if I click Filter, the keyboard does pop up and I can enter the first few letters of target artist. The filter will start showing artists in my library BUT it’s any artist with that character string anywhere in artist name. E.g. I want to go to Stereolab: I tap Filter and type “ster” and I get 26 artists with “ster” in alphabetical order. Stereolab is the 25th of 26.
So still using search, sigh.
Can I ask whats wrong with using the filter it does a very similar job. Type in a letter or more.
Hi CG, because typing one letter finds nearly the complete library, and typing two finds most of the library for many letters. It has actually been explained numerous times further up. And nobody is arguing for removing the filter, it is useful for many things, just not this one. So why remove the other option, did it hurt anyone? You may not have used it, but many people did, not sure why we have to justify that we used a feature that Roon offered until the 1.8 update
Of you kindly read a few posts up, it was already explained why this is no full replacement of this feature.
Fair enough should have read through, was being lazy during working. I dont recall really using it much on 1.7 myself . I don’t tend to go into albums unless I can’t remember the name of what I am after and just use global search for the most part or focus. Also it was never available on phone, I wonder if making all remote operate more or less the same is their reasoning. Not against it being reinstated. Funny how people all use Roon so differently and a big change to the UI really shows this with many complaining and many not.
I rarely used the phone, but it was there on tablet in 1.7, which I did/do use for editing as well occasionally, which is when this feature is most useful to me. The thing is, the option is still there in the desktop version as always, just type Dy and it takes you to Dylan. This is super fast and convenient, and its value is probably recognized by Roon, or else they might have removed it on the desktop as well ( 
). I often don’t browse leisurely but am jumping criss-cross through the library, in particular for edits (e.g. looking up how I set up credits elsewhere) but not only.
I guess it makes more sense on desktop you have a keyboard as you main nput device not a virtual one like on a tablet or phone where you need an interaction to make it come up in the first place. But they needn’t have removed it could have added it to phone instead and then there is parity.
I applaud their efforts for making the phone more similar to the tablet, and in most instances they did so by adding features to the phone, which is great. In this instance, unfortunately, it was the other way around.
I was happy with the Artist search feature until 1.8. The slide on the right side is mostly unusable, making it quite time consuming to scroll down to ZZ Top. I used to be able to use the slide at the bottom to go to any letter quickly, but can’t do that now. It seems to me that most of this change is just fluff.
David: I use the Filter now. Type “ZZ” and good to go. Filter is good on all kinds of list for quick access
And type BA and it shows you half of your library. The filter his helpful for many things but is not a replacement for the old alphabetic quick access bar. Neither is the letter at the scroll slider.
The desktop version still has the proper keyboard quick search and there is a reason for it.
This topic should not be in “uncategorized”. There is also an existing one here: Why has the Alphabetic way of quick searching gone in 1.8?
What are you using as your client?
It would be helpful to know the use cases where the function fails.
Using the filter fails on all clients. If you type BE in for instance it shows all albums that have BE in the name at any position. So not just filtering albums or artists starting with those letters which is what users are missing. I thought I could use the filter at first but it soon comes apparent it’s not suited. Gets you near but with loads of unwanted chaff along the way. It seems odd that it was removed as it was a feature on both tablet and desktop, but not mobile would have made more sense to add it too mobile not remove it from Tablet. The scroll bar is fine for some occasions but not if you want to find it quick.
Is there a way in 1.8 to focus on, or create a filter for, the first letter of an album title, ie as a regexp of “^B” would do ? That was useful to me as a way of reducing the choices, making it easier to pick something when I don’t know what I want to listen to.
Where using Focus fails for me is that it takes you to a specific Artist/Album and not to a specific spot in your collection. The ABC option would let me jump to the start of the M’s and browse from there. The slider on the right is a crude version of that so the function isn’t entirely lost, it’s just awkward. Until it was removed I had no idea how often I used the ABC option.
