Not disagreeing with you at all–a few things to add–
Definitely, and there’s an even worse problem with it that may not be as obvious. Even if you’re willing to spin the radio algorithm enough times to generate a radio stream, the 1/100 tracks that you’ll actually “hit” in the library are not well-distributed.
Lets say Radio builds a pool of tracks that spans 500 albums for a given seed. People mostly collect albums. You have 5 of those albums. Now radio is picking out of a 5 album shuffle really inefficiently.
Cue complaints about it being “boring”, “scattered” or “repetitive”, and “stopping randomly after a few hours”.
There’s no adapting…it would be a different algorithm, that is not dissimilar from what “library radio” is currently doing–building some sort of content similarity model within the Roon Core, then performing some weighted random picking based on a distance metric in that model, then applying business rules to keep things “on the rails”, “not repetitive”, etc.
Could we apply 20/20 hindsight and re-write library radio using some of what we learned from Roon Radio? Sure, but it would be a bad use of our effort. Lots of time and an ultra-long testing/iteration cycle to make something that already works OK work slightly better.
The “old” algorithm isn’t actually old–we released it 13 months ago. Sure, a total overhaul could make some modest improvements, but there is no new functionality to deliver there. It would make the same promises as the old feature and work in the same situations. Boring.
Roon Radio was worth serious effort both because it shares infrastructure with future discovery/exploration features, and because it adds a whole new dimension of functionality to the product. Sinking a bunch of resources into squeezing the next 5-10% improvement out of the library algorithm when we just overhauled it slightly over a year ago would be a big waste. Especially now, since a steep majority of our users have a better alternative–Roon Radio.
Also–it’s worth noting–we have been open about the plans for Roon Radio for a long time. It is and has always been on the same roadmap as library radio, with the plan to release in phases. Roon Radio is the final delivery from that plan that I laid out last year.