TBH in 1.7 I pretty much gave up with anything like that.
The predecessor of 1.8’s “focus everywhere” view was the 1.7 composition view. But that just had gaping holes in the period, form, instrumentation and other tags. What that meant was that no, you couldn’t do a focus on the chamber music form plus the string quartet instrumentation plus the classical, romantic, and post romantic periods and shuffle that. This has not changed in 1.8.
There were other consequences. I like the radio feature but in 1.7 I always had to remember to switch it off for Classical. Roon simply does not have the fine grain to work out that if you have been listening to some contemplative post-romantic solo piano you are probably not going to be interested in mixing that up with some avantgarde gangbusters Stravinsky symphony or a fingers of steel Prokofiev banger of a piano concerto. I don’t know if that has changed in 1.8. I haven’t tried it. But I doubt it. There has been no mention of changes to radio.
What I do is I just tag some Classical albums according to “mood” and shuffle those. But it is not at all scientific. I think it would make a big difference if those mood tags were brought over from AllMusic. Not just the genre tags.
I have experimented with the 1.8 focus and there is something I couldn’t do in 1.7. I have a weakness for modern, sacred, choral music but to set the mood I want to exclude avant-garde. I seem to be able to do something like that in focus and of course it will be a lot easier to do variations if I have both an OR and an AND. But and this is a big but. This is only working because of my own tagging efforts, probably 50% of which is with Qobuz content. For me personally, the effort is worth it for the results. Some greater automation by the roon metadata ingestion process would be very welcome.
I am afraid though that once the initial novelty of the focus for Classical tool has worn off, the frustrating gaps in the metadata on which it relies will become apparent. Paradoxically, if you have a streaming account this creates a greater need for roon library management tools not less as you cannot use 3rd party tools to plug the metadata gaps if that is important to your listening experience with roon.
Pre 1.7 I was a groomer - tagged my music using allmusic as a reference and developed a series of SQL scripts to improve consistency and enrich my file based metadata e.g. ensure every instance of a track had the composer entry added when there was sufficient other data to suggest there was critical mass around the composer name. This used to pay dividends for me within Roon in that I could find multiple performances of a track where Roon wasn’t doing so. Since 1.7 it’s all become moot because Roon does a better job than I can. They’re using ML to bring together and enrich TiVo, musicbrainz and (and I presume both streaming services’) metadata to arrive at what we’re served, and it looks to me like their metadata is better than anything else I’ve encountered. Is it perfect…no, but it improves all the time. Hats off because it’s most certainly a bloody complex undertaking.
LOL. Personally, in the genres I am interested in I get an awful lot of duplicate artists and composers. I imagine this is because there is a lot of missing equivalencing between Tivo and Musicbrainz. The idea seems to be that Tivo will plug Musicbrainz gaps and vice-versa. But what I see is that Tivo duplicates Musicbrainz and vice versa.
This is particularly frustrating with Classical vocal music. One of them categorises the librettist as “text” and the other as “lyric”. Text gets a composer credit in roon. Lyric does not. This not only leads to very cluttered Classical screens (immeasurably more difficult to read in 1.8 in the first place). It will also lead to composition misidentifications. In practice it is just one more task with a new album. I need to remember to delete all the text credits. It’s just one example, unfortunately I have many of these. Having said that I take your general point and if I have something without many tags I always try and let roon have a go first and I can often be pleasantly surprised.
If you’ve not reported these in support you should. These sound like the kind of issues Roon would appreciate feedback on because they can be systematically addressed and improved given time. Again, a horribly complex undertaking bringing together 4 different messes of spaghetti with different levels of data quality and consistency of presentation and turning that into something sensible that’s fit for consumption by the likes of us that’ll always point to what’s wrong whilst taking for granted what’s right.
I wish I shared your optimism. Release after release sees no real change. At this point I rather suspect it is deep in the architecture not a business case priority choice. A very good thing about 1.8 is that it will make Classical much more accessible to many more. But it will require more and better automation of metadata ingestion.
I really do hope roon can solve the automation and the manual side of it isn’t needed or at least needed less. TBH just tools equivalence between local and streamed content would be more than enough for me and many others I think. So its no great change but there may be other copyright and contractual issues with the streamed metadata that we don’t know about.
May be, but I doubt it. Roon is supposed to be about the UX of music consumption. Presenting unfettered metadata directly from Tidal or Qobuz would be an unmitigated disaster iro completeness, accuracy and consistency.
What I don’t get is the ‘Recommended…’ ‘Similar…’ and ‘Selected…’ albums. Sometimes just one of the categories appears, sometimes two or three, and often the the Similar and Selected have the same albums in them. It feels really scattershot to me. One category of album recommendations please, easy to see and parse. And I don’t need to see album recs that are already in my library or by the same artist.
Unfortunately I have to agree. But I do like the general idea. Maybe less of them. I also like the idea on another thread (was it you?) of turning these into buttons. Wouldn’t that help the small format guys?
I’m too lazy to update the ipad. Are all those circles “buttons” on a touch screen does anyone know? Is that why they did that?
I didn’t really like the Discover page in Roon 1.7, it was overstuffed and chaotic.
On the other hand, I quite enjoy the new functions like “In their prime”, “collaborations”, “performing the music of…” or “recommended albums”. I would still love to have a better discovery function recommending music in my library, that I haven’t yet really listened to, but I should, according to what I liked and listened to so far.
I know that I can use focus on albums and make a bookmark for my pile of shame of not played 5 star albums in my library, or similar. So, something like that in the new layout? It would be great to have the discovery tools not focus primarily on music I don’t know yet. I got too much music in my library, I haven’t listened to really yet, and I imagine it’s the same for other users. Is there anything planned to give “Discover your library” an upgrade?
After using them for a year, i find the discovery tools not very convincing, so I even prefer to return to the earlier “discovery” function, which randomly lists stuff in my library. It’s just too often unimportant or lesser cover versions that I get recommended as well as collaborations that didn’t result in anything really remarkable … this could be so much better!
I’m not sure but I can imagine that many listeners here have more than 1000 albums in their library and don’t always want to add even more, but prefer to listen to what they have in their collection already and could use some guidance.
So, a simple function that would recommend mostly unplayed or in a long time not returned to albums or similar albums to my current favourite album or so that are also in my library…
Maybe you guys @Roon could give us a heads up if something is planned about recommending music in our collections…
I like what Allmusic does here for example very much, with the featured genre … it’s just a recommendation overview for a certain genre. It could list stuff that is in my library, but also some stuff that isn’t yet…