Sure, I can explain why.
Having two types of “bans” is a confusing distinction. It complicates the mental model, particularly for new users, in order to satisfy a use case that only makes sense for people with a very detailed understanding of Roon. These people will always be far outnumbered by the people with only a casual understanding.
The favorite/ban picker is not in some dusty corner of the app–it is displayed on nearly every screen, and unlike most of the app, it presents purely using iconography. This is a very tricky thing–icons must be are easy for people to misunderstand. The design “cost” of adding an state that requires explanation to an icon that appears on every screen of the app is huge. Most people will encounter the favorite/ban icon before they are aware that there is a thing in Roon called Radio.
It’s also worth backing up a second and considering where Radio is going.
We have a mandate to make Roon accessible and fun for people without a personal music library. This is going to result in a lot of improvements to browsing/searching, but it’s a hard requirement that we be able to replicate a Pandora-like “lean-back” radio experience using the TIDAL library for someone with zero content of their own.
This isn’t new news–I’ve laid out this vision of radio half a dozen times over the past year, but it’s important context. Radio is evolving into a place where it is very much a black box doing some hard statistical + machine-learning work to figure out what to play. The more it moves in that direction, the less feasible it will be to explain it to anyone but technical people, and the less feasible it will be to be adding more knobs and controls other than perhaps some very high level stuff.
So–in that context: Radio is not library shuffle and is not trying to be. It’s also not designed to be a venue for highly detailed control.
If you want to accomplish a highly controlled shuffle within your library, there are ways to do that–for example, you could focus the album or track browser on the stuff you want to play, then exclude a tag from the focus that means “stuff I don’t want to hear randomly”, and then shuffle-play that browser. You could also manually dump a bunch of content into a playlist or tag and tightly control a random play experience by playing or shuffle-playing the playlist/tag.
Roon has never been (and will never be) the product that includes every knob/slider needed to accomplish every permutation of behavior that someone can dream up–Roon is an opinionated product. We work hard to keep it simple and approachable, even when that comes at the expense of absolute power or flexibility.
One final thing–Roon does automatically ban a lot of stuff from radio behind the scenes. For instance content that is properly tagged as audiobooks/podcasts is left out, and we have matching rules intended to remove applause tracks, introductions, skits, etc. If there is a common class of thing that you are having to ban, and you think we could automatically recognize it, and it would be reasonable to implicitly ban it for everyone, that might be a productive discussion.
