While I do like music exploring a lot, and while I appreciate the efforts of Valence to take me on a journey I still think my own library, the mix of local and choosen Tidal content, should get the most prominent place.
For example. When I go to an artist the thing that interest me the most is to see what albums I allready have in my library, next what albums are also available on Tidal and after that the exploring features like similarities and recomendations in all kind of forms. I think this is important to keep in touch with my own music and not to drown in the millions of albums available at our fingertips.
The same for the album page. The thing I am most interest in when viewing an album is the tracklist. Thatās what it is all about after all. I would like to see it fit on one screen, prefably together with album and title without scrolling up and down. After I want to see other albums of the same artist in my library and than all the exploring option like similars, recommendations etc etc. In other words, info that matters at that moment on that place should be the main focus point
All in all, after a short but intensive use I find the āpopular tracksā and ārecomended albumsā are just getting in the way. Itās beginning to feel like a over enthousiastic sales person trying to sell me new music. Can we have a choice to move these down on the page so we can scroll to them when we want to, or maybe disable some parts in totalā¦ Now we have to scroll by them to get to the information that makes more sense in overviewing my library. Now it is only confusing when there are album recommendation that have something to do with the artist Iām viewing or are thay recomendations in general. Things are getting mixed up as it is now. Again, I like exploring, I like Valence, but I want to get the main focus point back. I have nothing against Valence but it could get just a little less prominent role, thatās all.
Great suggestion!
Perhaps Roon could be a bit smart and adapt the Artist view based on whether you have numerous plays by them in your history?
I mean, i dont need to see āIn their primeā or āSelectionsā if itās an artist i play 5 times a week, as opposed to if itās an artist i have never played before.
You can get a feel for how Valence may be dragging down your experience by temporarily disabling any connections you have to Tidal and Qobuz. When I did that, my experience of Roon improved.
Well put. I think Roon sometimes forget that we add music to our libraries (on-disc or streamed) because we like that music and have often attached some meaning to it.
Two months further I noticed myself using Roon functions less and less. I get really distracted by the by the amount of ārecommendationsā and āpopularā or other AI generated stuff everywhere. I have lost the connection with my own music because of this. I have noticed I only use Roon as a background player shuffling my library the last couple of weeks because I find myself avoiding the interface. Thatās not a good sign. I am afraid I have lost interest and Iām more and more using other sources for discovering new music. Roon has tipped the balance to the wrong side for me.
For those who like it, Iām glad you do but Iāll wait till 1.9 comes out. 1.8 feels like a show off of new possibilities of Valence. Maybe, after the initial excitement is over it will be implemented in a more sophisticated way.
Unfortunately this has also happened to me. After 1.8 update i just quickly select album and play, before I spend much more time in artist and album pages.
For me, main fix is simple, allow setting to remove popular tracks and recommended albums from Artist Overview page. For those who like them can have them but for me removing them would make artist page fun and usable again.
But hereās the problem. Those are the two YOU want. Someone else might want just one, another person three things, and still another, two totally different things. Because Valence has infiltrated everything, itās almost hard to enumerate all the different stuff one might want on or off.
I really doubt Roon will get into letting users customize every feature of Roon, including Valence. Probably the best chance for some peace, short of disconnecting from your streaming service, is to have some Valence-free zone mode. I donāt think that will happen either, but itās worth asking for.
The problem as I see it (and I saw it right away going from 1.7 to 1.8) is it feels like they white boarded a bunch of ideas for Valence, and then instead of streamlining them down they decided to do them all, but without thinking which overlap the other, fitting them into the overall picture, and without object consistency between them (such as āin libraryā icons, return to place scrolling, etc). Perhaps this was a result of distance working this past year, who knows (and obviously Iām just postulating everything here).
Problem is, backing out now is going to be a lot trickier, and may even make things worse in other places. I think 778 is proof of that. But yeah, discovery is more of a b**ch now, esp and until they get the back to place scrolling solved in the Whatās New, etc screens. And The Popular Tracks view at the top an artistās page is just wrong, esp when the artist only has one or two albums - just take me to the album and more than likely that first track on the album will be their most popular.
I take a much more charitable view of how the various Valence elements have been placed. IMO, they can be very valuable in a lot of ways, especially when you are just seeing a new artist or genre for the first time. Those elements are valuable to me, anyway.
But that said, there are times I just donāt want to deal with it all, and I canāt get away. Turn off the streaming service and I lose a lot of music. Same with switching over to JRiver. Just seems like there should be a place where I can still have my streaming music and not be badgered.
