My wife Laurie is a voracious reader. Some of the books/authors she reads can be found on lists such as the New York Times Best Sellers List; however, most of the books she reads comes from our public library (you do know what a library is, don’t you?). I am amazed at the variety of authors she finds. Laurie likes historical fiction, so that can help guide her selection but I think sometimes she can just look at the cover of the book or read a synopsis and know if she will like it.

Today, my digital library of music comprises 3,385 albums from which there are 44,768 tracks. I stream music so I don’t really own it, I basically rent the music and when I cancel my subscriptions it will all go away. I began thinking, how do I choose which music to “Favorite” (hence adding to my collection) and after that, how do I choose what I listen to? Laurie’s penchant for historical fiction is similar to genres in music (in fact, historical fiction would be genre in books along with non-fiction, true crime, romance, etc.). At a high level, the majority of my music falls into the Jazz, Classical, New Age/Relaxation genres (with bits of R&B, Singer/Songwriter, Country, and Pop mixed in). So, I can categorize my music by genre, but when one has over 44,000 songs, how do I choose what to listen to? What I have found about me is that I will choose music based on the mood I am in (or need to be in) which is closely tied in some way to my energy level which can generally be correlated to the energy level of the music. That’s a bunch of words to state that depending on how I feel, I choose different music.

Subscribing to multiple streaming services (Tidal, Qobuz) and with a very limited number of CDs I have burned to disk, and even fewer digital music purchases, I use Roon to organize and manage my music. The metadata and ability to organize and find music is great in Roon. To organize my music I make big use of Playlists and Smart Playlists. A look at a few of the names of my playlists will show you how I create them based on level of energy in the music, and also along genres. For example, two of my most listened to playlists are: Morning and Reflection. These playlists contain tracks that are almost exclusively solo piano and come from my New Age genre of music. The Morning playlist contains a bit of piano and cello duets in addition to the solo piano. Likewise, the Reflection playlist includes a bit more of the electronic side of New Age (probably more of what people think about when they think of New Age music). When I need quiet, or I need to quiet my mind, I go for these two playlists.

I have another playlist called Dinner Music – which holds music mostly from the Jazz genre. This music tends to be a bit quiet and relaxed – think solo piano, ballads, and trios. I should add that I go in a create a playlist based on a mood (or other criteria) and then I will probably add a few songs to start it out, but over time as I listen to more music in my library and discover new music, when I find an appropriate song for a playlist, I add that song to the appropriate playlist. In a way, we could say that my playlists are an organization of my favorite songs.

In addition to mood or energy level, I do create playlists centered around genre. You might be thinking, “oh, so you have a Jazz playlist, a Classical playist, etc.” – well, yes and no. You see, genres like Jazz have several subgenres. The metadata in Roon, for the genre of Jazz has 56 (yes 56!) subgenres within the genre of Jazz! That is crazy – there is Smooth jazz, Bop, Hard-Bop, Neo-Bop, Contemporary, Straight-ahead, Jazz Blues, Vocal, Modern, Stride,…you get the idea. To drill down even deeper, the meta data in Roon also captures (where available) the primary instrument(s) on a track or album. For Jazz, common instruments would be piano, guitar, saxaphone, vocal. And to throw in more variables, one can search for albums where the performers are in a Trio, or a Quartet, or an artist performing with a big band. Yikes – no wonder we need to organize all this stuff. So, if you look at my playlists around the Jazz genre, you would find things like Jazz guitar, Smooth Jazz guitar, Jazz Vocals, Jazz standards and ballads, Jazz Trios, etc. Each of these subgenres and their corresponding musician and instrument structure ends up with my playlists being focused around some form of energy level – say, quiet for standards and ballads, and high energy for Smooth Jazz guitar.

And why stop with all this metadata – let’s go deeper. In the music industry, there are well known recording engineers. One such recording engineer who has been associated with many legends in Jazz is Rudy Van Gelder. Roon happens to let you select music based on the team of people who were part of the production of that album – which is crazy. So, I do have a playlist called Rudy Van Gelder and it includes all tracks in my library for which Rudy Van Gelder was the recording engineer. But wait – there’s more! In Jazz (at least) there are some well known teams of recording engineer and music producer. One such team that you see on many albums is Al Schmitt and Tommy Lipuma. So yes, I do have a playlist called Al Schmitt and Tommy Lipuma.

At this point, you might be asking yourself: “with over 44,000 tracks, how to you select all music from a specific recording engineer?”  Enter the Smart Playlist. As I noted, the metadata in Roon is huge. Artist, genre, instrument, subgenre, year released, most played, producer, composer, record label – even sample rate and bit depth. You can instruct Roon to create a Smart playlist and define the focus of that playlist based on metadata. Once that focus is defined, Roon will add every album or track (you choose which) to your playlist – boom! At all once. And here’s the cool thing – once you define a Smart playlist, as you add more music to your library, any album or track that matches the focus specified for your playist – it gets added automatically!

One more thing about these Smart playlists – they can be very useful for discovering music in your library that you haven’t listened to. What, you mean you haven’t listened to all 44,000+ tracks in your library? Nope. I spend a fair amount of time doing music discovery. As you may guess, when you play tracks or albums, Roon gives you suggestions for similar artists that you might like. Or, you might like the guitarist on a certain album so you then lookup that guitarist to see what albums they have. Typically you will add those albums to your library, but you (or I don’t) typically don’t listen to every track on that album. Enter Boolean logic into your Smart playlist. You can create a Smart playlist and then “invert” that selection.

Here is a good example – I have a Smart playlist called “Jazz Guitar and Piano music I have not listened to.” You see, there is metadata where you can see if you have played a track even going down to when was the last time you played that track. For example, you might choose to listen to only Jazz vocal tracks that you have listened to in the past month – great, make that the focus of your Smart Playlist. In this example, if you go more than one month without playing a Jazz vocal track, it will be removed from the playlist automatically. What I do to discover music I have never played, is I create a Smart playlist and I start with a focus around (say) all Jazz Piano and Guitar tracks that I have ever listened to – so, for all time. After I make that my focus, you can then choose to invert that selection – in other words, make your playlist the opposite of your focus. What is the opposite of all Jazz Piano and Guitar tracks that I have ever listened to? It is every Jazz Piano and Guitar track in my library that I have never listened to. And again, the cool thing is that as I listen to the songs on that Smart playlist, in this situation they come off of that playlist – because I have now listened to that track. Smart playlists are incredible.

There are some subtleties around metadata that aren’t quite available (at least not yet in Roon). A good example from my playlists is one that I created (a non-Smart playlist) called Covers.  I really like Covers. In fact, if the original artist of a song does a different version of that song, I will often include that in my Covers playlist. However, as far as I can tell, there isn’t a metadata tag for a track that is a Cover. So, as I listen to my music, when I come across a Cover I like, I manually add it to my Covers playlist.

And there you have it – a bunch of complex stuff that basically says I choose music based on my current or needed energy level, and I make use of metadata to help build my playlists!

And finally, for those of you who are too young to know, books are a physical media where ink is laid down on paper with the ink taking the shape of words in our language. Generally the front and back of these physical reading devices are made of cardboard or some kind of card stock that is heavier than the paper used in the book. What are the advantages of books? Well, your battery will never need to be recharged. You will never have issues with Blue Light exposure when reading a book, you can’t accidentally delete a book from your hard drive, and there are no Digital Rights Management rules associated with a book – so you can loan it to anybody, anytime!

Happy Listening!