I can think of a way that adds no complexity to the user experience at all, and also benefits people who never bother to provide feedback:
Feed thumbs (and track skips) during radio into a supervised learning algorithm that is being trained to distinguish:
Content which is bad for radio in context of this radio station
Content which is bad for radio in general
Take everyone’s radio sessions/data, train with those two objectives in mind, then let that algorithm influence (likely probabilistically) radio picks.
No more buttons, no more to think about. Radio just gets better for everyone.
But you won’t like this because you’re hung up on two things:
That it must be ironclad–i.e. you’re guaranteed not to hear things you don’t want to hear, as opposed to probabilistic optimization/improvement that just makes it less likely that you hear things you don’t want to hear.
That it must be personalized.
I think 97% of the value is in the automatic stuff, and the remaining few percent that we would get from manual editing isn’t worth what it costs. If the goal is to improve this bad picks problem, that’s the most appropriate place to focus.
BTW, the picks interface is not manual–those come pre-populated for many albums from one of our metadata services. Most people just use the data as it is and never edit it. Allowing editing of a pre-populated field is not comparable to creating a field that is only ever populated by hand. We try very hard to avoid doing that–it creates weird silos of value that are only accessible to a small minority willing to groom their library and limits our flexibility to evolve the product long-term by amassing value in whatever particular way that the editing was done.
What I am hearing here is that your product is going to be more and more tailored for the mass market that only streams and less and less tailored for the audio enthusiast that has his own library and knows what he wants to listen to and is willing to some work to make his listening experience better. You can say that is not the case but your words betray that.
Look, you already have the “heart” ban interface. You could easily extend that by going from 3 states to 4.
1: Nothing
2: Favorite
3: Ban from all automatic play
I am suggesting that a fourth position be added:
4: Ban from all but album play
Yet you think that will somehow blow up the world. I don’t see how that is possible. It would not even be hard to implement. All I see is you fighting anything that is not automatic and a benefit to the mass market streamers.
I shouldn’t have to ruin album play mode just to fix the Radio or not be able to use the Radio because I want to play full albums.
If the test for any feature is always going to be “only if it can it be automatic”, the product is in real trouble from an audio enthusiast’s perspective.
Didn’t say it would blow up the world. Just don’t think it would be a net positive for the product and our members as a whole.
Roon has always been an opinionated product, and has never been about offering every possible tweaking opportunity. The first time I said “Roon is not a metadata grooming platform” in public was sometime in early 2015, before we launched. This isn’t some new development about the “mass market”. This is how we have always run things.
Besides, we would have to be a totally different business run and funded in a totally different way to go up against Spotify, Sonos, Apple, and Amazon. Do you really think we have delusions about competing in that market?
The thing that you’re missing is that the needs of enthusiasts evolve too. And not by burrowing deeper into the grooming tunnel focusing on ever smaller details. The enthusiast market is becoming broader as product expectations and use cases trickle up from the mass market, and the definition of “ownership” of content evolves.
Music enthusiasts of the future will not be showing up with LP’s or CD’s or even files. They still feel ownership over the music they collect, they just don’t do it by physically owning the media. A whole generation of budding enthusiasts has grown up with streaming services. These are no less music/audio enthusiasts than you or me, and they aren’t the “mass market” either.
I explained this above, but I’ll say it again: we’re making the product serve a broader set of enthusiasts, and not abandoning anyone. This direction will benefit people with a library at least as much as those without one. I guess you won’t be convinced of that till we get there…but that’s the intent with what we are doing and where we are going.
Okay, it looks like I am going to have to get creative and solve this problem on my own through a lot of extra work.
The podcast tags are:
PCST, TCON, and ISPODCAST.
If present or set properly in the case of “TCON”, any track with one of these tags will be ignored by the Radio, correct? Do these tags have any other meaning in Roon? In other words, if I add the “TCON” tag to a track and set it to “Podcast”, will anything else be visible or happen with that track other than being ignored by the Radio?
Are there similar tags to podcast PCST, TCON and ISPODCAST, for applause, dialogue, spoken word etc. that roon would ignore in radio but not in album play? I take your point that it’s not for everyone but some of us would be prepared to tag these tracks to improve radio performance.
For example. I notice some patterns. I see a lot of tracks where the metadata suppliers seem to have set the composer to “Recorded Sound” in my library. Mostly this is “applause” but it is also “ambiance” (basically a lot of coughing in the intervals in live performances), and/or spoken intros, soundtrack dialogue etc. I could certainly be more consistent in populating this tag if roon would auto-ignore it in radio (but not in normal album play). Maybe there are some other similar tags that roon looks for?
That would certainly solve a lot of this for me. Personally, the biggest gap is live albums where the intro to the next song is attached to the previous song. I imagine that was a legacy convention so “gapless” play works as the performer often starts the intro of the next song over the applause of the previous one. Not sure what a solution for that might be. But it is very jarring in radio play to have the effect of an intro to a completely wrong song which is the present case.
Maybe a simple option for a short-term solution that requires little effort on the Roon side is to add a new tag that Roon recognizes as “radio skip” along the lines of how it handles the current podcast and audiobook tags? ISROONRADIOSKIP or some such? Then the people that want this can add it using whatever their favorite metadata editor is. There are zero UI changes to be made to Roon, and I suspect the tag check would be pretty trivial to add since it’d just be one more tag to look for in the existing tag check code that handles the podcasts and audiobooks.
I would like that as an option that hurts no one. It gives people that have tracks on albums they want to hear when playing an album but not hear via the radio a solution. Though I don’t see anything like this happening because it apparently violates Brian’s arbitrary “data grooming” policy. God forbid someone touch the metadata.
It seems I am not the customer type that Roon needs or wants…I guess the radio is a feature I am destined to never use.
Given the amount of time that the team and others have input in debating your initial thoughts and the amount of ideas it has generated I see that you are just the sort of customer they want.
Albeit a bit of a huffy one.
Nah. I am the type of customer Brian likes to tell what I want does not fit in with their vision of the future. They feel I am an anachronism to be brushed aside as I actually own physical media. I mean, who would possibly want to ban tracks from radio play but not from album play?? That’s the same thing, right? Playing random “similar” tracks from my library via the radio and playing whole albums from my library is such a similar thing to do, right? Who could possibly have tracks from albums they would only want to hear when playing full albums? It seems they feel I am unique…or only a few subscribers would want to do this.
I walked away from this conversation a couple of months ago with a todo list item consider a file tag for radio banning. Still intend to do it, even if it hasn’t happened yet.
Intending to consider doing it or intending to create such a tag?
I ask because you last word on this tag idea was that you would consider it. If you plan on creating such a tag that is new information that we did not have.
It’s not my management style to make a decision unilaterally on something like this. From a mechanical standpoint, I’ve put it on an agenda, and the product team will discuss it and make a decision together.
Personally, I’m open to the solution. It is lightweight and doesn’t create long-term-evolution concerns or product ugliness when done this way.
Well, if you are going to discuss it, please also discuss the idea of being able to edit this flag using the “Edit Track” window for one or more tracks just like with “Pick” and “Live” toggles. It would be more intrusive to do that for sure but it would make it simple to edit this tag while looking at one or more tracks on an album.
I know it’s a long shot but a discussion couldn’t hurt.
Well. if this feature is still on life-support I can add several more particularly annoying use cases to the ones already listed here and on several similar threads. My focus is on banning “spoken word” but I also can imagine wanting to ban entire albums of music from radio (for example a 2 hour opera when I only want to listen to the radio for half an hour). In all these cases, the spoken word makes artistic sense in the context of album listening but not radio listening.
I thought extended monologue was limited to live album song introductions and extended “atmospheric” dialogue on soundtrack albums. But I see “interviews” cropping up on classical remasters and on increasingly frequent centenaries (Menuhin Century e.g.). These spoken word excerpts make sense even on real radio, but that is because there is a narrow theme on the radio show. A retrospective of an artist or composer for example. It makes no sense at all when the context is changed to a more random virtual radio show.
Hybrid works of music and poetry can make a lot of artistic sense in the context of an album where the words are complimenting the music but none at all when taken out of this context and put in the context of a random virtual radio stream. For example, there is a famous version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition conducted and each variation introduced by a lengthy spoken word dialogue by Bernstein. Several versions of Shostokovich 13 “Babi Yar” have the movements interspersed with the poetry of Yevtushenko. Very moving when listening in the context of an album but makes no sense at all when the poetry is taken out of context into a random radio stream.
A surprising number of “themed” compilation albums (taking a queue I guess from soundtrack albums) now have lengthy monologues/dialogues. One recent example I have come across is the excellent LateNightTales series. The monologues make sense in terms of listening to the compilations in their intended late night setting but none at all when taken out of that context. I was really surprised to hear Benedict Cumberbatch droning out of my speakers on roon radio after some recent LateNightTales purchases for example.
I have several more modern recordings where the “atmospheric” coughing, seat shuffling, instrument tuning and the eventual applauding of the conductor onto the podium has been split off into a separate track. I often do this myself with dbPoweramp when that has not been done in the original release. Listening to this and getting into the “mood” makes perfect when listening to an entire album but non at all in terms of a random radio stream.
A more subtle problem is how radio should treat “DJ mix” type albums. Many that I have already have very lengthy “gapless” segues between tracks. There might be 10 seconds plus of the next song already tacked onto the previous. These sound really terrible when shuffled or in a radio stream and in the absence of a really clever solution (I would imagine that removing the segues at the end of these song mixes would be very hard to do right), I would just prefer to ban these DJ sequences altogether from radio but of course I want to be able to listen to them in an album context.
I wonder if the solution I use for Christmas music might help with the “play the full album” vs. “play selected album tracks” issue.
I don’t want my holiday tunes popping up all year in radio. So I put them all in their own folder. The folder is deactivated most of the year via the Settings, Storage menu. When activated, radio folds them in at random. Nice.
For the Tommy example, put the entire album (and others like that) into a common folder. Deactivate it until you want to play whole albums. For the day-to-day radio listening, duplicate just the preferred tracks from those albums into the main music folder.
I already do that with Christmas albums. But radio in general doesn’t work for me for all sorts of other reasons so I end up switching it off any way. Really would like it to work though. A ban feature is just a start. There are all sorts of other problems with radio.