Ode To Discover Function

Roon Software Discussion
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Yea, I enjoy this function so highly.

It pulls things from my songs or my Tidal library songs with such a broad net.
I get to rediscover lost items and others that I added and forgot about and if I was scanning my collection on my own, would be likely overlooked.
Maybe someday pulling from larger Tidal collection???

What got me into digital music to begin with is the shuffle function on the iPod.

Maybe its is my aging AD quality, but my mind craves juxtaposition of divergent types of music.

Others?

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For me, it’s the exact opposite. Either the propostions are blatantly obvious, but mostly they lead absolutely nowhere. In the very rare cases it throws up something that looks interesting when i go have looksee it leads me to an obscure session musician who played on exactly one track on one album in my collection.

Roon is incapable of finding a specific track outside my library but it is capable of finding inane “facts” about one track in my library. Waste of time and of computing power.

And what are those references to record labels about? You follow up a link and you get three albums on your display? How is that helpful? If this “feature” is meant tonbe of any use, why doesn’t it go mine outside of my library on Tidal? Now that would be fun.

And there is a whole world of music outside of the states you know. Maybe source some information from non American music information sites. Allmusic has a lot, but far from everything.

So no… I prefer they get me a decent search function first, then clean up that counterintuitive interface (people’s minds are geared for scrolling down, not swiping sideways), get the hyperlinks in artist bios and and album reviews working properly.

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Discover has a lot of potential, and occasionally it will remind me of something or suggest something that otherwise hadn’t come to mind, but generally I think it is too random and lacking in enough AI to be useful yet. It’s not much different than closing your eyes and spinning the little wheel on the mouse.

But the potential is there and Roon’s idea to park something and then enhance it later could result in a brilliant application. I just think it needs some attention from the developers – more logic so as to avoid presenting something that is thin on the back end, and having it be smart enough to be more “current” or “topical” – i.e. seasonal, or some part of the suggestions being based on the user’s recent listening trends, or even the converse of the current trend to dip into an under-appreciated part of the library, or even the time of day (classical/jazz in the morning, heavy metal later in the day, whatever…).

Ideally, users could configure their own Discover as a kind of self-configured magazine, with different parts having whatever the user has programmed - select from top 10 represented record labels, present all recent news related to the Pixies, whatever. I’d also love to see this pull from less static content - e.g. Rolling Stone Magazine, news, concert reviews, what have you, rather than just the static Allmusic reviews.

Perhaps Roon could “integrate” with other forms of content providers in a sort of similar fashion to Tidal, so that if I have an online subscription to Rolling Stone, or whatever, then Roon will intelligently parse some of that content and present it along with the appropriate audio in my library. Or the user could hack something less graceful but still more current/topicaland dynamic with manual configuration features.

It would also be great to have a mini-player represented on Discover. If I am going to be reading it as a magazine, then I would love to be able to have a song or artist reference be able to be just dragged and dropped (or right clicked) right into the queue and to manage the queue in a limited manner there.

In other words, Discover could be a whole new multi-content mini-world for the Roon user, configured by and for that user.

If I could do that for my wife under her profile, it would also have the effect of being a 21st century dynamic mix tape.

I’d love to see Roon get creative here.

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