When you find something you like in Roon, you generally have two main ways to play it: Play now and Start radio. If music is already playing, you can also add songs or albums to the queue, either at the end with Queue or right after the current track with Add next.
Choosing Start radio creates a "channel" of similar songs. This is based on Roon's deep knowledge of your music, including genres and years, as well as editorial data like Picks. Radio can include music that isn't in your library, such as tracks from a connected streaming service. Once Radio starts, you can see what's coming up next from the queue screen, and you can give it the thumbs up or thumbs down.
Choosing Play now always starts the music immediately. What it plays depends on what you've selected:
- Songs, albums, and playlists play in order.
- Artists and composers: Play now starts Roon Radio built around that artist or composer, including music that isn't in your library.
- Genres: Play now plays the genre's tracks from your library in random order. The Shuffle button in the queue stays off, because the order is set once as the music is added.
- Playlists: clicking the play button next to a song plays that song, then continues with the rest of the playlist.
You can also shuffle music. Shuffle appears by default on playlists, tags, and library browsing screens, and you can add it to album and artist pages in Settings > Play actions. To learn more, see
Shuffle in Roon and Roon ARC.
If you want to start an album in the middle, you can select a song and choose "Play from here".
If you want to play a single song from a playlist, right-click the song (or select it with its checkbox) and choose "Play now".