Obnoxious Reviews!

Exactly! Some people like music reviews imposed on them, others don’t. Like anything in life it’s nice to have the choice. And when you consider that Roon is not free software. And that for many it’s a way of organizing and playing a private collection of music, then perhaps unsolicited opinions really have no place there. At any rate the choice to have or not have them would be rather democratic. Don’t you think?

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While I don’t like some of the reviews, stop and think about what turning off reviews means.
It will create a large empty space all the time.

If there’d be a way to hide reviews I’d only use it if it would work on a case by case basis - like a heart / ban feature for a (single) review, as there’s for tracks. If this functionality would be easy to “copy over” from tracks to reviews I have no idea. And - to make things tricky: I’d like reviews to automatically “unhide” if they change at the metadata provider side. Which they probably do at times - and that is a part of the Roon metadata package I wouldn’t want to miss.

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The reviews and artist bios are a major plus for me with Roon. I like discovering new music and now that Roon Radio encompasses the whole of Tidal and not just my collection, learning about the artists through the All Music content has definitely enhanced my experience. I find that when I go back to use Spotify on occasion, I really miss those features.

So sure, maybe there could be a way to turn reviews and bios off would be good for some folks. I’m not sure I’d like Roon to be cluttered with lots of different alternative reviews; that’s what the internet is for for me.

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I don’t see why this would need to have a cluttering effect. You could just scroll down like you do now, but with more content below. I enjoy having the content there, but I think it would be better to have more than one point of view.

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I totally agree with you here. I see some of the upsides of not recreating the wheel with Wikipedia links opening in a Roon integrated browser, but it does sorta “kill the vibe” when you get taken out of the experience with it.

All in all, I’d like them to open in a tab within Roon, so that I could stay in roon, but be able to read the Wiki while also doing other Roon stuff.

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You could post this as a feature request; display track/album/artist/ internet content in Roon.

It’s more the ability to add extra reviews that is important, rather than deleting the scraped Allmusic ones. That way we can add reviews from our preferred sources. It could be implemented in a streamlined way using tabs or something similar as is already done in other areas of Roon.

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I often add Gramophone reviews as a PDF into the album folder, works fine , not sure of the copyright implication mind, not the same as the built in ones but a viable alternative

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I enjoy the reviews. Far from being “useless chatter,” I find them enlightening. I don’t always agree, and I don’t expect to always agree.

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The reviews are fine, but they’re just one person’s view, and sometimes that person is opinionated rather than authoritative or credible. So I would like to be able to add links of my choice to albums - for example to Gramophone reviews - much in the same way as I can tag an album, or prefer my own metadata. Would just make roon a richer, more personal, experience.

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Add it as a feature request or add your thoughts to an existing request.

These kind of things have already been requested numerous times.

As for example, in 2017

I like that the reviews are there. If you don’t then don’t read them.

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Totally agree! I really like all the metainfo about the music, but Stephen Tomas Erlewine subjective, ad-hominem “reviews” have spoiled my day several times. So much so that I now always scroll down to see if his name is under the “review”, and if it is, I avoid reading it.

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He’s not the only one. I’d like the ability to turn off the reviews, or perhaps hide them per album if I find one that offends me. (Offend might be slightly strong - ‘annoys’ me might be better.) I do understand that a feature like this must be way down the priority list though.

It might break one of the key ideas behind Roon, but I find that I’m a dab hand with Google and can read reviews from Gramophone, Classics Today, Pitchfork etc. and don’t need the opinions of Erlewhine and others like him.

I think what creates cognitive dissonance is that there’s a single review. We all know reviewers disagree on details and overall. They disagree with each other, we disagree with them, even our favorite ones. So one alternative would be to list links to lots of reviews, in order to show the diversity of opinions. And you could allow each user to choose how heavily to weight / how to prioritize reviews by certain reviewers. But that would be incredibly complex for most users, and likely few would use a feature like this, despite how much we might like to say we would. So I’m fine with how Roon does it - I ignore when I’m not interested or think i know all I might want to already, and when I am interested I follow the reviews down the rabbit hole to discover new artists or recordings.

And when I sniff at the particular review or reviewer, I get a brief chance to feel superior. Just like when I read a review anywhere that I disagree with. Don’t you?

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I think you all take these reviews waaay to seriosly.
I read them, if I am in the mood, sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t, not a big deal.
Music is still great.

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Yes, music is still great on a free music player. We paid hundreds for Roon. So I don’t think that flippant argument holds lol.

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