Inaccurate 'Play Similar Tracks' Feature in Niche Genres (ref#E83H3G)

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1

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· None of the above quite fits

None of the above quite fits

· None of these quite match

Tell us what's going on

· I’m experiencing issues with Roon’s "play similar tracks" feature when listening to rare or niche genres. After finishing "B-Tribe Spiritual" (reverby acoustic guitar with synth bass, similar in mood to Enya), the feature queued instrumental tracks, but the mood didn’t match. It jumped from "scary-instrumental" to “classical-instrumental," then to the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack, then R&B Christmas music. Most concerning, it queued Chapter 4 of the audiobook "Annihilation," which shouldn’t appear as a similar track to music at all. The feature struggles with rare genres, pulling unrelated content and mismatching the mood even within the same category.

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2

Hi @hollisnolan,

That’s a terrible experience to report and shouldn’t be happening.

We have a few questions to help pin this down on the backend.

What was the Play Now action you used to initiate playback on the seed content, “B-Tride Spiritual?” Did you click Play Now on a track, an album, or an artist page in particular? This question sounds semantic, but knowing this information will allow us to investigate how the seed resulted in such a bad recommendation pool.

Christmas music, in particular, shouldn’t appear in Roon Radio unless the source content is missing a Holiday genre tag upstream.

Can you share a screenshot of your queue history from this incident so we can identify the particular album objects that played?

We’re going to gather logs in the meantime.

Thank you for the post and we’ll watch for your response.

4

(fixing the bad image links)

Right? I really feel others will benefit from us working on this.

We have a few questions to help pin this down on the backend.

What was the Play Now action you used to initiate playback on the seed content, “B-Tride Spiritual?” Did you click Play Now on a track, an album, or an artist page in particular? This question sounds semantic, but knowing this information will allow us to investigate how the seed resulted in such a bad recommendation pool.

Play now on the album:

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Christmas music, in particular,

Linus and Lucy was the xmas track:

It was correct in that it was acoustic music with no vocals

The only hint Roon had was genre = christmas

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as you can see, after this album, Roon was really struggling to recommend next tracks.

Thats on me, I dont have much that is similar to B-tribe

If you fingerpint the waveform for recommending next tracks. B-tribe does use religious style chord progressions on acoustic guitar.

Not christmas-y but definitely Christian.

shouldn’t appear in Roon Radio unless the source content is missing a Holiday genre tag upstream.

so far, I have not used the tag function at all

Can you share a screenshot of your queue history from this incident so we can identify the particular album objects that played?

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Here it started really messing up.

Dropkick is punk rock.

2nd xmas track, Be-Bop Santa Claus came in

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It started falling back on Enya and Jocelyn Pook too much

I got skip-happy

and after 3x skips in a row it grabbed a book on tape.

Those are ripped allongside my other media and all in the same library. Maybe I should treat them as podcasts instead?

We’re going to gather logs in the meantime.

Sure thing. One important note. I am an iphone user and local media on my phone is super crucial to me.
So I rip and edit metadata via iTunes (no way around it right?), sync the entire lib to my phone.

Then have Jriver and Roon each read from the itunes lib.

The new, windows Apple Music app + Apple Devices app are not compatible with syncing a lib of this size to a phone on windows.

If I start it just crashes after a few tracks.

So when I say iTunes I mean literally iTunes.

Thank you for the post and we’ll watch for your response

5

Hello @hollisnolan

Thanks for going back and fixing the image links, and for the detail on the queue order. Being able to see exactly what followed what makes this much easier to take forward.

We are raising this with our product team, in two parts. The first is the audiobook question specifically, whether Roon Radio should recognize spoken word content and keep it out of selection entirely. The second is the broader behavior you documented, where the selection widens into Christmas and punk and then loops back on the same two artists once it runs out of close matches.

We will come back to you when we have something concrete. This will not be a same-week answer, since it is a product discussion rather than a fix we can apply to your server, but the thread will stay open.

6

Thank you, thats a perfect response. So glad me raising this was helpful.

Happy to help more if you need anything more. And, I wont worry at all when this thread auto closes in 7 days. Keep me posted on what you do next even if its months later :slight_smile: