I recently jumped into these forums and participated in a post “AI Music Recognition In Roon” … Great discussion by the way, if you haven’t read it yet.
Let me start by saying my library is currently about 170,000 tracks. Months ago I started to rebuild my media server that was some 15+ years old. Back when MP3s were created. My library is now FLAC. I have a ways to go to get it back to the almost 300,000 songs. Still about 40% of my CD collection to rip. I choose to have Roon have a go at my library and see how it faired against the previous platforms over the years I have tried.
That all being said for some context …
I came across several discussion about Valance. Or what some refer to as Roon Radio. I did read the Roon page on Valance, what it is, how it works etc. Its use of AI to determine what a person might like to hear based on their listening. Which is all well and fine.
I don’t particularly find that Roon radio plays what I would like, but thats just me. I also have been looking around at the focus feature of Roon. It’s good, and my use case is it organizes my music through playlists. I think it could use some expansion on the criteria areas it presents to me, and that may be a discussion. for another post on how that could be better formulated.
Valance, as far as my understanding of it, does not allow for user / listener interaction. It decides for me what it “thinks” I will like and would want to listen to. Im sure I’m not alone with the thought of something or someone thinking what I want to listen to is a way to listen to my collection. I might be in the minority in that my listening habits are all over the place. One day I love some Earl Klugh and 45 minutes later I want to listen to some Slipknot, then onto some Britney Spears.
Now I think there are some ways that Roon could improve its platform. I already mentioned a broader selection of focus criteria, and another is to use AI in a way that it allows Roon users to interact and determine what they want to listen to.
One of my absolute favorite features in Roon is that I can load something up in a queue, hit shuffle and then start throwing songs and albums at the queue. It will continue to shuffle the contents, and if I want to totally switch the mood, I can get rid of the remains of the queue and start something completely different, all without music interruption.
For those who haven’t explored other streaming and listening platforms, this isnt available widely. The Sonos app does it well, but until I found Roon there wasn’t a platform that I used or tested that gave me this kind of freedom.
Now, if Roon were to allow me to submit an AI prompt and build a playlist for me based off that prompt and the criteria I wanted, we are talking game changer. Apple recently added a feature where it back ended ChatGPT and lets it build a playlist from that and then save it into their app. Ive tested it and it does work quite well. You can put anything into the prompt and it will create a playlist. My example that I used was something like this:
“Give me 50 songs for a Friday morning that starts off with a slow mood till Im done with my coffee, say some Steely Dan and then as I start to get ready for my workout add some upbeat pop and dance music and end off with some influences of Metallica”
I would say it was spot on … It gave me a playlist of exactly what I wanted. There was no Jazz or hip hop in the playlist .. quite impressed I was.
This kind of feature would go a long way in raising the Roon client experience. It gives me a high percentage of control, while being pleasantly surprised at what is in the playlist. AI used in this way tends to be insanly accurate.
The language model that Apple uses also remembers a history to what Ive prompted in the past. A few days later I asked it to create another playlist and it actually came back and told me that there were a few songs it found for my request that were played in the last playlist it created and wanted to know if that was ok, or to re-think and come up with a different song selection. Crazy stuff!
I know a lot of people are asking how Roon will keep out the AI slop. Maybe the question that needs to be asked is how can Roon implement AI to its user base and have that user base participate in the use of AI in Roon?
Something to think about and I would up-vote anyone who thought this was a good idea.
In cased the questions comes up about Roon resources to create such a prompt driven feature, it is not all technically that hard to create an implement a feature like this. It seems a lot of time and effort has been put into to Valance, which I applaud, but now that Valance is out and understandably being tweaked, maybe its time to start working on a feature of AI prompted playlist creation?
Just some thoughts I had … thanks for reading and have a great day!