Yes, it changes everything.
This is wrong, let me explain.
Valence isn’t limited to a specific feature; it’s actually a core part of how we are growing Roon’s ability to understand music and your personal taste. This technology is contained in our cloud services as well as in the Roon application inside your home – together they are Valence.
For example:
- Valence powers our new, more accurate, search results. This works spectacularly even with local content.
- Valence has processed and disambiguated more than 40 million new credits into our metadata systems, and will be a key part of how we add additional metadata services in the future. This gives your local content much better metadata than it had before.
- Valence is enabling smarter browsing of your collection, helping classical fans to surface the best compositions and performances across their library, whether they have a streaming service enabled or not.
Going forward, Valence is going to influence the product in innumerable ways, and continue to deliver new features for both local content and streaming content.
With 1.7, there are three totally new features powered by Valence, all focused on music discovery.
Roon is a music player first and foremost. The goal is not to become the Wikipedia of music. Surfacing music recommendations that you don’t already have will require a streaming service, so you can actually listen to them. If you want to use these new features in Roon 1.7, you will need a streaming service enabled.
While you are getting the benefits of Valence throughout Roon, don’t confuse these new features with Valence – we’re just getting started tapping into the power of this system, and it goes way beyond a few new features.