I am running my ROON core on an ethernet-connected PC with Windows 10. I use a laptop connected to the core by WiFi to choose music. I have hundreds of albums with 2 or 3 versions; local storage, Tidal, and Qobuz. I have chosen one version of these duplicates as the “primary version” whenever possible. I have active subscriptions to both, running them through ROON. When I choose to listen to a music genre and shuffle play using ROOn Radio, the tracks/albums ROON chooses are rarely the ones I have listed as “primary versions” in my library. Is there a setting I’m missing that will “tell”: ROON Radio to play the primary version? Right now it seems totally random.
Funny you should mention that. I got this response from @jamie very recently:
jamieRoon Staff
Hey @Jeff_Bellune, I’ll take a swing at these for you.
It will randomly select either unless you set Roon Radio to only select from your local library.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for your reply Jeff. Here is a screenshot of my current Roon Radio setup
Maybe if I toggle the library setting to off, then on again it will improve.
Hi Kim,
I don’t know if this is relevant to your screenshot because you may be in the midst of playing a queue and displayed the radio prefs just to get info to this forum, but you’re not currently playing via Roon Radio. Radio won’t start until the queue ends 13 days from now. 
Oh my gosh I evidently don’;t have a very good understanding of Roon Radio! 
I guess I’d better do some research!
Thanks!
OK Jeff, I did some reading on the forum and have a much clearer understanding of Roon Radio. So I have to revise my earlier comment to "why won’t Roon choose “primary versions” of my music when playing music genres? 
It’s on YES. Is that my problem?
It most likely is the source of your problem.
When you group versions of an album together, typically you’d want the secondary, tertiary, etc. versions to be hidden and not in your album list. So if you set Roon to not display hidden albums, then only the primary version will show up in the album and track lists. This will also restrict Roon to playing from the primary version.
And keep in mind that you can always access the hidden version(s) of your albums using the Versions link in an album’s display page.
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Thanks Jeff, that answered my question!
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Still on Roon 1.8 and I’m wondering if any other 1.8 users (or 2.0) are also noticing this behaviour.
Playing a Daily Mix , the track playing does not pick from the primary version. I’ve scoured for a setting that I’m missing but no luck.
Seems that despite higher quality AIFF or HiRes versions are selected, the old iTunes AAC or MP3 version gets played?
Suggestions?
I notice the same behaviour. In my queue from the Daily Mix one of the songs it played was “Someone, Somewhere in Summertime” from “New Gold Dream / Simple Minds”.
I have this album in my library als old MP3’s from when disk space was expensive. But I have this album’s Primary Version in FLAC from Tidal.
My Streaming Content Preferences are “Prefer MQA over anything else”. “Show hidden tracks and albums” is on “No”.
And still it took the MP3.
Wouldn’t a list of how the user wants the format to be selected not be better than the current behaviour? I could put “MQA, Hi-Res FLAC, FLAC, AAC, MP3” (just an example) where someone who doesn’t like MQA would set it to “Hi-Res FLAC, FLAC, AAC, MP3, MQA”.
It’s very noticeable if MP3 is selected instead of the lossless formats.
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Hi Danny,
Yes, the way it’s ‘supposed’ to work is if a track from a curated Roon playlist is in your library, your selected ‘primary version’ is the one that should play. The tech guys are investigating this (see this thread https://community.roonlabs.com/t/re-streaming-content-preferences/258117/21?u=mark_dabielski)
I’ve tried all the different settings and it’s still doing it. (picking the non primary version)
Thought about a work around, but haven’t implemented it as yet. Maybe join in on the above thread and then they have more data to work with.
" Oops! That page doesn’t exist or is private"
I found an old (closed) thread from '22 but the page you mention is maybe a continuation of that one?
Sorry about that; not sure how to un-private that.
Suffice to say, the behaviour you’re describing is the same as what I reported. Connect with @jamie and let him know.
I kinda expected the behaviour to be that primary is the one it should play in any randomised playback, but my Roon Radio just dug out an old mp3, ignoring the lossless primary version.
It could well be the way it was intended to work, I can imagine it plays from all files so as to keep unintended ‘duplicates’ from being skipped (e.g. different mixes and extra discs of the same album without distinguishing metadata).
But even if others prefer that, I’d love a switch to make my Roon ignore the non-primary versions while shuffling.