Roon radio picks can be a bit hit and miss as many have reported, depending on what it is seeded with. Today I got an ‘interesting’ selection, that surely could and should be avoided with some modicum of intelligence, artificial or otherwise …
I seeded Radio by playing the album ‘Durf jij" by Ellen ten Damme, a Dutch language album released in 2009. After the album’s 12 tracks finished, Radio came up with the picks showing below - nothing too noteworthy until 15 tracks into radio (track 27 in screenshot 2) but from that point onwards pretty much half the picks are ’ Mag Het Licht Uit’ (Switch the Lights Off) by De Dijk, and even twice in succession to kick things off. (positions 27, 28, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44 below)
And since I started typing this, two more occurrences out of the next 4 tracks picked …
It’s not that I don’t like this track, honestly I do, may even have given it a thumbs up before, but this goes way beyond ‘algorithm picks not great’. It’s IMO a massive fail. Lights out on radio for now.
The thing that underwhelms me the most with Roon Radio is the repetition and small selection of artists used; I seed with an artist, eg Neil Young and then see the same few artists and their tracks appear in the radio again and again. I seed it a few days later and same thing. Same if I seed with a genre, for instance, Pop: same artists keep being presented. I have Tidal/Qobuz subs, so there’s plenty of scope to mix things up. Would like to see some big improvements as Roon Radio has so much potential.
Roon radio is supposed to be a learning algorithm. I’m not seeing any improvement after more than six month’s implementation. On the contrary: the selections appear to become narrower and narrower over time.
While away on holiday I was using the Tidal app and when I seeded Tidal’s radio with one of my favourite tracks, the results were uncannily similar to Roon radio’s choices down to the sometimes inane selection of third rate compilation albums for follow-up tracks.
I think I’m starting to doubt the existense of an actual learning algorithm. Some clarification from the developers might be nice.
It doesn’t work for me reliably. Doesn’t start after the queue ends, or just stops after a while. Tidal, local, only, doesn’t matter. And no I don’t use wireless and there’s nothing wrong with my network or playback otherwise. And when it did work, selections were limited and repetitive. Guess I’m not that interesting.
OK, apologies, I did not work through all 425 posts. Am I missing something? When my playlist comes to an end and Roon Radio starts it shows me what is playing and what is coming next in the que. One can then thumb up or down what is coming next. How am I supposed to do that if I havent heard the song yet?
That is a very good question to which I haven’t found the answer yet.
Experience has taught me that it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference if you thumb down a song or not. The algorithm is very likely to bring up the song you thumbed down further on in the cycle.
I live in hope that one of the future releases will contain a “radio” function that does what it says on the tin. For now we’ve two choices: hope it throws up stuff we like or shut it off.
In any case, the current radio function is nothing to brag about.
Yep that’s what I do. I wish there was a global off for Roon Radio or it was off by default and you had to turn it on for each zone rather than having to turn it off.
My “radio”:is the “What are we listing to” thread on this forum. I much prefer to,actively choose what I am listing in to settle in for whole albums rather than bother with the idiosyncrasies of Roon Radio or any other Radio for that matter.
When I search for drum n bass I get three results. Two of them have blue tags with ‘drum n bass’ and the other had drum n bass in the description.
Too bad it’s not consistently finding/returning all as when I drill down into the genre (which is a way I simply don’t think about music) I find many more stations that also have ‘drum n bass’ as a blue tag.
Wow, nice find, Pat. Have you tried Roon Radio with D’n’B as a seed since the update? I haven’t but with other esoteric genres I am getting better results.
I had not… but I just seeded it with Calyx & Teebee and 7/8 tracks were all DNB, with the one outlier being a downtempo thing by Hybrid Minds. So it seems that Roon has fixed something.
