I just can’t help but feel that people have a little too much time on their hands at the mo. I approached the upgrade with a relaxed, open mind, and I’m genuinely enjoying everything about it. Including the engagement on here!
But sometimes the tone is a little…spoilt and needy, right? Just chill. It’s a piece of software, written by human beings, also living through a global pandemic. [Absolutely not directed at you in particular!]
Discover needs to back on the main menu under Browse. Why we now have to scroll to the bottom of a sub page … ugh totally bonkers. Roon boffins … please restore Discover back to where it doesn’t have to be discovered.
The discovery feature is what I use most to find forgotten music in my library. I have widley varying tastes in music and am sometime snot sure what I want to listen to so I find this feature a great way of reminding me what is in my library.
What do you suggest I use instead?
Yes this is the first thing I noticed. Please just put it under a main side tab. I’ve bookmarked it but the flow has been disrupted.
Guys / gals - my guess is that Roon know that its perhaps not the most used feature, hence the lower prominence it has now. They can hardly have relegated it if they knew it was so highly used and prized, and I’m guessing no one on here thinks Roon would be so obtuse. I certainly dont.
I used it much less than I originally envisaged, in part because I didn’t find its recommendations especially inspiring, and were at times a bit odd.
For some listeners, their tastes move on to some extent, and being shown (mostly) older stuff that you may not have touched in a long while maybe isn’t a prompt to rediscover things you may have grown out of. This won’t apply to everyone obviously, and I can see why some liked it. But my guess is that Roon can see that it wasn’t working that well.
Yes, and yet they never bothered to fix it.
I guess I have too much time on my hands?
Easy…Genres, just under Home…look what I get. Paul Macartney representing ‘Classical’ gendre
and even funnier Stevard Copeland representing ‘Easy listening’ and Frank Zappa ‘Comedy/Spoken’
More I use this 1.8 revision less I like it. I was not using ‘Discovery’ too often but frequently. Currently what we have under home are mostly statistics ‘Recent Activity’, ‘Recent listening’, ‘What you have been listening to’, ‘Recent Artists’ but the Discovery is just a bar with nothing on it. So we are not encouraged to use Discovery - OK, but what instead? Statistics of what we alreadhy have listened to?
The genre boxes are a bit hit and miss I’ve found this week, but not entirely wide of the mark always. Jury is out on them I’d say, but sure they could do with some underlying refinement.
My broader point is that I’m pretty sure Roon have redesigned things, at least to some large part, cognisant of how users engage with the platform. As opposed to a blind redesign.
I can see that there is obviously a sizeable rump of users with extremely large local music collections, for whom the tagging is now an issue, and as that seems to be the one principal flaw with 1.8 (for them), one really hopes that Roon can add back some of the transparency and tagging flexibility they need.
Regardless of its origin I think what some customers are saying is it was a useful feature for them and IMHO more customer research should have been done before making final UI decisions.
I use Discover when I’m not sure what I want to listen to. It occasionally surprises me like a slot machine.
Anyway, first world problem and there are other bigger issues to address within 1.8.
Genres are meta data from a licensed service (Tivo/All Music i think). Nothing about 1.8 changes the assignment of artists to Genres that I am aware of. The mismatch happens if one individual song gets a genre that can make an artist show up under that Genre. I’m sure there are others here more knowledgable, that is my recollection.
I love the HOME page, I’m hoping they will make it customizable in the future, both order and topics, then you could move it near the top, and get rid of pesky topics you don’t like 
Hoping …
How do we know that they didn’t do the research, by looking at usage stats, and therefore conclude that it merited less prominence?
It is still there after all…
@brian, please do us all a huge favour and turn this thing off. Just like „most Popular“ „Top Permormers“, „Top Compositions“ and similar wannabe-intelligence-nonsense that clutter the screens of Roon these days.
There will be many users here that would be tremendously grateful. And it would make the software so much more valuable and useful to us.
Addendum: Forgot to mention „Popular Radio Stations“ in the list above.
I’m mainly interacting with Roon on an iPhone. Discover was actually the primary way I browsed, as most of the other ways were less than ideal (albums list takes forever to scroll through on iOS, filter wasn’t available, etc.).
The shift to showing what I’ve been doing (hours listened, genre breakdown) is bizarre. I already know those things. Maybe that’s important to folks who are selling data about my listening habits, but to show stats to me before showing music to listen to is perverse.
Well I don’t have insight in to that but usage stats can only tell part of the story. Frequency of usage doesn’t reveal the value a function has to customer. It’s a useful indicator but you need other customer research to understand context and the “why”.
True of course, but the stats that they may have will have some informational content, which I suspect informed their decision. And after all, Discovery is still there, on the Home page, albeit a short scroll down. And given the post from Roon re Discovery, it sounds like it will get some attention at some point from a development perspective.
I’ll say 3 things:
I use it alot;
You’re right, it does some weird stuff;
So you should improve it instead of hiding it.
Someone else already mentioned this, but I too have a rather bread taste in music and I liked (still do) Discover feature a lot just because it was able to recommend me something from my own library that I had completely forgotten about. I believe I was a fan of “pretty weird results”.
I don’t want recommendations only based on what I’m listening to now. I don’t want more of the same. I just want more. I can’t be content on only metadata based recommendations because frankly you don’t have enough metadata on all the bands I like.
So what current feature is like Discover but better? How should I proceed moving away from Discover?
I’d guess that would be down to the eternal, unbridgeable chasm that typically exists between Development & Marketing departments in any software business. (cf Microsoft)
Honestly, I’m really disappointed to hear this. This feature was advertised as a way to uncover hidden gems in your collection. This is particularly valuable to users with larger collections, especially in light of the fact that there really isn’t any way to easily view your entire collection in Roon. It’s easy to lose sight of some of the records you have. I’ve always felt this was a great way to re-introduce you to music in your collection and burying it way down the home screen almost ensures that it dies because new users may not even know it exists… I sincerely hope you’ll reconsider the value of this feature and give it the attention it deserves.
