I’m subscribed to Roon and Qobuz. I tend to stream more than listening to my catalog of flacs that are on an SSD attached to my NUC.
I’m interested in new music discovery and am not sure if I’m using the Roon interface most effectively for this. I’ve not been interested in the Roon Radio proposals in general. I’ve read about Roon Valence - does this work via the Recommended area of the iOS app (which is my usual interface for using Roon)?
Any tips on maximising new music discovery potential very welcome. I don’t subscribe to Spotify but the algorithm there has impressed me with its ability to propose tracks based on my listening history that have been new and very much in line with my tastes.
I find the Daily Mixes, a little time, and yes some Radio rather helpful. Your local FLACs will be a cornerstone, as initially the Daily Mixes (in my experience) skewed contemporary jazz. This is fine, of course, but suffice it to say the virtuous cycle of adding more favorites off the streamers means the Daily Mixes get a little better in identifying your taste, which in turn embellishes the discovery.
Don’t expect to suddenly have a comprehensive collection. But why would anybody want that much anyways?
Excellent combination to discover new music. Welcome!
Roon combines several methods of discovering new music. According to my experience you have to play around with several of them to find out which works best for you, or even combine several methods.
It very much depends on the track you start roon radio from and its assigned genre. The more general the top-level genre (like “Pop/Rock” or “Stage&Screen”) and the thinner the meta information on the track roon has, the more likely radio stream will not be satisfying.
I personally discover a lot of music using roon as some kind of ´Wikipedia with embedded music player´. I read the bios, I follow the links, I check the musician´s and producer´s pages and their discographies. This works particularly well with Jazz, partially rock and electronic music.
When viewing an album page I usually find the section ´Recommended Albums for you´ and ´New releases´ to be the best way to discover similar, positively surprising things as well as the ´Appearances´ sections on a musician´s page. In some cases the ´Influences´ section but it is not as consistent.
The corresponding recommendations on the roon home screen are not as useful for me as my taste is very versatile and it gets messy. The only thing on that screen I occasionally find useful is the Daily mixes per artist. Usually prefer it to roon radio which works well only under spefific circumstances.
My library size is: 6,033 tracks, 704 albums, 403 artists and 34 composers.
In terms of your question of whether I add tracks from streaming, I suppose it depends on whether you mean purchasing the track from Qobuz or not. I will often “add” tracks I discover from streaming off of Qobuz to playlists, but I do not “add” them to my library in terms of purchasing them through Qobuz.
The third variant was meant here probably: Adding in terms of using Qobuz embedded in roon means clicking the heart icon in Qobuz or the “+” icon in roon so the album appears among library > albums in Qobuz, roon will treat is as an album in your library which you have. Adding to a playlist does not do the same thing.
Hmm thanks for the clarification. Up until now I have only been using the Add to Playlist on a per track basis. You seem to be inferring that if I want Roon to learn more about my musical tastes I should also click the heart icon of each track I deem good enough to add to a playlist, correct?
A follow up question is whether Roon shapes it’s recommendations to me based on the tracks I listen to in playlists over and over. These are sometimes tracks from my own pre-recorded flacs of artists I’ve purchased over the years and are sometimes tracks I’ve heard via streaming off of Qobuz and asked Roon to Add to Playlist (without “hearting” them). I tend to spend most of my listening time playing back playlists I’ve put together like this, and only perhaps 10-15% of my listening time I am actively trying to discover new material. So if Roon were to analyze my listening choices there would be alot of repetition (i.e. listening to 3-5 playlists in rotation), but that body of music is very much a cross-section that I would like Roon to use as a basis for predicting what new material I may like.
As someone who tends to like multiple genres but listens to metal the most, Roon has a hard time with recommendations, at least in the new release section for me. So, to maximize finding new music and recommendations, I do the following and have been doing this for years now. If there is an album that you like and you click on it, beneath the albums songs there is always a recommended albums section and a similar albums section. I have found a lot of success with this method. If you are a playlist listener, the daily mixes section is actually not too bad and should be somewhat similar to stuff in your library.
As I’m a rock guy I might find the Daily Mixes useful enough, given there is so much music to push, but even then perhaps only a handful of their cuts are going to be both novel and of interest. If your tastes are less common (and that is a compliment) then you might have a harder time of it.
My understanding with Valence was that the more data you feed it (and I believe data comprises of unique tracks) then the more it can use for further discovery. You’re content enough with what you have already found? Roon may not reorient that much.
You mean the ´New Releases´ section on the home screen of roon?
That is indeed a problematic one. I have a lot of genres mixed but that one is very classical-heavy in my case. I usually ignore it.
Navigating to a particular album of a desired genre as a reference point and then scrolling down to Recommended albums > New Releases turned out to be much better. It is actually a good mixture of unexpected albums close to the one I am listening to and some unexpected ones, exactly what TheRiz was mentioning.