I think Roon Radio is a step in the right direction, and I hope the official Roon folks (@danny etc) realize that my criticism is based on a feeling that it has the potential to be so much better. Please give it the kick in the ass that it needs!
The main problems are:
It gets too artist-repetitive too quickly and seems to stay that way. I’ve tested up to 500 songs from all types of starting points and once it goes past about the first 80-130 songs, forget it. 95% of the songs after that will be repeats of the artists that I already heard, and often it will be from the same album (or two, if I’m lucky). I’m really curious why it tends to fixate on single albums. Like “Let’s throw some Bjork into this David Bowie radio, but only songs from Vulnicura”. Why does it think a random song from Vulnicura is related to David Bowie but then it goes on to never play any Sugarcubes, which IMHO is much more relevant?
The starting points always output the same songs. So if I start with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as the seed, I get the same station output even if I go back to it a week later (95% the same songs, just a different order). So basically for me, every starting point is a one-time-only play, because I’ve “been there, heard that”. It’s always a gamble and too much manual searching to find a starting point that won’t quickly get boring.
The algorithm seems kinda dumb, honestly. If I start with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and it outputs Guns N Roses and Bruce Springsteen several times in the first 2 hours, but never Pixies or Alice In Chains or Meat Puppets, something is seriously wrong. I wonder if this is the result of bad voting by the community? GNR thrown into a Nirvana station isn’t necessarily bad (I like variety), but it becomes bad when the algo plays 11 GNR songs and 5 songs from “Born in the USA” (WTF) but nothing from artists which are much more relevant and directly tied to Nirvana.
I had the Bruce Springsteen conundrum last night. Seeded from Rolling Stones Sympathy of the Devil it played John Lennon, Neil Young, The Beatles, The Door, Van Morrison, The Who, Bob Dylan, Led Zep then for some reason decided to play the London Calling by Clash, then back to Crosby,Stills and Nash and then Bruce Springsteen. A few of those understand but a lot don’t follow on at all and choosing solo and their bands is weak choices. Also a lot of the track choices where not of the right time very old Bob and I don’t get Bruce or The Clash at all.
I have already posted in another thread that when switching to Qobuz only radio seems to have taken a nose dive.
I’ve got a library of 80,000 songs + Qobuz + Tidal so there should be no lack of songs for Roon Radio to choose from. It’s funny because when I look at my Roon library, it knows exactly which bands fit into which genres and sub-genres, the various relationships between bands, who collaborated on what, which bands shared members, who wrote songs for other bands, etc etc etc… and then those songs and bands never actually show up on the radio, instead I get super questionable and repetitive picks. It’s baffling. It’s like the “library catalog and discovery” side of Roon knows about this stuff but the radio side is clueless.
None of us know what goes on ‘behind the curtain’, but my sense of the reasons for your observations (#2 and #3) @armandhammer are basically two-fold. First, output is based on the collective Roon user experience, and second, they want to avoid making ‘bad’ decisions. Consequently, choices directed more toward the heart of the frequency distribution will be what you hear. The closer you get to the fringes the more likely you will make a ‘mistake’. My sense is that this is worst for mainstream rock, where there are a lot of Roon users playing the same old stuff. It is a deep rut to fall into.
I’d expect that with time, experience and a broader user base Valence will get better at exploring those areas at the fringe that actually make sense. Or maybe we’ll get an ability to direct Roon to make riskier decisions,
As to point #1, this seems to be some kind of bug. It feels like Valence has just gotten bored and turned off whatever deduplication it uses earlier on. TBH, when it is 80-100 songs out, I don’t mind. I probably don’t even notice it as bad, if I notice at all. But again, if the choice is to repeat something safe, play something that might be a ‘mistake’, or turn off the radio, what do you do?
I happen to get a lot of joy out of what Valence does. It has introduced me to lots of good new music, so there is a lot of good stuff at the heart of it. But as you say, it can also get better.
I really hope Roon is working on something which will throw more randomness, deep cuts, and happy (but relevant) surprises into the radio. It’s definitely a concern that as of now, we only have an ability to vote to remove stuff from the radio, but no way to suggest new content. So it would appear that over time the radio will get less interesting and more “lowest common denominator” effect after the “weird” and “unfamiliar” stuff gets voted down… ending up with a radio that’s not much different than the local classic rock station that plays Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Hendrix, Eagles, and Pink Floyd all day long but never Mott The Hoople, Frank Zappa, Roxy Music, The Clash, pre-1975 Fleetwood Mac, or Warren Zevon.
It’s a good start. I have found some great entry points that do result in a fascinating mix of songs. It’s just that for me, this only happens about 10% of the time. The rest of the time I find myself wondering what the hell is going on and why I just heard “Black Hole Sun” followed by “Glory Days”.
I appreciate all the effort you’ve put in @armandhammer analyzing the radio behaviour. I only started using radio in the last few days and my opinion is that it is pretty terrible - frequently playing multiple songs from the same album and repeating the same artists. Spotify and Tidal are considerably more relevant in their radio track choices so it keeps forcing me away from Roon…
I’ve been away from Roon for a few months now. Just checking back. One of the reasons I left was because the Radio feature is useless for my purposes. I want to listen to a customized station based on all of my music (not just 1 song or 1 artist).
I’ve been using Deezer’s Flow for a while now. It works pretty well. I guess Roon still hasn’t figured this out.
Shuffle seems to use the same algorithm. I started a shuffle of a bookmark with 536 albums in it. (Edit: probably more like a couple of hundred because there are duplicates between my local library and Tidal/Qobuz.)
In the first hour, it played five songs by the Beatles (three from the same album), and three by James Brown. Roughly half the selections played were by two artists. There are hundreds of artists in the bookmark.
The thumbs up/down dialogue pops up every now and then, too, as if it’s playing radio instead of bookmark shuffle.
Edit: Oh, cool, there’s the Beatles again, as I’m typing. At least it’s from a different album.
If v1.8 doesn’t contain major fixes and improvements for Roon Radio I’m going to throw my hands in the air. I can live with and work around the bad iOS app (my other major pain point) but there seems to be no way for end users to fix/manipulate the Radio. Would be nice to see some additions to the API which let 3rd party extension devs do interesting things with the radio too. Here’s hoping!
So far no hints about Roon Radio 1.8 improvements.
Would love to see:
Less repetitiveness of Artists on stations / a wider variation of related music. Stations get kinda stale too quickly. This seems to be a Valence issue which surely will be improved over time on the cloud side.
The ability to seed stations with multiple inputs: from a playlist, by adding several artists or albums, or a few different genres.
The ability to Save stations. And then be able to combine 2+ stations into a single mega station (not complicated: just output a shuffle of what the individual stations would generate by themselves)
The ability to Fine Tune stations:
A) A slider to control the percentage of songs from my Library vs Cloud
B) A slider to control between Popular tracks vs Deep / Eclectic tracks
C) A slider to control between whether tracks are Closely Related or More Discovery
D) A double-ended slider to control the time period (select any range from 1920s to 2020s)
E) A way to ban certain Artists or Tracks from a station or all stations
Absolutely agree about Roon Radio just being a marketing gimmick and nothing to suit serious music listeners. Nor does it help me discover music the way I would expect Roon to do. Then there is the other problem about consistently streaming TIDAL track vs better quality versions from local library.
I am a techie and I understand ML and AI pretty well. I don’t know how they have implemented this and nor do I want to know. I am only interested in the outcome which is not much to my liking tbh.
Thanks so much for collating this data. Really helps to understand how unintelligent Roon Radio is. Is there any easy way to keep track of this? I don’t think we can export Tidal tracks in play history to an excel.
Unfortunately, I had to collect the data by typing it into Excel manually (which is why I only tracked artist, but made some notes about it repeating the same 1 or 2 albums for each artist).
I don’t know if this changed in 1.8, but you can export your Queue, which includes tracks from streaming services. It doesn’t have any field to sort the running order, but it would be a pretty simple process to add formulas to generate track counts per artist/album, etc…
I’m going to just provide some quick stats below, but the raw data is here:
I’ve rerun seeding Roon Radio from David Bowie (the first track Roon used was Lady Stardust):
Artists: 27 Albums: 46* Tracks: 499*
*while no track from the same album version was repeated, there are examples of different versions of the same album being played (deluxe etc…)
Artist - Number of albums - Number of tracks
AC/DC - 1 - 9 Carlos Santana/John McLaughlin - 1 - 7
David Bowie - 4 - 36 The Doors - 2 - 34
Eagles - 1 - 2 Fraternity - 1 - 35
Grateful Dead - 1 - 4 Iggy Pop - 2 - 14
Janis Joplin - 1 - 10 Jethro Tull - 1 - 11
King Crimson - 1 - 7 Led Zeppelin - 3 - 24
Lou Reed - 1 - 8 Neil Young - 4 - 30
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - 2 - 17 Patti Smith - 1 - 11
Pink Floyd - 3 - 21 The Rolling Stones - 2 - 53
Roxy Music - 1 - 8 Santana - 2 - 18
Stevie Wonder - 2 - 1 Supertramp - 2 - 20
Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - 1 - 15 Van Halen - 1 - 11
Van Morrison - 1 - 7 The Who - 3 - 72
ZZ Top - 1 - 13
As the raw data shows, in this example, Roon Radio is playing almost every track from a limited number of albums per artist.
Thanks for this! It’s good to know that other people experience the same. I’ve looked at every thread on Roon Radio that I can find and I can’t find anyone who says their Roon Radio is super diverse and backs it up with facts. Some people say they don’t get repetition like this, but I think they just aren’t paying attention.
Since Roon Radio is what initially brought me to explore and subscribe to Roon, and I discovered that it doesn’t live up to the hype, I canceled my subscription. I still have 2 weeks remaining so I’ll try to run a few more tests and export the data.
I’ve tried every music service which has a radio function that I can find: Slacker, Pandora, Tidal, Deezer, Spotify, Apple Music… they all suck to varying degrees. I find that Pandora probably has the best algorithm, especially when you set the Fine Tune mode to Deep Cuts or Discovery – but what they don’t tell you is that this does NOT work in Offline (Download) mode, it only downloads the regular mode (e.g. popular predictable songs). Since more than half my listening these days is offline at my cabin, that sucks. Tidal is the second best… it’s easy to create playlists from the queue (incl radio) and then keep diving down into various related Track Radio or Artist Radio, adding everything to the same playlist (it can automatically skip duplicates), then set that Playlist for Download. My only gripe about Tidal is its obvious bias towards pushing Rap and R&B music even though I hardly ever listen to this genre.
Slacker has a pretty good algorithm and Fine Tune options as well, but when I download a station it only fetches about a dozen tracks and there’s no way to change it, so that’s a no-go for me as well. It also seems like a dying service. Deezer wasn’t bad, but it didn’t feel like it had anything unique to offer. Apple Music and Spotify radio functions are a joke.
I don’t have access to Pandora in the UK, but have you explored the idea of transfering these Pandora playlists to whichever streaming service you use for when you are at your cabin (sounds lovely btw), downloading in the streaming app? Obviously these would also appear in Roon:
The transfer appears to be supported for Pandora->TIDAL/Qobuz in Soundiiz:
Unfortunately, Pandora doesn’t have any ability to transfer songs from a radio station to a playlist (there’s not even a Queue or History). I can add individual songs one by one as they appear on the Now Playing screen, but that’s too tedious when I want to save a few hundred songs for offline listening. I’m hoping they fix it so that whatever Fine Tune mode you’re listening to when you select to Download the station actually determines the songs that are downloaded instead of using only the default station mode. They added these new modes (Deep Cuts, Discovery, Crowd Favorites, etc) about 2 years ago, but only if you’re online when you’re listening. It’s baffling.