How does Roon Radio work? What do you think of Roon Radio?

It’s also proprietary, uses “data science” based on tags, I would guess but don’t know.

I’ve been using Roon for well over a year now, and I find that Roon Radio works more or less perfectly for me. I have discovered lots of albums for my library that would never have come across were it not for Roon Radio.

I simply don’t understand your claim that “Roon Radio plays one recognisable track from your library - then switches to instrumental/Christmas/Techno/opera or any genre other than pop/rock”

You must be very unlucky!

In all the time I have been using Roon I can pretty well say definitively that Roon Radio has never offered me a track from ‘Christmas’ or ‘Techno’ genres. Nor has it offered me an ‘Opera’ track when I have started out in my preferred genre.

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Reviving this thread…

I tried starting the Radio from the track Mad World by Youngblood Brass Band, a R&B/hip hop/jazz brass band combo thing. From then on Roon Radio would only play thrash and death metal (i skipped through 10-20 songs just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke), which is so dissimilar it put me off the radio altogether. Using Qobuz if it matters.

Why didn’t it work?

Its extremely repetitive, plays the same set of artists in a loop, and always chooses to stream from Qobuz/Tidal rather than same track in better quality from the local library.

I think it’s subpar and a gimmick. Radio features in Tidal, Apple Music, Qobuz serve me much better for music discovery. They talk about AI powered engine and so on, which is plain sales speak for me. Because I find it to be extremely unintelligent.

Hopefully they will fix it in the future.

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I don’t know what genres of music you prefer, but I find that with my main genre (Blues and Blues influenced
Rock), the choices offered to me are very varied and not at all repetitive.

I have discovered many new artists and album material via Roon Radio.

Good for you. The repetitive nature of Roon Radio has been researched and documented in this thread quite extensively.

But still one perspective. A different library and user gives different results.
By its very nature roon radio will be carve a narrow path in listening as that’s how most people listen to their music according to most studies I’ve read.

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I’m just so surprised it couldn’t keep the genres even remotely close. Now I do like me some epic metal (nightwish, within temptation) once in a while, but combining brass band and screamo death metal is so weird it might be Artificial but definitely not Intelligent.

@zenyatta80

My point exactly. I was simply pointing out that Roon Radio can work well for some peoples’ choice and genres of music, and would add that Roon Radio was one of the features that helped persuade me to subscribe to Roon in the first place 2 or 3 years ago.

If you happen to listen to an obscure music genre or have a very different music library to mine, you may well be less lucky than I am with Roon Radio’s performance. However, it would be helpful to have some idea of the genre/type of music to which you listen.

I listen to popular classic rock mostly. And Roon radio from most tracks/albums/artists exhibits the same behaviour as I have highlighted. This genre is obviously extremely vast and there is no excuse for repetition at the level Roon radio churns out.

My (mild) complaint about roon radio is that it plays tracks related to just the last item in the queue. I frequently mix genres as I queue tracks and would like radio to take account of that mixture - maybe, say, the last half dozen tracks - at least as an option.

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Like yourself I think Roon radio is superb because when I get in from either work or the gym just put on Smooth Jazz radio out of Monterey which is excellent as unlike so many UK stations who literally have adverts every 5 minutes this station has very little which is great plus quality is really good also with a good selection of chilled out music.
Also listen to UK Smooth Radio & a few others all very good.

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I recommend WGBO, Jazz 88, 88.3

It’s from right outside New York City, in a neighboring city, Newark. It’s quite good.

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The thread is talking about Roon Radio that “auto selects” tracks for you once your selected tracks or album have finished. You are referring to “internet radio” I think

Its very confusing naming !!

As an example I started Roon Radio from Time of the Season by the Zombies. From the 20 tracks that are queued, I already have 6 artists (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Paul McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel) that have appeared twice. This is sub-optimal experience IMO. Its a no brainer as to the array of music available from this genre. And yet within the first 20 tracks Roon Radio is unable to find much variety. This same cycle of artists have repeated and am now up to 50 tracks queued up. It seriously shows how unintelligent their AI engine is. In fact its so lame, that when repeating artists it even repeats albums. So every Paul McCartney selection is from Ram, every S&G selection is from BOTW.

I would give further examples of how repetitive the artist selection is. But unfortunately Roon does not allow export of queue outside of local library and Roon radio plays 100% of the tracks from Qobuz/Tidal over better quality local versions (another major problem).

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I left the house with an album playing on Roon (via Qobuz). I expected Roon Radio to kick in after the album was over. Isn’t that how it works? With related material? I came home: silence. What am I missing here?

Did you have the radio switch set for that zone?

I totally agree with you.

I liked a song, LTJ Bukem Flip The Narrative.

So far this morning on radio its played it four times.

What an amazing AI it is.

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3 posts were split to a new topic: Is it possible to inhibited the playing of Roon Radio