How should you organise streamed music?

A thought struck me today - the problem with streaming services is simple: they are not organised as we would like.

Example: I have added about 30 albums to my favourites in the last week. This is from various sources - albums of the year here, the Guardian, Qobuz, Gramophone etc. Now I have a chance to listen, and I have no context. Who recommended it? Can I call them a cunt?

When I had a small record collection I organised them into three groups: stuff I love, stuff that’s OK, and shit. When it grew, the first addition was “stuff to keep trying with”. This system worked really well, and actually I regret being forced to go alphabetical, but the volume meant there was little choice. I still wonder whether alphabetical within those groups would work well.

Now that my collection is basically the entire Qobuz library, I need a way to sort them out. Unfortunately all I can do is do favourites, or not. And that’s useless - the favourites gets much too large, and no matter how it’s organised it’s unwieldy

What I would like is the ability to add my own tags onto music. I listen exclusively via album, so I would like to be able to add a tag (or several) onto any album - “recs from the Abattoir”, “Guardian top 10 of 2018”, “keep trying with this” and so on. Whatever I want. I can then separate long-term favourites from new stuff to try out. Naturally I’d want to be able to filter by genre as well.

Does Roon allow for this? Is there any service that would work with this kind of system?

What would your custom tags be?

Yep, Roon custom tags.

I use them for two things currently:

  1. So I have an electronic version of my vinyl library which is easily catalogued and browsed

  2. I tag the LateNightTales Series, becuase the metadata for these compilations is absolutely all over the place and it keeps the collection together nicely
    image

Yes, within those views, you can sub-filter.

I like the idea of using them for this as I tend to work my way through a number of end of year lists.

Hmm, Roon should work with Qobuz soon. I may investigate it…