The way Roon Radio works now, is that, by default, it is looking both inside and outside your library - however, chances are high that it will discover new music for you outside your library. You can restrict it to only look inside your own library - look at the 3 dots menu at the top right of the Queue screen.
The only caveat is that when looking just in your own library, Roon uses the same algorithm as was in version 1.5 for Roon Radio, instead of the improved algorithm used to swim through the entire universe of known music (i.e. your library, and the entire contents of the streaming services that you are subscribed to).
Thanks for that clarification. I didn’t know. Still, in my opinion, it would be ideal for each user to be able to customise how much they want radio to push new music. Or maybe give 3 options: focus mainly on known music (within library), focus mainly on new music (outside the library) and balanced mix
I have a navigation question with the new UI.
When I am browsing my library or adding credits or anything that move me away from the playing now screen and I want to go back to the album that is playing I find I have to do it in 2 steps, first press on the icon over the waveform and then press on the cover album on the left. Is any way to jump immediately to the album?
It happens a lot while I am playing the radio while I manage my library and I find a song that I don’t know but I like and I want to check the album and I find myself clicking around just to get to the album the track is from.
thanks
+1 to that idea. Been asking for more control over Radio since May 2015. 3 choices as you describe would be fine-a slider of sorts continuum would be ideal.
But my personal view is that two clicks in every circumstance is a small price to pay for consistency, and preferable to one click available in only some cases.
Wherever you are you see the Now Playing bar, and can expand it to the full Now Playing page by touching on the bottom, and get back to where you were by touching again.
Wherever you are you can open the Queue page by touching the Queue icon, and get back to where you were by touching again.
This includes going to NP from Q and back, and from Q to NP and back.
And wherever you are you open an album by touching its cover.
I know this is a long thread and others are discussing radio performance in detail, but this just happened and I thought it was so crazy I just had to post… surely Roon keep at least within the general area of genre? I wonder just how much of the radio functionality is already programmed, are we teaching it everything?
Meh… I’m not convinced that Roon’s radio is “engineered to produce serendipitous results”. First of all because serendipity is purely random (and thus surprising to the human mind) and secondly because putting all that work in a piece of software that is supposed to learn only to have it return random and unrelated choices would be beyond stupid: you’d get the same kind of results by writing a routine that pulls a bunch of tracks from a loosely defined query (say on main genre) and then executing a play command triggered from a random number generator.
Your comment is only valid for brute force AI by the way: the kind of research along the lines of “let’s see what happens when we give the algorithm as little instruction as possible and as much room to self modify as possible”.
Not really what would be deemed appropriate for software that is supposed to generate a pleasing listening experience for the user.
I’d think that such a machine intelligence would be given enough boundaries so as not to stray too far from the seed. Surely a jump from Frank Sinatra to Sibelius cannot be the goal?
Anyway, for now I like the results from jazz/funk/soul seeds. Classic rock is worthless: Radio keeps returning to the same 7 to 10 artists and the same 20 something albums.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
338
Roon Radio 1.6 is going to be a serious problem.
It’s finding so many awesome alt/college rock/indie/post punk bands for me that I’m going to hit that Tidal 10k album limit thing a lot faster than I thought. I may have to get Qobuz just to double up on the limit (which is what, BTW?).
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says that mastery in any field requires 10,000 hours of experience. By the time you hit that limit, you’ll be a master of Roon Radio listening.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
341
Actually it would be kind of cool if Roon tracked that. I think I must be coming up on my mastery of the forum then :)
My initial experiences with Roon Radio were good - particularly when I was entertaining some friends, whose musical tastes are not mine. I was able to stream a whole series of 1960s and 1970s popular music, much to their delight.
However, I am finding that when I start off with some classical orchestral music, my queue gets filled with pop songs, with the occasional opera aria and German lied thrown in for good measure. Surely, Roon Radio can differentiate between orchestral music and pop music, and between orchestral music and vocal music.
The other problem is that Roon Radio is also selecting exactly the same works (same album) that have already been played. It is bad enough when the same work is selected - albeit from a different performance.
Yes - I have been vigorously downvoting the “rogue” tracks. I trust Roon Radio will “learn” quickly!
I was very much in the camp of not liking this type of feature. A lot like your kids not liking food they have never tried, because they have never tried it. Recommendations on sites such as Amazon and allmusic are too predictable, so I suppose that has also affected my judgement.
So, putting my prejudices aside, I really like Roon Radio. It has already turned up several albums and artists I would never have otherwise discovered, adding even more value to having Roon as a front end. Great job.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
344
I have found it to be very seed specific. I had it rolling with an excellent late 80s/early 90s post punk groove (I don’t recall the seed, but it was all appropriate) but then I changed the seed to something that it played during that groove, clearly a powerpunk band, and it went to straight radio rock. Didn’t make a lot of sense to me but at least it didn’t play Vivaldi during that session.
Liking my initial forays into Roon Radio. Though I’m on Tidal, I’m currently limiting Radio to my own library.
Last night, after listening to the Cranberries’ album “Something Else”, Roon Radio went into a song from “Everybody’s Doing It . . .” (No surprise there) but then went into Beck’s “Blackbird Chain”, Elvis Costello’s “Don’t Look Now,” K.Flay’s “The President Has a Sex Tape”, Van Morrison’s “Till We Get the Healing Done”, Annie Lennox’s cover of “Strange Fruit”, Neko Case’s “Ragtime” and finally The Elvis Costello/Roots collaboration “Wise Up Ghost.”
Not a single song sounded out of place. More importantly, each was a small, pleasant surprise. When I first heard Pandora, I was impressed by the human-made radio lists. I have a feeling Roon Radio’s AI might be better.
According to the Roon team, limiting Radio to your own library defaults to the old (1.5 and earlier) radio, so you are not getting the benefits of their new algorithms. So I think in this case you just happened to get a lucky mix.
I think some of the cross-reference between Classical and Pop (for want of a better word) occurs when Classical Artists or Composers have Pop genres attributed to them because they appear on compilations or film scores.
I don’t know whether this is something that curating by the user can fix or whether it will improve as RR gives greater weight to the Classical connections.
