Focus - would be great to have the default focus a little tighter - like your 'Similar To', 'Influenced' and "Followed' lists

I love your ‘Similar To’, ‘Influenced’ and "Followed’ lists when browsing an artist. I’ve discovered quit a bit of new music through this, and in general from my limited experience so far, it seems quite tightly related and will often pull in something similar that I like. (Incidentally would be interested to know where these lists come from)

However, when I select an album in my library and select ‘Focus on similar’ there, it selects a huge chuck of my collection - I assume this is using something more basic like listing anything similarly tagged i.e. as ‘electronic’? It would be great to have a tigher more relevant focus using your other lists for example and seeing if there are any matches that way.

It would also be great if Music from Tidal (or other music services in the future) could be included in this focus. I realise that at the moment streamed albums need to be added to the library before they can be used in this way, but it would be such a nice way of exploring new music - kind of what you have already, but just being presenting with a load of stuff to listen to, rather than hunting for it (which is fun don’t get me wrong)

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Selfishly continuing this topic myself as I pressed ‘focus on similar’ to a Goldfrap album at the weekend, and again Roon suggested practically 50% (around 500 albums) of my library was similar to it. Not very useful at all, yet if it worked - and ideally across streaming services even if not added to my library - this would be a killer feature.

As it is its pretty useless right now sadly :confused:

Perhaps you listen to a lot of stuff that is like Goldfrapp :grin:

:grin: :laughing: actually, that’s probably true, but I don’t have anything like 500 similar albums! Unless by similar we mean ‘not classical or jazz’. I’ll do some screenshots of what Roon thinks are similar to this particular Goldfrapp album.

It’s like Roon doesn’t use any of its metadata intelligence here…

I have all her/their albums so it would find a few in mine.

If you have time and feel so inclined, maybe you could select one and hit the ‘focus on similar’ button and see how many albums Roon finds for you, and how similar they are?

One datapoint that Roon doesn’t show and I really wish it would is similar albums when browsing an album. AMG shows this listing at the bottom of the album page and I suspect it’s a subjective datapoint rather than listing albums with the same or similar genre tags. Roon’s focus on similar feels more like the latter and is of limited utility in its current form.

Selected “Tales of Us” and it gave me 252 similar albums, but I only have 750 in my library so about a third.

OK, so a bit less generous than mine (about 500 out of about 1,000).

Out of interest, how many of your 252 would you say were quite similar to ‘Tales of Us’? :slight_smile:

I’m not familiar with AMG what is it? Sounds like it might be useful for discovery?

All Music Guide

Hi Steve @hifi_swlon,

There’s now a ticket in for this. It will be looked at while they’re working on metadata for version 1.3.

So, it should be given some love (as Mike would say), but it may take some time.

Cheers, Greg

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Great news. IMO it could be one of the most powerful tools in Roon if done right - the simplest way to find similar music to the album you’ve got selected. Roon has the knowledge and the data (or access to it) - it just needs to be plugged into that button!

I’ve got high hopes for it! :slight_smile:

I’m sure Roon team realizes the focus feature is of little value. It seem to pick mostly by time period of album release.
Radio feature in 1.4 is better than it was to not replay the same music.
There is still much work to build a better heuristic engine to match Roons UI.

This ‘focus on similar feature’ hasn’t been upgraded in 1.3, 1.4 or 1.5. And seriously, it needs work. i still totally agree with @hifi_swlon on this one.

Roon’s ability to enable a rich data driven user experience needs a complete rethink and overhaul, not just its Focus capability…as does its handling/enriching of metadata. Users that bought into that paradigm have been left high and dry now for a very long time.

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Agreed. The focus is useless for me as it is.