Curious on the algorithm that Roon uses for radio after playing a full album, it seem fairly narrow to me. For example this morning I played the full album of Tom Waits “Beautiful Maladies” and since the album finished its only played songs by Randy Newman, Neil Young and Frank Zappa and we’re going on more than 3 hours. My library is quite large at just under 100,000 tracks and I have a lot more similar artists to Tom Waits than just those 3 artist.
@anon94274355 I find exactly the same thing, sometimes the radio just sticks with that artist (it was jazz)! I have a large library, it looks like the Radio parameters need ‘loosening up’ or give us the ability to set how tightly it matches the song it is based on?
Russ
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Yes seems to loop around a couple of artists for a while and only if you skip through quite a lot does it expand a bit.
This is a serious problem. I’m in the middle of my trial and really finding a lot to like, but this is a critical feature (IMO) that’s very disappointing in its current state (IMO).
The original poser has a 100,000 track library. My library has well over 200,000 tracks. Not only was Radio strangely limited to about 4 artists, but it was largely limited to 1 album each from those artists even though I have many, many albums from those artists - seemingly playing songs from them at random with no regard for their popularity or quality. Either I don’t understand how to use Radio, or the Roon team has not yet implemented serious Radio functionality. Apple (Genius) and Spotify are much more successful with this.
Roon is very strong as a manual library browsing service, but what I want most is an intelligent service that will find music in my large library (and within Tidal) automatically for me. Having both capabilities (Radio/Automatic and Metadata Browsing/Manual) together is much more powerful than having only one or the other.
Is Roon dedicated to implementing a robust Radio feature?
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I have plenty of albums and whilst the Roon radio is very accurate it is far too narrow in my opinion, it would be good if we were able to user select how ‘focussed’ the radio was on say a scale of 1 to 5?
Russ
@Ratbert
Agreed - Roon (Radio) only seems to play from a very limited handful of albums - the “focus algorithm” needs to be significantly “widened”.
However, there is of course a balance : you don’t want the Radio to veer off into completely unrelated genres unless a “true random” option has been user-selected.
Absolutely. In addition to a few known issues (the repeating of recently played tracks being the most annoying, IMO), we’re also aware that the current algorithm is pretty simplistic, and we’re confident we can do a lot better.
The last 2 months have largely focused on the 1.1 release, but we’re definitely looking at some improvements for Radio in the near future. I can get into more specifics once the work is kicking off, but I think it’s safe to expect a greater degree of control over the breadth of the selections, as well as the option to go outside your library and have Radio include relevant music from Tidal.
We’ll update everyone with details and timeframes as that work comes together, but for now, keep the feedback coming! Definitely interested in hearing examples of what we should be including, but are not right now.
Appreciate the feedback here @k6davis!
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Excellent Mike!!
I appreciate your thoughtful response. It can’t be a simple thing to try to accommodate the many (sometimes conflicting) wishes of us audiophiles and music lovers, but you and the team are doing a great job (ASIO, DSD, Tagging, hopefully HQPlayer soon, etc).
Several years ago, I chose to migrate away from the Apple ecosystem toward Windows/Android (personal choice, of course), but one thing I think Apple has done extraordinarily well is “Genius” for playlists. Spotify’s radio is decent as well.
For years, I’ve wanted (to put it mildly) similar functionality for my huge library of flac & DSD files.
I can envision Roon:
- with an effective Radio, frequently exposing the user to great music for
the first time from their own collections & from Tidal and… - of course offering it all with the extensive metadata
and linking that Roon already does so well.
Both of those separately are great, but the combination of the two would be explosive! And synergistic! New songs/artists from Radio would lead to mining, which would lead to yet more new songs/artists from Radio, and so on.
We all have our vision for how things should be, but as for me, I see this as the killer application for Roon and it’s so close, but it’s not quite there yet.
Thanks for listening and being responsive to your customer base. It’s because of that that I’m leaning toward going lifetime.
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Roon’s radio has served as a frequent reminder that I have bloody great music in my library.
I also find it does a pretty good job picking things in my library that match the mood of what I last chose to play.
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Agree. It’s slightly like the old Apple iTunes DJ and Genius that would pick and play obscure tracks from my library and compell me to go over and investigate the name of the song/artist. Like having a good music buddy come over and play your records only you dont have to worry about records being mistreated or running out of Doritos.
Very interesting conversation and my experience has been the same, until yesterday. Not sure if anything was done on the backend, but I’ve had the most eclectic Radio playing on my system for the last two days. Radio is currently based on the last song in my queue yesterday, which was “Little Bird” by Angus & Julia Stone. Since the Radio kicked in, I’ve had few (if any) repeats for songs OR artists.
I’m not sure why, but this is how I want Radio to work. I’m bookmarking this particular song and will try it again in the future.
SC
I need to do a lot more testing of the Radio feature, but so far, it has been a tad disappointing. It seems to draw from a very limited range of albums (artists?) , or make rather strange choices (e.g. I finished playing an opera, and the second Radio track that followed was a jazz track by The Manhattan Transfer…). I don’t think the current algorithm works very well with my music collection 
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For me it is dissapointing too. I have 2000 cd’s and Tidal to choose from, and every time I here Alt-J, Joan as a Police Women and so on. It looks as if most frequently played has something to do with it ( which is self-fulfilling) . I am currently in a stage where I seriously am thinking of removing these artist from my collection to heare something new. This frightens me a bit - as i am a lifetimer. ( but am pretty confident the Roon guys will adress this)
What I would like is to have some kind of selector the B&O Beosound Moment has: a “moodwheel” where you can ( within a circle) choose between uptempo and relaxed by colour; and inbetween known and unknown music by the distance from the center of the circle.
Please Roon, improve the radio functionality - or tell me how to clean the cache which feeds the current algorithm with unwanted repeats…
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I’m sure this will improve in future updates, but I have the same problem.
In my library of roughly +9500 albums (local & Tidal) “Queen - Live at the Rainbow '74” is my most played album overall, but I’ve never once chosen it to play, it’s all been done once radio starts up. I can pretty much guarantee if I play a rock album I will be hearing songs from this one Queen album and only this Queen album, even through my library contains every studio album they have put out.
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Continuing the discussion from Radio thumbs up/down question:
Settings like these to “interfere” with the current algorithm would be useful.
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There are two options here: hard settings like your listing, which already would be of great help. But I am expecting more from a program like Roon; some sort of self learning fuzzy logic - as i said before something like a mood wheel with Tidal integrated. Main purpose for me is to ( re) discover music - maybe even music valued by colleague Roonies!
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There is a Radio Ga Ga joke in here somewhere.
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If I’m offered up Learning to Crawl by the Pretenders again, I’ll 
and every time I hit thumbs down, back it comes, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…
Thought I’d revive this and add that Roon has almost ruined me on Bach Cello suites. I swear–and I’m not exaggerating–every single time Radio kicks in when I’m playing something classical–and I have more classical in my library than anything else–the first thing up is Bach Cello Suites. Happens so often it has become a joke in our house.
Looking forward to better “Radio.”
Cheers.
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