Markus,
first let me thank you for your well thought out and well written post. It is, and I am not kidding, one of the highest quality posts I have read in a very long time.
I completely understand your frustration and share many of your issues. To me, Roon is like democracy. It’s a really stupid system but it’s the best we got if you can make it work for you. I have been collecting CDs since about 1985 or 1986 … it all started around that time. You can probably imagine that, over time, I amassed an amount of CDs that is close to impossible to manage physically. A very long time ago I started ripping CDs. And then did it again and again and then again because formats and quality kept getting better. Today I own about 12.000+ CDs. some of them very rare and impossible to buy, others common as dirt.
You are absolutely right, it’s my musical PAST and I value it … A LOT.
My collection has about 230.000 tracks. Impossible to manage, impossible to handle the discs physically. When I discovered Roon not long ago it was like the greates gift by the god of music for me. And even though Roon made A LOT of mistakes organizing my collection, it got 95% or more right.
Granted, those 5% still dwarf most music collections but … to me it is invaluable. So much so that I purchased Roon 3 days after I first tried it. So much so that, a few days later, I purchased a Nucleus+ to feed my Cambridge Edge NQ. If you have a collection this big at some point you actually stop listening to music because it becomes so tedious. Roon allows me to surf my music collection, travel back into the 80s and just enjoy the music again. It is no longer about contemplating what to listen to and where to find it and then getting it only to find out that my mood had changed and I felt like listening to something else.
Now, for me Roon radio is a feature that I do not really need or want. But so far, within the “boundaries” of my collection, it worked fairly well. But that is probably because it can only chose from a limited number of songs to begin with.
Roon has it’s flaws for sure. I experienced your EDM problem but there is an easy fix for it. Two actually. You could just edit the tags so Roon treats it as one collection/album (with multiple discs if you like) or you can just manually group all these songs in whichever way you want them. It’s not obvious how to do this at first but you can edit pretty much every detail about every album/collection. Make it a various artists album with, say, 100 discs and group the songs up in whatever way you prefer. You can do this with Roon. It can not get everything right and it will never be perfectly accurate.
It works for me because it offered so many benefits that I just had to make it work. There is nothing like it.
If Roon isn’t for you that’s fine. It can’t be a perfect solution for everybody. But maybe you too can make it work for you if the benefits outweigh the flaws for you. What is stopping you from using Roon to manage your musical past and Tidal to find new stuff that will enrich your present ?
Jens