Radio - not impressed

New user, not overwhelmingly impressed, especially with Radio. I’ve just been playing Neil Young Harvest, radio then took over with Led Zeppelin and the Who -what similarities do they possess?:worried:

Continuing gripe many of us have, including me.

It used to work decently, up until about Dec 2017, and then Roon screwed with it and it hasn’t been right since.

For example, I select Miles Davis and within half a dozen songs I have Christmas music, Cecelia Bartolo, and even harder-to-discern likeness.

And unfortunately, Roon’s mods here just bury any further complaint so nothing gets done.

I recently renewed Roon, but it was after long and hard thought and against my better judgment, to continue to subscribe to a wack service that they have thoroughly broken.

That’s quite a statement. I visit the forum everyday. Never got the slightest impression mod’s are “burying complaints”.

Can you give an example?

My post Mar 17, moved by Carl Mar 25 deep into “Roon 1.4 Radio feedback” thread

Case closed

Before the thread gets hijacked to the quality of moderation, the burying of complaints isn’t my biggest gripe here. It’s just that nothing gets done to fix the Radio function despite many, many subscribers coming here with valid concerns in this regard.

I don’t see a problem in merging a thread into an active one to prevent dozens of topics about the more or less same issue.

On topic, I also expect more of the Radio function, sometimes choices are strange, on the other hand it does not annoy me either. I’m confident it will get better in a future release.

Classic rock? Guitar distortion? Tight pants in the 70s? Were you looking only to hear Crosby Stills or Nash? If it were an actual RADIO station (hence the name?) Neil Young could certainly have been followed by the Who and Led Zep.

Really the issue with Radio is it’s quite difficult to read the mind of those who initiate it, and many complained prior to the current radio that it was too focused on a small group of artists and albums and ignored vast tracts of large collections. So Roon made it go wider.

To me, there is no winning with Radio unless there are user configurable preferences. I understand there are challenges there, especially with small collections, but that is more surmountable than the difference of passionately held opinions somehow being bridged.

In December Roon released the version of the Radio that you’re now complaining about…prior to that, as above, others had the converse complaint. So December’s release was in response to that. My understanding is that the Roon team isn’t working on another minor tweak to Radio to address current complaints, but rather a substantial overhaul that will use different logic and dip into Tidal even if the Tidal album is not part of the user’s collection. Doesn’t fix what bothers current complainers, but it will be darned cool.

That said, I don’t use Radio often (occasionally as a change of pace, and to see what it currently does) because I want more control. I’ve developed a home-brewed set of categories and I have about 60 different Tags based on what I’m in the mood for. So I have 60 alternative radios. Probably could create one of those in the time it takes to post a complaint about Radio.

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One of the things the Radio algorithm uses is genre. If you enjoy grooming then populating narrower genres, instead of having catch all categories, can influence Radio.

There is also the mentioned 1.4 Radio Feedback Thread which the Devs use to assist further tweaking of the algorithm.

Excuse me now, have to bury my quota of threads :sweat_smile:.

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Roon is a “wack service”. Wow, I am really surprised you continued your subscription if you feel that strongly. The Roon team actively monitor the threads, participate and respond directly to individuals, how many companies do that? They should be congratulated on how they respond to people, I certainly could not be as reserved as they are.

I have never felt that the mod’s bury threads, in fact I feel that they are pretty easy going.

Roon know that the radio function isn’t perfect, how could it be? You can’t please everyone. But they are working on it, they have made that clear. Before the update to Radio, the field was so ridiculously narrow that out of my 11,000 songs the same ones were repeated over and over. I could not use it. Now I am more than happy to use it, sometimes it throws up some very strange patterns but that’s what the “skip” button is for.

For me it works way better than it did before and more like what I’d expect Radio to do. It gets it wrong sometimes agreed but I love the journey it can take you on and I get a lot more out of my library. Previously it would get stuck playing the same few artists over and over.

I haven’t used Spotify or other streaming services, so I haven’t had experience of their equivalents to Radio. Are there any services that people would recommend as having a Radio type feature which they particularly enjoy ?

Also, this was an informative post from Brian in the other thread:

While most things in software fall under ongoing development initiatives to keep current it is radio that has this specific current situation where the current implementation does need some more work and it’s actively being pursued.

I beat you to it…but yes that’s was a quote from Brian the CTO of Roon

I use Spotiy and sometimes Deezer, both recommend and both services gives me sometimes odd suggestions. From the 30 recommendations in Spotify Discover Weekly I keep only 1 to max 3 in a playlist, so not a great result, I am afraid I am stuck in a bubble. I used (from the beginning) Apple Music for about a year but their recommendations where terrible.

I haven’t used the Spotify’s radio function for a long time. So tried it this morning: started with Kraków Loves Adana, second track was acceptable, the third song already resulted in a horrible German “rock” song, totally not inline with the artist I started with.
In contrast to Roon I never got any response on issues I shared on the Spotify’s forum regarding this (or layout issues).