Why don’t you put all that into a separate storage location you can turn off so things like this won’t happen. 
I wouldn’t have thought John Hiatt would be objectionable. I did remove the Eagles and other known offenders as she has knives readily to hand.
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If you want exploration then there would be a single button called “Radio,” Deezer has a great one called “Flow.” Or as I mentioned earlier you could make a playlist of several different styles of music and then use a “Playlist Radio” button. Spotify does have a “Playlist Radio” feature but it is a lie, it takes one song out of the playlist and uses that one song as the seed track.
But if there is a “Track Radio” button, it should follow the sound of that track.
Why would you want a predictably narrowly focused stream of music…
Another point I made earlier is the environment you are in. I’m trying to fall asleep to music and want similar sound to a slow relaxing instrumental Enya track, but Roon throws in upbeat tracks from The Cranberries, Hootie & The Blowfish, and 3 Doors Down, and a ballad from Firehouse. Sure it was a great line up of songs, I like every one of them, but not for that time and place.
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I agree it would be great if Roon was that smart. I see this as quite challenging from a coding or logic standpoint, however. How would you suggest the Roon team figure this out? I mean, BPM is one possibility, but you could end up with a lot of slow stoner metal songs that actually are not very good to sleep to.
You might consider manually tagging several hundred good-to-sleep-to tracks and shuffling those. Point being, I’m not sure software could ever satisfactorily do this without some manual work on your part.
I’m not a coder, so I have no suggestions on how to fix Roon’s problem. Is it really that hard to keep hair metal bands from playing with a track seed that is relaxing instrumental new age? Or to keep Christmas music from playing when the seed is not a Christmas track?
But I know it can be done because other programs can do much better than Roon.
Here’s another example of really poor “Track Radio” execution…
Seed song by Taylor Swift, but the song is nowhere close to being a country song.
We’ve been talking about how Taylor Swift is a tough one, because a lot of her music gets classified as Country, and she herself tends to be classified as “Country” by many of our metadata sources… but she hasn’t really been a country artist for the last few albums. These are tricky problems, but we’re actively thinking about how to address them as we continue to improve the selections.
We are keeping an eye on all this feedback guys, so please keep it coming.
Above, I mentioned some information you can include with your feedback that will help us understand the context in which these selections were made. If you can, please include those details so we have what we need to act on this feedback.
We are planning some additional changes to the Radio algorithm soon, and we intend to continue iterating on this part of the product over time. The feedback we get from you guys is a big part of that, so again, please keep it coming.
Thanks all!
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track level genres, aka style, can fix this.
@mike
I understand you are busy working out better results for “Track Radio.” Thank you.
Can you say whether you are seriously considering adding a “Playlist Radio” feature which would perform a Track Radio function for all tracks inside a given Playlist.
For example, I make a playlist with Sam Smith’s “Pray,” Luke Bryan’s “Play It Again,” and Volbeat’s “Black Rose.” Then the Playlist Radio feature would play a mix of songs based on all of those specific seeds.
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It seems like you guys want a very sophisticated AI as the engine for the radio. These things are cutting edge, and a big challenge to develop.
Let’s say there was a real person with actual intelligence that builds your radio, and you want him to build a track based queue. How many tracks from your library could he fill the queue with, and still keep all of them “similar” to the source, without being repetitive? Now ask him to play that same radio 10 times without being repetitive between those different radio plays… You just can’t win.
Also, it’s very clear that everyone has different expectations from a radio algorithm, so maybe radio with parameters is the way to go.
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We are planning some additional changes to the Radio algorithm soon, and we intend to continue iterating on this part of the product over time.
Hearing that the Roon team is preparing to update Radio again, I have a suggestion / request:
Please give users the option to use Radio 1.3, Radio 1.4, or (presumably) Radio 1.5. There were users that loved 1.3 (not I) that felt 1.4 was a problem. and I do like 1.4.
So, please, let us have the choice?
Going through all the posts regarding Roon Radio I see at least two expectation groups:
- one that asks for similar tracks
- one that asks for exploration of related tracks
So I think Roon Radio should allow to choose with a switch either of them.
Similar tracks should play other tracks and abums from the same artist composer and similar artists and tracks as can be chosen manually in the artist section.
Exploration can go way beyond what we can do manually following similar or influenced by suggestions. We should get surprised about suggestions that enrich our awareness of what is available and some sort related to our taste.
With such a selection of either similar or exploration we could enjoy radio much more and according to what we are looking for when we do not want to listen to what we exactly choose.
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Taylor Swift should not be a tough one.
As an artist she is tagged as Country and Pop (along with several other criteria).
The Taylor Swift song that I used as a seed is specifically tagged as Adult Contemporary and Dance/Pop (Country tag is not used for this album/song).
If I used the Taylor Swift Artist Radio button, then it should play a mix of Country and Pop.
If I used the Taylor Swift “…Ready For It?” Track Radio button, then it should play a mix of Dance and Pop… but no Country.
See the difference, one choice uses the ARTIST tags. The other choice uses the TRACK tags.
So if you have a Track Radio feature but are using the artist tags, you are doing it wrong. Sometimes there is also other data buried int the tracks metadata to help sort it out, such as BPM, mood, style, etc.
@mike, if Wendell Hicken is free to work on audio analysis since his MusicIP days, hire him to work on this for you. What he did was based on the underlying audio, not metadata, and it was excellent. Metadata alone will never get you there.
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Thanks @evand and others for the feedback.
My goal here wasn’t to say that good Taylor Swift selections are impossible, or that we consider Radio to be done, or even that the next iteration will be “the one”. It was simply to reiterate that we are actively listening to this feedback, and that we intend to continue listening and calibrating our approach based on this feedback.
I also wanted to communicate the kind of information that’s the most helpful for us.
We’re considering a number of different ways to continue improving Radio, many of which have come up in this thread, and many that have not yet been mentioned.
All options are on the table, but I don’t want to influence the discussion too much with the implementation details or specifics – I want to hear what’s working for people and what’s not, so we can continue improving this part of Roon.
Again, we really do appreciate the feedback guys.
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I’ve every faith that the team at Roon are extremely capable, didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I just figure Wendell spent many years working on audio analysis and that resulted in a very capable Radio - I’ve not experienced a better radio in any other product. If that experience and know how could be embedded into Roon coupled with the other methods you’re tackling the result would be superb.
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A “Why This?” Button that revealed the logic involved would be useful for identifying odd connections and potentially fascinating to look at.
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Along these lines is the HEART button. I found out I was using it wrong. As I was listening to a Tack Radio stream, I was HEARTing tracks that I liked for that stream, and I was unHEARTing songs that I didn’t like for that stream. I was thinking that this was causing the Roon program to learn what I liked and didn’t like about that particular Track Radio stream (this is how most other Radio streams work). But I found out recently that I was HEARTing and unHEARTing tracks in the main library. I had to go back through my main library and reHEART all the songs that I liked.
I guess the Roon Radio system is not a ‘learning’ system, there is no feedback feature?
I thought the Thumbs-up and Thumbs-down buttons were for fine-tuning the Radio algorithm… Of course, this is just an assumption on my part, that function may not yet (or ever) be implemented… So I just use them to cue the queue at the moment.
The thumbs up/down only modify the current Radio session, (at least that is how it used to work, I think. 
)
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