Am I the only one who thinks Roon Radio isn't so great now

Before the most recent software upgrade I loved Roon Radio. Even more once it had the ability to go out into Tidal and Qobuz land and find me music.
Since the update, I have been underwhelmed. I often hit skip because the music is not interesting or close enough to what I was listening to. I’m bummed…I really liked the old version.
Am I the only one that feels this way?

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No, you’re not the only one. I subscribed to Qobuz so I could try out the new radio with 1.7. Still has no clue about what to play – well, maybe a tenth of a clue. Now surfaces gratingly out-of-place shit from various Qobuz albums that I’ve never heard of before. Unfortunately, I think this kind of thing is basically doomed. Roon simply doesn’t know enough about you, your situation, the music, and your current context to be able to do this convincingly – at least, not for me. And I doubt merging me with “other users” via the-V-word-which-I-can’t-type (because I don’t know how to put that accent over the ‘a’) will improve that situation.

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I don’t stream but also find Roon Radio has gone backwards, often when an album has finished radio kicks in playing a track or two from the album that’s just finished or more tracks by the same artist. My collection is more than large enough that it shouldn’t be necessary, ever. I also find myself skipping Radio’s selections or choosing albums more frequently as a result. It’s like Radio’s choices have become contextually poor. Something is definitely off with the picking algorithm or the data driving it.

Much as Roon have stated machine learning will far surpass the capabilities of technologies like what was MusicIP I disagree. There’s something to be said for understanding musical characteristics of a tune over crowd sourcing “if you listen to this you’re likely to want to listen to that” - in other words catering to the lowest common denominator.

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Agree…it’s goes well of the rails rather to often now

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we’re going to see more and more of this in Roon, which is great if you want that, but becomes a significant barrier/detractor that just gets in the way if you don’t. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes and the extent to which you can opt in/out of autopilot everything.

I sometimes turn radio option off so it forces me to play something else I choose to play…other times radio just stops with nothing to play…on a close to 300k track library I find that hard to fathom. And with it mostly ok I do sometimes turn it when I want to not be picking things…but when it goes from barry white to prodigy it just seems wrong.

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That ‘Added by…’ line bugs me a bit. At best, it’s a waste of screen space. I see it against tracks that I dislike, and tracks that I have never heard of, less still added to anything. Why is it there?

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I have the sad suspicion no one but the Roon fanboys will want that. Building an object graph linking users and libraries and tracks and plays is all fine and dandy; I’ve done it myself on a few projects. But it takes a whole lot more than that to build a predictive superstructure on top of that graph – I spent two years working with a group of excellent cognitive psychologists and mathematicians and programmers to get that to work even a little bit, and we had much more data about our users, and about the material, than Roon does – but that kind of talent is hard to assemble nowadays.

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I let Roon Radio go and gave it its head the other day while I worked from home. I began with some trumpet and sax lead Jazz and it stuck pretty faithfully to that theme for the better part of three hours. Only one track came up which made me stop and want to skip it (and I don’t think I did because I was too busy). I am not a huge user of Roon Radio because I usually have a pretty good grip of what I want to listen to but my impression is that it works a good deal better than it used to. But it does seem to be thrown by some genres, and I do wonder if the answer to that is for us to be patient and ‘teach’ it by skipping and responding to the questions it then puts up.

I am confused and disappointed on the ‘Recommended For You’ choices Roon puts forward. I don’t want to listen to any of them. Maybe in the past I have listened to a snippet of Jazz (not a fan) or something from a viking track - but almost all the recommendations are jazz or viking chants, what?? Most of my listening is from playlists that I put together - blues/rock, singer/songwriter etc - but there doesn’t seem to be any connection with any of them. I want to cancel my sub to Spotify, but Release Radar and Discover Weekly still keep putting good and relevant (to me) selections forward. The big hype about the A.I. combined with user recommendations making Valence the future has not worked for me yet. Can anyone tell me if it improves if you keep skipping tracks you don’t like??

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Hmm, I both like and frequently use Roon Radio and the ‘Recommended’ and ‘New Releases’ sections.

Truly don’t understand the complaints.

The thing I can’t abide is the Roon’s Live Radio. Most stations are too lo-fi, but that’s not a Roon problem.

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Yes I can: it doesn’t.

I find there’s little difference between v1.6 and v 1.7. Sometimes it works great, most of the time it keeps playing tracks from a handful of albums by six or seven “related” artists.

You’d expect some progress after almost a year of “learning” since 1.6 came out.

I suspect the learning is more in the minds of Roon’s marketeers than in any algorithm - if such an algortihm even really exists in Roon, which I’m seriously starting to doubt.

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Can’t say I have noticed any difference in Radio for me infact it’s helped me add quite a few more albums. It does however have the capacity to repeat tracks from the album it followed on from after a while. Normall though I can happily play it for hours.

Hey Bill,
I agree with what you say : the amount of data available on any single user appears in general very slim to issue relevant personalized recommendation. Letting mere simple scoring of who listens to the same tracks might also be a bit slim and tend to propose pretty standard things on average, therefore more suited to a novice than a connoisseur in a given genre. Also, keeping always the same genre and instrument like jazz with trumpet, is also almost warranted to bore most user after a few picks.
I believe that if the algorithm should be fine for anyone, it would need to be trained for everyone specifically. Maybe a way for Roon to implement this, could be to let the user designate specific playlists as “learning playlists”, for Roon to incorporate into the determination of user preferences, for defining a certain degree of eclecticism in the way we chain the music, which is definitely user-specific, and even mood-specific. Not only user playlists but also user tags could be used to assist in making more relevant recommendations.
It makes be think that about tags, it would be simple and interesting to have Roon enable to perform searches for pieces that have in common not one tag, but several.

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But that is the whole point…to help you discover music that is new to you. The issue I have is that the previous version did a great job…I have discovered so much good stuff. Now in 1.7 the software makes terrible suggestions. I’m bummed.

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I could imagine:

He’s devouring the heat, the energy
The heat, the energy
The heat

With Barry White’s voice… :laughing:

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Another vote for: something went wrong in Roon radio.
I use it constantly and also noticed weird behaviour since the last update. It feels a lot more unbalanced. It either chooses a few albums I liked on Tidal and then keeps playing songs of those (boring) or goes wildly off the track (annoying). In general it suggests less new music that fits my taste than it used to do.
This evening Roon even threw in the same song three times in one hour for no obvious reason??

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Your comment about the New Roon Radio being “underwhelming” is spot on. I have been using the recently upgraded Roon Radio for a few weeks and never before did I ever asked myself the question “why (the hell) is this track playing now?” compared to before “What is that track playing now, I want to know more…”. Now the first question seems to pop up quite often!

When reading about the upgrade and ‘what’s new’ I was a bit worried that the choice of the ‘next track’ was going to be left to millions of users who do not necessarily match my taste, my expectations, my choices, etc… It turns out that my gut feeling was correct.

Wouldn’t it be better to have a panel of options when it comes to choosing the “Roon-radio mode” where we could either select to follow a perhaps more ‘academic’ algorithm (like before) or any other forms that can come along (for instance a musician’s playlist, etc…) but definitely NOT an average of the world’s mixed moods that in the end has zero character?

Ball’s in Roon’s court please.

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Hi,
I agree with the headline. The “old” radio mode matches with my music taste and sometimes it surprices me with music perls. Now, I very often turn of music mode and using playlists.

I would like to have a switch for the music mode - old style or KI.

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I have also experienced similar things, but I haven’t used it extensively lately.