James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
116
Thanks Brian for the thoughtful response - it is fascinating to see inside the development process and what did and didn’t work for a pending release.
Interesting point. I wonder if you could calculate the pool of songs from which a shuffle or radio would draw, and then present slider settings that match. E;g; if there are 3000 tracks, 5 incremental settings available, if 1500, then 3 increments, and below 500, you pop a message that the pool of tracks is too small for meaningful adjustments. But of course this would mean setting it every time you shuffle, which would not work for “set it and forget it” folks.
A “why this track?” capability might help with this. Amazon does that when they pop certain products.
I don’t disagree with the way you phrase this. My concern related specifically to the thumbs up and thumbs down functions and your response which I inferred to mean that documentation isn’t for telling us what those functions are. I think there are many users who would want to understand what this does (other than the obvious of creating the queue), at least on an approximate basis. The exact algorithm, no, I wouldn’t even understand that. But if I am affecting more than the decision on what song goes into the queue, I’d want to know that.
Hey, it’s hard for a leopard to change its spots.
Sure, however you want to characterize it. I don’t disagree which is why I’ve stated concerns about putting all my object-by-object metadata into the Roon database alone as opposed to reading it from file embedded metadata. That said, I do hope that if there are radical shifts in how Shuffle and Radio work, that users have a way to use versions they liked better. Maybe that’s impractical, and I am not change averse, but there is something to be said for letting people have the version they felt worked the best for them.
Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing the SkyNet version of Radio!
Maybe I have misunderstood but is there no way to “user-hide” categories from radio in roon? I can imagine wanting to hide at every scale. That is, doing everything (and more) you can do on “focus” but just for radio.
Hide:
Tags - e.g. spoken word, dialogue, recitative, applause.
Genres - e.g. Xmas, Christmas, Holiday, Experimental, AvanteGarde, Traditional Folk, Rap
Tracks - e.g. (real) radio station playlists you get in the car that have been played to death. Also, some tracks are titled “dialogue” or “intro” that you would like to hide. e.g. rambling intros on live disks. But some dialogue you would like to keep, e.g. on Soundtracks (Tarantino).
Album - e.g. Vinyl you have ripped on a side by side, rather than a track by track basis.
Artist - e.g. Your wife love’s “Sting” but you don’t.
Sample Rate - e.g. Everything below redbook.
From comments I have seen from @mike there are some existing rules that roon does in the background. Perhaps roon can give some guidance. Is it possible that all these sorts of “radio rules” are transparently machine learnable so no user intervention is required? Surely the simplest thing is to extend the “hide” functionality in library so this can be tailored to user preferences?
Been an interested follower of this thread. Appreciate the thoughtful input and suggestions by the contributors and the followup responses by the Roon team. Certainly, share some of your concerns and am encouraged by the efforts being made by the staff to address them.
Hopefully, this is the right place to post some issues I am encountering with Radio 1.4 that I have not seen addressed by others to this point. Am aware of the fact that radio will not start if it is a Tidal track. However, from time to time, the radio will not begin after the last track of an album I own is played.
As you can see from the image provided, it queues up a similar track. But it never plays. The play button is greyed out. So I have to manually click on the next button or thumbs-up-or-down button in order to activate the play button. Once activated, I have to click on the play button to start the radio function.
The only explanation I can provide is that I have noticed radio starts okay when it queues up before the conclusion of the last track playing. Radio usually fails otherwise.
The other issue I have encountered is when the radio starts after playing an album, rather than being initiated from a single track. Although Radio 1.4 is doing a much better job of not being repetitive, it frequently has, at some point, queued up a song or two from the same album just played. Wish there was a way for the radio function to avoid this issue by programming it to play similar tracks from the album selected vs. the last track played.
Please let me know if I can provide any further info to help address these issues. Thanks.
This is what bans are for–you can ban tracks/albums from radio by clicking the favorite heart twice if there is really stuff you would truly never like to hear except when chosen directly. As with favorites, bans are tracked per-profile, so you and your spouse can have different preferences.
There are existing rules related to many of the genres you mentioned. We are testing a set of refinements to those rules right now based on feedback in this thread, so it’s not really useful to argue based on the current behavior until that rolls out.
This is a known issue. There is a fix for this in alpha testing at the moment.
This sounds like something for @support to investigate and turn into a reproducible bug report that our developers can act on.
Hi @brian, maybe I am doing something wrong or I have misunderstood something but banning doesn’t behave the way you describe which is why I haven’t been using it. The example below is a Johnny Cash compilation where there are several lengthy dialogues:
If I ban those tracks, then the dialogues are skipped when playing the album through normally as well as the radio. I just want to be able to ban spoken word from radio. There are many other examples, applause, lengthy intros on live albums, recitative in opera, narration on some classical works, dialogue on soundtrack albums.
All of these spoken word items I would like to ban only from radio. When playing the album through normally I don’t want them skipped. Is there a setting I have missed?
No, you aren’t missing anything. Banning is for all “automatic” play situations (i.e. where you haven’t picked that specific thing). That includes album play, artist shuffle, radio, etc. There is no “just ban this for radio”, and I’m not sure there should be.
As I mentioned above, Roon automatically removes a lot of tracks like this from Radio. I don’t think it would auto-exclude those “Dialogue” cases, however. Maybe that is something for us to expand (@mike–this is for you. Also consider “applause”, which is not in the current list)
It is difficult to generalise a pattern from the track titles. Dialogue by Johnny Cash was just an example. It is rather common in Classical libraries so other variations I commonly see are “spoken”, “narrated”, or just “voice” and then there will be localised equivalents in French, German and Italian. For example parlé in French. One pattern I have noticed is that the publishers will tag composer and/or genre as “Spoken Word”. Is that a rule that roon could standardize on? Here is an example:
And here is an example where “voice” (very ambiguous, is that singing voice or spoken voice?) has been used to title a lengthy narrated introduction to Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals:
A big challenge is Opera. Maybe there are those that would like the recitative on radio but shuffling what is essentially sung dialogue from different Operas doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I do not have access to my main library at the moment but I have a recollection that tracks are sometimes titled “recitative” or similar but it is not a universal practice. For example below, is Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro from Deutsche Grammophon. There is a lot of recitative in that Opera which makes sense when listening through the whole piece but lengthy recitative on the radio queue is not something you would expect to hear on a regular radio station for example. The problem is there is no indication that the marked items are recitative:
If roon had a rule that it excluded “Spoken Word” marked and/or in a genre or composer tag then there would be some control over this. Technically I am not even sure that Mozart is the composer of the recitative as traditionally it was improvised by the singers.
With non-Classical seeds, I am getting Classical creeping into the radio queue on a regular basis, especially when I seed with Easy listening / Bossa Nova artists. This is probably the reason why:
Another pattern I see is that Folk, Folk/Rock seeds especially those associated with acapella voice will often provoke large scale choral works. So here the seed was the Folk/Rock crossover Eddi Reader, associated with the very intimate “art” songs of Robert Burns. The result was a large scale Arvo Pärt choral work on the radio queue which is jarring in every way imaginable.
Is there any strategy for avoiding this? Other than the nuclear one of removing all pop tags from Classical artists. Would that even work? I am noticing these effects happening even where the offending Classical artists do not have any obvious pop tags but I assume roon is finding a relation with Classical artists that do.
We have some changes coming that re-calibrate our treatment of artist-level genre data. It should reduce the probability that artist level genres cause radio to “cross over” via artists with overly broad genre data.
I don’t know if a new thread should be made for Build 306 radio?
I have started roon radio build 306 with various seeds. “Disappointing” is not really the right word. My experience is not what I was I expecting from the release notes. This will do as an example, but I did try with several different seeds. Nothing worked.
I started with a live Eddi Reader track. The seed was an unidentified live bootleg.
I would expect Folk/Rock, Contemporary Singer/Songwriter, Contemporary Nugrass would work as well. There is plenty of stuff in my library. I can make a nice play list in a few minutes using any number of players lying around on my PC. I was hoping roon would find things hidden away on box sets, compilations etc. that I didn’t know I had or had forgotten I had or the other players don’t see the connection. I was also expecting some variety in terms of tempo/dynamic range, mood etc. Just like a real radio station takes you on a journey for an hour or two.
After some Eliza Gilykson (good choice) I got a totally disconnected 49 second burst of applause to some Michelangeli classical piano (unrelated to the Browning that proceeded it). Then some reasonable choices followed by a 4 part art song/Lieder cycle of Classical Soprano.
After a few more Eddi Reader, Eliza Gilykson and Fred Neil (ok) this was followed by more Classical Guitar, some full on Polyphonic Ligeti and then some very traditional Scottish Folk (none of which works at all).
The pattern continued with a similar bizarre mixture of Folk/Rock, Classical Guitar, Classical Piano, Traditional Folk and Modern Classical until finally roon found a 6 minute interview with Andres Segovia reminiscing in Spanish about his early days of establishing the Classical Guitar on the concert circuit.
That’s when I could bear it no more. In many ways this is worse than random. It was almost as if two very conservative but unrelated playlists were shuffled together.
!