(I’m not trying to beat this to death, I swear)
Let’s go at this from another angle and use the genre “Indie Rock” as an example. I have a local library of 200+ indie rock artists and 700+ indie rock albums, all of which Roon categorizes correctly. So if I go to the Indie Rock genre page in Roon it shows Pavement, Fugazi, Sebadoh, Archers of Loaf, Superchunk, Built To Spill, The American Analog Set, Unrest, Les Savy Fav, Throwing Muses, Spoon, Pinback, Minus The Bear, Helium, The Dismemberment Plan…
So obviously Roon knows what Indie Rock is.
Yet when I start the Indie Rock radio station, it plays NONE of these.
When I see it do such a questionable job on a genre that I know really well, it makes me wonder what else Roon Radio is missing across the entire music spectrum.
On a somewhat (confusing) positive note, it does seem to do a mostly decent job if I start with, say, a Superchunk song… then it spits out what I would mostly consider to be a great selection of related songs and artists (though still at that weird ~20 artist limit which gets tiring after a couple hours).
If there was a way to create a radio station based on several songs, that would be a breakthrough and would probably resolve most of my complaints. Then I could seed it with songs from each of the artists that I mentioned in the first paragraph and get a super diverse output of Indie Rock that probably wouldn’t be repetitive for 20+ hours of listening. Maybe only 10 seed songs would be enough to knock it out of the park.
Famous last words, but this shouldn’t be very difficult to do because the pieces seem to be in place – just combine and shuffle the radio queues that already exist (in the algorithm) for each of the 10 seed songs on the server side, and serve the merged output to the user as a unified super-station. How to choose the songs would take a bit of clever UI… an easy way would be to just do it via Playlists (same UI as starting Radio from an Album)… and automatically have it select the first 10 tracks in a playlist as the seeds for the super station. Users could create/adjust playlists as needed to get the desired station output.
That’s my idea for making the radio more diverse and less predictable in a way that seems feasible within the constraints of the current system (as I see it from the outside as a customer). It’s clear that the current approach is very limited and quickly repeats and recycles the same artists and albums over and over. I feel like it’s so obvious that surely Roon Labs must realize it’s a legit problem even if they’re not saying so publicly. Hopefully we get a working solution sooner than later.