Indeed, and if the queue is empty there is actually no way to see the current state of shuffle, let alone toggle it. Not the first time I’ve mentioned this but I guess it bears repeating every few months.
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Im in the same boat, for various reasons 
- I am actually NOT using Roon at the moment, having invested in a great Android HiRes DAP which can’t use Roon other than in limited remote use and this has become my main musical source.
I am in the sad situation of wondering if I will resubcribe in February, mainly due to the lack of UI and ergonomic updates.
Fix the Radio already… It’s a really dynamic part of many great players and streaming services.
I’ve switched to Qobuz already for a more stable streaming service already and a refreshing break from the Rap-focused Tidal crap. Even less incentive to continue with Roon.
I’m getting a bit tired also of this “it’s coming” nonsense. So is death.
Ps… Sorry for my grouchy, Monday blues… terrible weather here in Switzerland is not helping 
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Hahaha! 
Thats harsh!
I am a bit confused though, some people use the phrase ”repetitive”. Though i cannot see that Roons radio has ever played the same track once in one session?
However, if you play one album Roon will almost certainly start it’s radio using the same tracks each time.
But, to make this a useful reaction there should be a ”surprise me” level regulator. If set to low it would play similar tunes from your own library, if set to high tracks from all of Tidal could be included.
Well, i think were expecting a improved radio quite soon, i would say before februari!
Yeah, sorry, bad day yesterday - I like your idea of the “surprise me” regulator. Safe->Dangerous, lol. Could be cool.
I was all ready to go with Deezer and it’s cool radio-biased play modes, but it’s CD quality streaming is very limited.
Ah, the good old Gartner graph…
It’s odd, I’ve never felt myself in the Trough of Disillusion with Roon. I suppose if it was still at version 1.2, then I would be. My needs are pretty much met with 1.3. Yes, some features (e.g. Internet Radio and Radio) are very basic, but they are simply icing on the cake for me, and not showstoppers.
Putting my amateur photographer’s hat on, I’m still looking for a photo player that can slice and dice my collection for instant presentation. Plex, Emby and Microsoft’s Photos app have kept me in the Trough for years.
At least Roon has got my music sorted. And yes, YMMV.
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I hit the trough pretty quickly when I realized that Roon does not support non-standard (i.e. custom) embedded metatags to allow any sorting or Roon tagging of tracks or albums, since that was how I enabled quality shuffle/radio through my own customized system.
I posted about it in a long and popular thread and although the Roon team didn’t bite on my request to support this function, they did admit that their radio/shuffle were not good and promised to fix that, which is what kept my faith for months.
But that was a long time ago. Hence the point, when will they do so? I’d like to see this in the next release given how long and how many have asked for it.
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Roon has really done a lot for my music hobby. I have found dozens of artists and hundreds of albums I didn’t know existed or that I’d only briefly had come to my attention. From that perspective, it is great.
I just wish that the playback was as sophisticated as some of the other parts of Roon. What caused me to start this thread was watching releases roll out that were integrating with specific hardware.
I can understand the commercial logic of allocating resources to integrations that will increase the install base, but at the end of the day, if people feel that iTunes and Spotify do a better job at random play or suggesting music, those integrations won’t hold anyone to Roon. It’s a difficult balance with limited resources, I’m sure.
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Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, right?
I can’t argue with any of your points nor can I claim that your dissatisfaction is unwarranted, but there’s another way of looking at this which may make some sense.
Integrating new hardware is relatively straightforward in the sense that the requirements and deliverables are very well-defined. It’s a small and relatively self-contained problem to solve. In contrast changes to track selection algorithms and playback functions is much more open-ended. Sure, Roon could just look to another solution out there and duplicate it, but it’s been shown time and time again that the team is way more thoughtful and thorough than that.
I think that part of the reason that we’re seeing lots of new hardware support is that those projects have the benefit of clear definition and a solid business case. Without solid growth on the business side Roon can’t afford to focus solely on new playback features or functionality. On top of that a truly useful radio or randomization function is actually difficult to solve in such a way that users walk away and go, “wow, that’s cool.”
As users all that we can point to are the features that have been released and the bugs that have been fixed. This gives us no clear indication of what the Roon team has going on in the background. To be perfectly honest I’m encouraged by the releases focused on hardware support as that tells me that Roon is doing what’s needed to keep the business in growth mode. Roon’s history to date tells me that the team will likely parlay that security into something really cool.
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James, you are here attacking what, for me, is one of Roons greatest strengths: the ability to recognise a complete piece of music, and to find similar examples. There clearly is a need to talk this out, to avoid destroying that little pearl. I would imagine that it ought to be possible to come up with some kind of ‘truly random’ algorithm for throwing tracks together on the radio (or whatever). However, ‘truly random’ is very difficult to achieve to the satisfaction of all.
Oh I’d love that. Roon does an OK job of it now but it seems kind of predictable and simplistic. Radio/shuffle needs to be improved no matter what direction it goes - more random or more intelligent…I’d like a choice of both… but it needs to be far less predictable and repetitive relative to the actual pool of music it can select from.
Not really attacking anything. Someone has to state an opinion to get a thread started. But plenty of people will here will agree with me that Radio and Shuffle are both subpar relative to Roon’s overall stature.
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I like the glass half full thought process - you are right the hardware integrations may not be very hard relative to the complex functions we are asking for here.
beta/alpha testers have been testing new radio and some other new features you all will love… VERY SOON!!!
(no we aren’t looking for more testers)
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It may sound like a Douglas Adams invention, but it was actually coined by the Gartner Group.
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Repetitive=
What they mean is that it seems to take a very small number of albums and repeat tracks almost exclusively from just that small number of albums.
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I am a new user to Roon and jumped in feet first (lifetime) but have already noticed limited track selection on the radio function. I don’t use Tidal and only just my local files (NAS) but have a large enough selection of my given genre to not repeat. Perhaps this is due to the extensive tagging Roon has making 2 album that I would consider similar be very different to Roon. Who knows.
The short answer is I have noticed repeat plays myself.
Hi Paul - welcome
Radio can a bit quirky…I have a few repeats too when I use radio. Especially a few songs where I have albums with the same tracks like hit collection or hi-res copies.
s+1 from my side, too.
Before roon came into my life I used to be a laggard in the „squeezebox“ aka LMS universe, meaning, I have been a day-one-follower of this open-source project and slimdevices (long before logitech‘s takeover and ruination of the company and later of the whole platform).
In this environment there was a great tool for creating intelligent playlists based on music „dna“. It was called musicIP and worked like a charm on tens of thousands of songs and albums in my music library. You had to semi-automatically analyze the music files and store the results in four additional tags. This was a little cumbersome but it worked for many years - and it is still working, even if the musicIP creators have ceized support of the platform long time ago.
To cut a long story short, the mixes done within this architecture have been (and still are) superb! Listening to an „endless“ mix is pure delight because it will reveal many gems in your audio library and the chosen pieces will always fit in some more or less surprising way.
Best of the mixes based on musicIP was/is the parametrization of the environment meaning everybody can fiddle with similarity parameters based on different features of music like mood etc. to make the listening more or less homogeneous vs. varied (in tempo, mood etc.)
I do think the creators of roon delivered a more than worthy successor to the now antiquated squeezebox-world - but they should take a deep look into its musicIP-based mixing-functions to get an idea of what a demanding roon customer might expect from the world‘s „most sophisticated music listening environment“.
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This is easier said than done. I’ve only ever encountered two brilliant tools in this category - the first was MusicIP and the 2nd (and less capable in my view) was echonest. Both technologies now exist in a different guise, used in commercial music offerings. The main developer of MusicIP was Wendell Hicken…one hell of a talented individual. No doubt the IP remains that of the crowd that bought AmpliFIND, which had previously acquired MusicIP.
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MusicIP would be so great, specially if it could include Tidal content as well, but that’s wishfull thinking I’m afraid.
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