I wanted to put something out there that has frustrated me about search options for new music for awhile. I’m a fan of particular genres, say “New Wave” as an example. When I click on the link to that genre either through the genre tab or from an artist’s page, I get sent to a list of artists and albums that already exist in my library, but there are no suggestions for new music I don’t yet have from that genre.
Does anyone know an alternative way to search for new music from a particular genre? It sure seems like a big miss that unlike Tidal or Qobuz’s native app, Roon doesn’t curate new music of interest to me other than trapping me into slogging though tracks played on Roon Radio. Am I missing something? Thanks!
You have to use the native apps to do this, Roon doesn’t search for genres if it’s not in your library annoyingly. But you won’t find any they use as granular genres so search for new wave on its own isn’t possible they are all limited to top level pop/rock etc .
There is a somewhat limited way in Home > New Releases For You because this has the option to show new releases by genre. It is limited because it really has only new releases that go back a limited time, not all releases “for you” from the genre
In addition, you can go to Home > Genres and pick a genre, and it will not just have releases that are already in your library. Scroll down and there will also be new releases in this genre as well as recommended artists and albums that are not new:
What it doesn’t have is a way to list a genre in its entirety and narrow it down by additional criteria. This would be neat but is probably another case of the architectural limitation in Roon of currently having to treat library and non-library differently, which leads to so many other limitations
As genre as a tag is pretty subjective to it’s likely the reason apps stick with basic categories, what it goes in iI guess up to them and or the metadata provided by the studios in the files.
Well, from the genre you can also drill down into subgenres and there are more recommendations. Not an overview of everything, but often enough to stay busy
Not via streaming apps you can’t so doesn’t help with discovery which is what the op is after. Only useful when it’s in your library but similar artists can be found with breadcrumbs on the album or artist pages.
Thanks for all the tips! I think this is a pretty glaringly absent feature TBH—they have all this metadata and tags for myriad genres, they’re even tagged to artists, albums or tracks on the screen during views, and it’s not very informative for me to click on those and be enlightened about the fellow albums I already have in my library under that tag (I pretty much figured out the genres of the music I prefer). How great would it be if I could click on a genre tagged to an artist I love and get a list of other artists tagged to that genre I don’t have in my library yet?
I’m an eighties kid and have been trying to populate my library with every imaginable album and artist from my youth, and occasionally I’ve found some more obscure bands from the similar artists listed at the bottom of a band’s Overview tab—but it’s been a very hit-or-miss, circuitous process that has been dragging on for almost two years. If the genre tags actually linked to something, that would offer some value—but otherwise “genre” seems to be an “FYI” resource only…
I’m speaking about Roon. There are definitely recommendations on the genre pages that I don’t have in my library. E.g. none of these Latin artists and albums are in my library:
Nobody disagrees. It’s probably another consequence of the architecture and will only be solved by moving much more of Roon away from local cores and into the cloud. They know but it means a complete re-architecture:
I’m not necessarily saying they are wonderful (but those I looked at also weren’t much more terrible than recommendations elsewhere - recommendations never work for me). I was just mainly pointing out to the OP that it’s not entirely correct that genre pages show only library content. Even though there is much improvement potential
If I’m looking at a particular album, I can scroll down to a “Recommended Albums - For You” section. There’s often plenty of stuff that isn’t in my collection.
There is also the “Similar Artists” section that is a good launching point.
I also use the album credits to follow various musicians, producers, or engineers to see what else they worked on.
