Creating my own roon radio stations

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

My name is Luiz Carlos and I’m from Brazil.

I think I use Roon from the very beginning of it’s life and, I have to say, I really enjoy it!

One of the things I like most in Roon is the radio feature. Most of all, it gives me a chance to discover lots of good artists that, otherwise, I would never know existed!

I know that Roon Radio is based on an algorithm that selects songs based on what I was listening.

The thing is: sometimes, I find that this algorithm finds music that I really enjoy. One after the other. I could not do it better! Other times, I find the selection not so great.

Because my listening sections are mostly a combination of music I choose and music from Roon Radio, I feel it’s a matter of luck to get a great selection from the radio.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to the same radio search “engine” I was listening in a previous listening section.

My suggestion than is to give the user a chance to name a radio listening section (basically, the parameters passed to the radio search algorithm). This way, I would have my own “radio stations”. Imagine that: Jazz, Classical, Pop, etc. stations, each with its algorithm working for my own taste!

It would work this way: whenever I feel Roon Radio is giving me a great selection of songs, I would name that radio listening section (NOT the songs, or playlist. Only the parameters Radio is using to make the selection). This way, at a later date, I would have the possibility to return to the same radio selection “engine” I was previously enjoying.

Hope this helps.

Congratulations for the very good job you’ve done (doing) with Roon!

Best regards,

Luiz Carlos

2

Hi @Luiz_Carlos_Pereira. Welcome to the forum! Why have you waited so long to post? :wink:

That is an interesting thought.

Have you ever started Roon Radio with the same ‘seed’ track and had vastly different listening experiences (one good/ one bad)? I’ve never done that experiment, but if one got very different experiences you would have to wonder why there were such different outcomes. On the other hand, if the same seed track gives the same general experience (I can see the playing order different), I suppose you could use that track and Bookmark it.

3

From what I can make out Roon radio is basically crowd sourced. So, again going by my experience, if you start with a well known artist and song there is an overwhelming middle ground of related links so the path is very predictable as the majority tends to safe selections and your own influence is diminished.
If you start somewhere a little more off the beaten path then there is less data so kinks can happen and can be seen and your own preferences stand a chance.
If you start too off the path there is little or no data and either it kind of doesn’t work or you get nothing at all.

4

It seems so.
But in the OP’s case, he wants basically the same music experience every time. So given ‘the herd’ doesn’t change music preferences much, his listening experience for a given track should be the same.
But I see what you are saying, if one is really an ‘edge case’ the result will generally be unpredictable, which means not just once, but always.

5

There are a lot of folks who’d like a little more control over the AI here. Roon folks have said in the past that sliders and other “smart shuffle” or “smart random” tweaks don’t work well with a small collection.

That should be past history now that the AI dips heavily into Tidal/Qobuz.

I would love some means to do more than indicate a track and start radio. I’d love to be able to specify whether radio uses the seed as:

—a genre based similarity
—era based similarity
—BPM/energy based
—others who have listened, have also listened to
—go wide with similarities vs go narrow with similarities
—influenced by, similar to, have influenced
—stick to the hits vs. go deep

Etc. THAT would be some real power. I do love Roon, but there is an opinion there that “we know your tastes better than you do” and that is not really always true.

Specific settings for each of the above, combined with a seed, could be a saved “Roon Radio” station.

For now, I have to do this with Tags. It is laborious and not fully functional. And you cannot really combine the tags without Roon choking in terms of performance. And it doesn’t work on the iphone because sorting Tags really requires Focus, which the iphone app doesn’t have.

Roon is great. But really looking forward to upcoming releases that add more of this power. Put that stuff under the hood so that those who get too confused by choices don’t have to deal with it.

6

All of this stuff was available in music IP back in the day. I pointed out it’s playlist capabilities in 2016 then 2018. I realise the fingerprinting wouldn’t work for streamed files but the ability to custom create playlists really should be in roon by now.
Never mind recently played screens.

7

Roon radio does work pretty well off the beaten path. I only whish it would play more diverse. What it is doing know it something like I watched a foto with a red object in it and now Roon radio keeps showing me foto’s with other red objects. Some maybe light red, others dark red and occasionaly some orange but never blue or green. It also has a habit of starting with obscurities (when I have fed it with that) but after a while it always ends up in mainstream. All in all I like the feature but some manual settings/tweaking/preferences would be nice. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn’t. You can allways see the starting track. When I like a radio stream I just add the starting track to a playlist with other interesting starting points. No possibility to give them a name though. You could use a bookmark for that but since bookmarking and tagging is used for about every other ‘workaround’ I try to use it as less as possible to avoid it becoming a mess.

8

I like the randomness of it as long as it stays within some semblance of the original starting point.

9

Hi there!

Nice to see the replies! Thanks!

How does that AI in radio work? Does it take in consideration only the last song choosed, or more than one? What other parameters does it take in consideration?

Often, it takes a while for me to realize that the selection radio is doing for me is one that I really like. At that point, I have already forgotten the last song I chose, which (if the algorithm uses only one) would be the seed for radio.

Of course, I could take a look at the history and try to find that last chosen song and bookmark it but, should it be that way? What about other parameters needed for the algorithm?

I think the algorithm is very good. By that, I mean that it is consistent. Whenever it’s a great selection, it keeps that great selection. When not the best selection by some margin, my feeling is that that margin is somewhat kept.

So, for the sake of simplicity, after listening for, say, 20 tracks of a great selection, I would like to be able to save that “engine” for a later time, not having to go back, trying to find the seed…

For now, I dont feel the need to tweek the engine. I find that it works quite well.

Thanks.

10

Good discussion here: