How to get the best experience from Roon Radio?

My experience exactly. Radio very quickly limits itself to not only a small subset of artists but also a small subset of their albums. It’s awful.

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I just tried Plexamp radio using Dua Lipa as a seed. There was lots of repetition of both the seed artist, radio artists - Harry Styles, Doja Cat, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber etc and also albums from within this artist group. It seemed a little better than Roon Radio but not much.

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Does the radio algorithm behave differently when skipping tracks versus letting them play through?

This can only be answered by ROON. @noris might be able to help or provide a link etc

I too gave Plexamp a try and had a similar experience with radio. Lots of artist repitition with pop seeds. Unless I’m missing something, it also seems like you have to rely on AirPlay or other phone/tablet streaming to the endpoint (unless you’re using a computer or AppleTV, etc.), which I don’t care for. I’d rather have tracks stream through the endpoint like they do with Roon or Tidal Connect. Stil holding out hope that Roon will eventually sort out the issues with radio.

Yeah I’d say that PlexAmp radio (a) requires a big local library and complete Sonic Analysis, and (b) is much more “lean forward” than Roon. When you teach it by clicking on “up next” it learns fairly quickly and can seem kind of magic even though you’re helping it more than you realize.

That’s why I put this feature request in, I think it is the core of the difference - part interface, part more data collected on expressed preference, Pat options available. If you agree, welcome your votes:

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Been running all day not a single repeat. It is more DiY but lots of users for Roon are to, plug in a pi and you have a streamer to a DAC. There are others who prefer turnkey and this is where Plex falls down unless you go Chromecast or AirPlay or Sonos.

Yeah, it does seem like Plex isn’t quite as varied if I play Dua Lipa radio. It does mix in tracks from Harry Styles, Lady Gaga, Doja Cat, and Olivia Rodrigo fairly frequently. But at least it doesn’t seem to be stuck on only single albums from those artists like Roon Radio.

I suspect that part of this is that I have near zero post-2000 mainstream pop in my personal library, so it must be leaning more on Tidal to create stations from this genre because it has nothing to pull from my library via Sonic Analysis etc.

As a long-time Roon subscriber with two lifetime subscriptions, I share the Roon Radio frustrations. I’d love to see them offer something that can be more tailored to my listening preferences.

What I miss more than anything is a plugin I formerly used with my LMS/Squeezebox called called “Sugarcube” (Spicefly - Sugarcube). My favorite use case allows you to “wobble” through your music collection with each song providing the seed to the subsequent song. It uses MusicIP to get “sonic similarity” within whatever parameters the user chooses on how far it can drift from the last track, and along which dimensions it might drift (genre, artist, recency, date, album, how repetitive, etc.). Because it was so highly configureable, it could work with large or small collections as long as you’re willing to fiddle with it a bit.

Without anything like Sugarcube, I’ve largely given up on Roon radio. My replacement is simply streaming Radio Paradise when I’m in a lazy discovery mood (frequently!). I love RP, but it’s definitely not the same kind of awesome discovery of my own collection that I enjoyed with Sugarcube on Squeezebox.

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Weil as long es we don’t get any feedback by ROON this is like speaking into the dark :grimacing:

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Roon radio actually made me laugh the other day.

I was listening to a really nice singer / songwriter type indie pop. Just relaxing, the album came to and end, radio kicks in.

Out blares what can only be described as screamo metal. The worst part was I had it turned up relatively loud as the indie pop was quite quiet.

I have maybe 10 metal albums in my library and all of them are basically metal crossover with shoegaze.

Roon radio is now limited to my library.

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Never had it do that. When it kicks in it always plays a track by the same artist first but from a different album. Never had it go to another artist or a different genre straight away unless there isn’t anything in qobuz for that artist. But it’s generally follows suit musical wise. What does happen though is the queue sticks to the previous radio seed if you decide queue stuff up instead of play now which resets the queue and seed to the next last track. This becomes very annoying if you changed styles as it jumps back to the previous style when that album track ends. It should resets whenever the radio is interrupted by a user choice.

Played Kind of Blue yesterday and if there was an off-track betting office nearby I would have put all my money on it playing Autumn Leaves off Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else when KoB finished and I would have cleaned up.

I’m just so tired of the same-old same-old. Great music, but please play some deeper cuts!

I might try to limit RR to library, just to see if that messes with the algorithm in a positive way, but I always think I’ll miss out on the occasional discovery. (Although, I do have albums in my library that I’ve added and haven’t heard yet, so it might be just fine.)

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I think Spotify Radio does a good job, I like its AI radio algorithm.

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Isn’t Spotify “radio” actually just a playlist now?

There are both “mix” and playlist in Spotify radio if I am not mistaken.

No idea if this is possible, but would be fantastic to see Roon Radio incorporate the functionality of Spicefly Sugarcube. I’ve used this for years with LMS and a Squeezebox system. It could be finnicky to set up and install, but once it was up and running it produced superb radios from a library of, for example, NAS-stored FLACs.
Importantly, you could adjust the settings to increase or decrease the variation of the mix at any time.
That can find of functionality, plus a ‘play more like this’ button, would improve Roon Radio.

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“more like this” would be great, but only if Roon has a proper understanding of what “this” is. As it stands, there’s no concept of sonic similarity in Roon Radio.

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I’m a relatively new user and am getting that impression…
Where Spicefly Sugarcube excels is in using a program called MusicIP to ‘fingerprint’ tracks in your music library, which can then be individually tagged with that MusicIP fingerprint - a short line of text and numbers.
Once your music is tagged Sugarcube then selects tracks with similar fingerprints to build a playlist/radio. It’s both very effective and pliable (minimal track to track variation or lots / don’t repeat the same artist for X number of tracks / don’t repeat the same album for X number of tracks etc, etc). And most importantly, it can weave through your library for hours without jarring changes.

Now, if Roon could buy and integrate that fingerprinting algorithm and Sugarcube’s radio making methods into its software in some way…

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“Gracenote; Sr. Director Sales”…
:slight_smile: A quick internet search on MusicIP suggests that the company’s intellectual property was sold to Gracenote in the 2010s. Is that accurate? Does your company potentially hold the solution to a revamped Roon Radio?!?