Lately I’m having the idea that Roon Radio is getting worse in coming up with a song.
I thought this was me, but this weekend my wife made a remark about it and she noticed it as well.
So… more people having this?
3 Likes
Hi Harry,
Can you be a little more specific? What do you mean by “coming up with a song”? Do you mean it just stopped picking music? Started repeating itself?
1 Like
Oh sorry. What I mean is the actual song it comes up with: up until recently I was always pretty happy (and sometime positively surprised) with which song Roon came up with.
Recently I noticed that it now comes up with songs that make no sense at all: resulting in me skipping the song.
2 Likes
Ahh. That is tough, since, what you and I consider good follow up songs can be quite different. Can you post the actual song sequence as examples and why such a track is not, by you, a valid sequence.
But, to answer your question, I have not noticed RRadio getting worse, but, to be fair, I rarely use it, especially since it seems to get stuck on questionalbe compilations as found on Qobuz.
Well, obviously it’s not about the songs itself… that is highly subjective to your own taste. It’s more if you can reasonably understand the ‘logic’ behind the choice(s) being made. And it that area I’m sensing (and my wife as well 
) that it has changed somehow over the last period.
So it’s not about “do I like the song it picked” but about “I really don’t follow why it has picked that song”.
I understand. I have long argued for more (actually any) user input to focus Roon Radio output towards what I was looking for at the moment. (top hits, deep album dives, etc). That was met with some push back.
Roon has never really discussed the priority logic behind Valence and Roon Radio, other than to say it is influenced by users as a whole.
This thread is in Uncatogorized and as such people and/or support might not see it. Do you want me to move it somewhere else? Support, Roon Software Discussion?
1 Like
Maybe the latter. It’s certainly not a support question. It was more of a shout out if there are more users that recognize the (perceived) changed behaviour.
Thanks
2 Likes
Radio Paradise refers to these logical sequences of tracks as “arcs”, meaning that there is a level of similarity to the sequence before “arcing” toward another artistic style or genre. I have also noticed Roon radio losing the plot a few times recently.
2 Likes
Is it the audiophile “she noticed it from the kitchen”?
Just joking
4 Likes
IMHO it all depends on the seed.
And the genre tags for the seed are still drawn from the album, aren’t they? So if you’ve got a diverse set of tags on the album, Radio can wander all over the place. @Rugby is absolutely correct to say that if it’s ever going to work, there needs to be more constraints that the user can place. Like multiple tracks as the seed, for instance.
I have found some great musc with Roon Radio but I have noticed it tends to play the first song on any particular album - might have always of course…
For me, Roon Radio is a tale of two scenarios: (1) works pretty well (say virtually any mainstream jazz seed) or (2) not reliably useful and somewhat formulaic (say a Bach cantata). In the Bach example, I often get presented the same long Scarlatti recording (not in my local library) — when Roon doesn’t understand enough about a seed it seems to reverts to some degree of hard coded, invariant rules, and this just rarely leads to an enjoyable “radio” experience. I have argued in the past for an ability to either increase the randomness (don’t repeat recordings as often with “similar” seeds) or perhaps increase the weight to favour local library genre tagging more (as a proxy for musical style).
What I don’t understand is sometimes Roon does an amazing job even with an obscure seed— one particular evening we started from a 15th century recording I quite like and the following radio was quite varied, interesting, and successful. So, the results are frustratingly polarizing and inconsistent. I’d say that Roon Radio doesn’t fail gracefully or gradually: only “pretty good” (if the dataset is diverse / sufficient) or “pretty bad”, but I can’t tell why or how to help Roon be more successful.
(Yes, I know I can vote down selections, and even tag an album to simply not show up, but this requires too much intervention. If I need to manage the queue, I’ll simply start something else and see what happens.)
1 Like
Hi, this is why I just let my room subscription lapse. They indoduced extensive features and I have no interest in, and the one set it and forget feature that is important to me makes no headway.
It would have even been acceptabke to pass through tidals recoomendations, but no love. So, I’m taking the hit in sound quality and I’m back to Spotify.
1 Like
Yep, I agree 100%. I’m a lifer so not going anywhere, but imo Roon has lost the plot on its basic features in order to go all in on ARC.
And if I have to hear RHCP again as the next song after a Nirvana album feed, I’ll throw my Core across the room, lol. Roon Radio seems to work best the more obscure the seed genre, but for anything listed as pop/rock as the top genre it seems to lose its way pretty quickly.
5 Likes
It was never great and its getting much worse. I can now tell you what songs after a seed for the first ten songs.
Perhaps they should invest some time in this feature, because right now anything else is better, tidal is miles better, perhaps they could get some hints and tips from them.
2 Likes
It’s been poor for a long time now and yes I would say it’s getting worse. It’s the feature that’s fallen off the wagon and no one seems to care. Way more repeats, same songs played every session and did I say more repeats.
5 Likes
Agreed with you 
IMO pretty much the entirety of the software has fallen off the wagon except for ARC. Most likely Roon will next bring us more DSP that nobody really needs, which they’ll pronounce as more innovative than pre-sliced bread and give it some fancy sounding name like Valence or Fluency.
3 Likes