Roon 1.4 - Radio Feedback

I’m enjoying the “Drunken DJ” effect. I’m not sure what the connections are, but this was an interesting set:

Neon Magazine was the seed.

I’m afraid the reliance on genres is way too simplistic. I sincerely hope that some analysis of the attributes of the underlying audio becomes part of Radio, a transition from Songbird to Back on Terra Firma just doesn’t work other than to jar.

build 306 definitely has an issue with repeating artists. using Solid Air by John Martyn as the seed (the whole album) radio has played Leonard Cohen, Richard and Linda Thompson, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and more John Martyn in faily heavy rotation. there’s some other stuff too, Tom Waits, Harry Nilsson…but the former predominate.

it’s not bad, but could be more varied.

I agree. Playing a radio of “my library” rotated between about 5-6 artists, and most from the same albums too. I think it was better in the previous build.

So today I went to the ‘Pop/Rock’ genre and tried to Start Radio… and Roon told me “nothing similar to play” :open_mouth:
Does that make sense?

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I see this too, along with Electronic and R&B, and probably others.

@support, there seems to be a bug here.

  1. Genre Browse
  2. Select Pop/Rock
  3. Select drop down and click Start Radio.

Nothing Similar to Play.

Note: Shuffle seems to work.

Cheers, Greg

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Thanks for flagging us down @Greg, we’ll have a look on our end and see what we can come up with!

-Eric

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I don’t want this to sound critical. I applaud the Roon team’s continual work on radio. However, comments have been made about users not being privy to the underlying logic, and I get that to a certain extent, but I also like to control what my system is playing for me to some level. And that requires some understanding about how Radio changes from release to release, and ideally it would allow various permutations of Radio to be tried/available.

So the idea that Radio changes from release to release without any indication of how that changes the experience creates uncertainty for me that I address by creating tags for various artists or albums and then shuffling them instead of using Radio.

I do use Radio sometimes and am interested in using it more in connection with my Tags. But I am not so interested in the feeling that I’m on a ride and someone else is the bus driver. That’s just me. I know there are others that really just want Roon to be their tour guide through their own collection. And I will enjoy that at times. But these different Radio releases, absent any indication of what has been changed, and absent any ability to control its parameters, are in conflict with my control-freak tendencies.

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All - Thank you again for your feedback here!

To offer a quick update. Our techs have been able to reproduce the issue raised in @Chikolad post above and a ticket has been issued to the DEV team who will evaluate/schedule accordingly.

-Eric

@Chikolad updated my post :wink:

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Thanks @eric for the quick work and credit should go to @Chikolad for discovering the bug.

Cheers, Greg

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I’m having a similar issue with the repeating of a small subset of artists. Whatever about the matching that is used there needs to be some code to reduce repetition of artists in such a short space of time.

.sjb

In a Genre or Sub-Genre, what is the different between “Start Radio” and Shuffle?

EDIT: how do either of these compare to “Focus On Similar” when on a given album?

Thanks!

I don’t know about “Focus On Similar”, but generally the difference between shuffle and radio is that shuffle plays only within your selection and radio might also play outside of your selection (similar to it). So if for instance you’re in Synth Pop and you only have one album in that genre, shuffle will just play that album in random order, while radio will also play tracks similar to that album, or similar to the Synth Pop genre, or similar to the album artist (whatever the radio algorithm does) from the rest of your library.

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Yup, this is right.

Shuffle = Play these tracks, but in a random order
Radio = Play music similar to these tracks

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These tracks? Does Radio play similar to the queue or similar to the last track in the queue? This can make a big difference and could be the reason why some are surprised how wide radio interpretes ‚similar‘ or how narrow.

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Similar question to @streamy68 – If I am in a Genre, the Radio is playing tracks similar to what? , similar to all songs in the Genre?

I’m having the exact same issue, with a small subset of artists being played repeatedly.

Jeff

I think you’re confusing two things. When you pick some selection (artist/genre/album/song) and click “Start Radio” it will (attempt to) play things similar to that entire selection. That’s different from when you didn’t start radio yourself, but played some ordered list of songs (e.g. an album) and just let radio take over once the queue was finished. In this case the radio will be based only on the last track of the queue.
Anyway the radio pane will tell you what it’s playing (things similar to X).

I’m sorry, but Radio often makes really odd choices for me - particularly if I seed it with something classical. Here for example, is the opening of the list created using Saint-Saens “Organ” symphony as the seed:

The Lauryn Hill track seems almost apposite in retrospect…
(the skipped item was a track from The Pogues - it proved too much for me and I skipped to the next suggestion). This is on build 306.

The powers that be here didn’t like me expressing my OPINION of MQA last month, and deleted my unfavorable post, so let me give you all some FACTS about the busted “Radio” play feature on Roon.

This thing worked fine up until about the end of 2017, then started sliding in musical genres completely unrelated in kind to the original choice I made. For example, my be-bop, hard-bop musical diet went from sampling my sizable collection of Miles, Blakey, Donaldson etc. to Miles, Colby Caillot’s Christmas album, the HDCD sampler (God I had forgotten I even bought that 20 years ago) and other such not-even-vaguely similar songs.

Roon, whatever you did to “Radio” has busted it. Listen to your users on this.This is the second time I’ve brought this up, and I’m not the only one griping about it. There are active on this board right now several similar complaints about “Radio.” Here’s a plea to fix it back like it was, because its present iteration is sufficiently annoying that I am going to end my subscription when it comes due next month.

Hell, iTunes random play could perform this poorly and it costs nothing.