Having spent the last couple days playing with Plexamp and deciding that I like Roon very much, I did come away with one feature that I think is pretty remarkable. While you’re playing a track or album in Plexamp and you view the queue, you can click on Related, and there are two sections “Related Tracks” (ones that are presumably more closely related / in your library) and “Outside your comfort zone” (one’s that are presumably more distantly related and/or not in your library). Each of these tracks has a + next to them, and you can click it to “Add Next”. If you want more variety in your “Roon Radio”, you just click on a bunch more “outside your comfort zone”. And if you want more closely related, well, you can see. So this does a few things - it lets you have more control over your “Roon Radio” so you feel like you’re getting what you want. But also… it creates a lot of expressed preferences for the equivalent of Roon Radio to see what you think goes with what. It can see both what you chose, and what you didn’t choose. So because it’s not a single song at a time, it gets inordinately more data on relationships.
Now, Roon often has a “lean back” feel while Plex has a “lean forward” approach, but this is a case where I think the case for lean forward can be very strongly made. And it’ll take care of many of those who feel like “Roon Radio plays the same songs” or “Roon Radio plays random stuff that doesn’t make sense”. Both of them can be headed off by leaning forward a little bit. If Roon Radio goes off the tracks, you notice, and give it a nudge. And in so doing (by more than a thumbs up, thumbs down) it learns a lot lot lot more.
I am not for directly copying. You’re both operating for-profit businesses. But feature imitation is rife. And theirs is better. Roon’s better (for me) at almost everything else. But boy I want this feature. And I find myself playing with Plexamp all the time just because this is fun to play with. And you want features that are “fun to play with”. Fine, make it your own version - don’t just blatantly copy (or do, cf Vines, Reels, blah blah blah). But it should meet these same needs to learn, to steer, to be fun to play with.
@CrystalGipsy 100% agreed. It’s tunable in a number of ways. And every time you tune it, or learns more about you and about relationships between music.
I personally dislike any kind of automated playlist/radio-like playback but being able to pick a track in my library and then manually browse/hear through selected similar tracks across the whole Tidal catalogue is definitely something I want Roon to implement!
Plexamp is so incredibly good, and I pin most of my love for it on the UI and Sonic Analysis. It’s so good I rarely use Roon, and I’m thinking about cancelling. Roon Radio has always been very hit-or-miss for me, while the track radio option and Guest DJs in Plexamp “just work”. The app doesn’t take a second to respond to any input. It doesn’t crash constantly on Windows. I want to love Roon, but for the price, it’s almost unjustifiable next to Plexamp. Getting the analysis features would be a major win for Roon.
““Major improvements to our playlist functionality are in the pipeline (Hallelujah!). In the coming year, we’ll be focusing on features that center on your music library, rather than non-library streaming content.””
If Roon can provide a ‘Sonic Adventure’ feature similar to Plexamp then I for one will be very happy. I find that Sonic Adventure is the best way to discover long forgotten tracks in my music library. As far as I know B&O were the first to offer this with their MOTS (more of the same). But then they stopped developing it and I move on.
