Does Roon's Valence recommendation engine use your album/track favourites from inactive user installs?

Roon Software
#1

I guess that my question is really just on how server-side information gained from users is maintained.

Assuming that my current Roon account is the same as previous installations, will my recommendations made by Valence take into account my past favourite albums and tracks from my older and now lost (to me) ‘activity’?

Various circumstances have meant that I haven’t been able to keep a backup of past databases, but Roon obviously has collected the data about my favourite albums and tracks from past installs, which drove recommendations for me and collectively for other users.

With any new install (without database backup), will the recommendation engine take into account my old favourites when personalising my recommendations? Or are recommendations reset to the data from the whole community?

From the recommendations I am seeing I think it is the latter, and without knowing how Roon preserves user anonymity from usage data, I think it makes sense that Roon is using some client-side processing of favourites to drive what Valence suggests - even if it is just flagging active, over past, installations.

#2

I don’t believe Valance works like this at all. It aggregates playing habits over millions of plays. This is completely anonymized and has no bearing on your library past or present.

For example, if you played an album or track by Talk Talk after playing something by David Sylvian, and sufficient people did the same, then Roon may use this relationship to make a recommendation. That’s an oversimplification, but hopefully you get the gist.

#3

As I understand it, Valence will provide recommendations based on various datasets…

Certainly it must look at the relationship between sequentially played tracks as you suggest, but surely the thumbsup/thumbs down function in Roon Radio also effects the recommendations that Valence will provide you in the future (not just the community aggregate). The Skip dialogue provides these options:

I don’t like this track
I don’t want to hear this right now
This doesn’t fit

Somewhat similarly, Track/Album hearts have two active states:

Love
Dislike

It would be strange if this functionality is not providing data for both the aggregated community data, but also to further modify Valence recommendations in a more personalised manner.

From what @mike said in the recent Qobuz livestream, I think this is the case:

Artist page>Recommended for you

And what is actually interesting about this, like a lot of our recommendation features, this actually has a little bit of a personal twist to it…

which is that, if you’re been using Roon we have a sense of what kind of music you tend to listen to - this list will actually be different for different people.

If you like someone’s more Jazzy period, you may get more of their Jazzy releases…

Completely anonymized from personal data, yes of course.

But from what Mike has said, perhaps we should assume something like an installation ID that is connected to the data on a user’s likes/favourites stored by Roon server-side for the further personalisation of Valence recommendations, or is there some client-side processing as I suggested in my OP, or both?

#4

These are two unrelated items. The first is used by Valence but individual responses will not have a direct impact on recommendations; Valence learns from millions of plays and feedback.

The second item is for your management of your library. I suspect some users don’t use favourites at all and others occasionally, so I doubt this would be useful information. What we play is more important.

BTW, the heart has three states: no preference, favourite, and banned.

1 Like
#5

OK, many thanks you have answered my original question. :smiley:

Yep, I just ignored the default (no preference) state. It’s active in logic, but not an ‘active’ user input.