Maybe for you. It’s better only for some genres IMO. I much prefer the old local radio for certain genres.
When using Roon radio when a mqa album comes up can see music playing but no sound.Dac is not mqa capable but have dac settings no mqa support and enabled mqa decoder.
I have to disagree that this is a fact in my case. I’m getting a lot more unrelated genres and my radio experience has been worse for a lot of styles of music since 1.6. For example, when a progressive trance album finished playing, Roon radio served up a light orchestral track followed by a lot of rap tracks - both unrelated genres.
Absolutely love the Radio + Tidal integration. Already found two new artists I really like. Been on the fence about Roon compared to other music players for about 3 years, but I’m totally sold now.
The AI algorithm to match bands that have similarities to “Massive Attack” appears to work well.
For fun I signed up for a trial of TIDAL to experiment with Roon 1.6 Radio.
First pic is a queue from my local library prior to joining TIDAL thus with 1.5 Radio and the seed song is “Dead Flowers” by Rolling Stones. I then added TIdal and seeded 1.6 Radio with the same song and version off my local library.
With Tidal+local it seemed more focused on same style and artists from same era (even in albums were recent from 60’s artist vs. 60’s song from 60s artist) where 1.5 had a bigger spread (i.e. Stones and Dream Theater). Neither is necessarily bad.
I got 4 Tom Petty tracks with Tidal+local and 1 with Local only (and I have all the Petty albums)
There weren’t new artists w/1.6 and Tidal but different versions from Tidal of songs I have locally and for some classic rock bands like L.Synyrd Tidal select at more recent album vs. the pre crash classic line up and I didn’t have that era on my local drive (I have many versions of the rest).
There was a Lou Reed live track “Sweet Jane” from Tidal played but I have a local HDTracks version from same album that was not so I got a lower rez version w/Tidal vs. local. Same for Jealous Guy by Lennon. I got a CD from Tidal but have the Blu-ray of same recent album reissue.
In general I have all or all the early albums from these artists. Tidal added comps and the very recent past their prime titles.
I’m still observing and of course AI hasn’t had much time to learn.
I’m not really sure what I’m wanting. Focus and shuffle was fun so this is fun too just different. My interest in mostly in listening to my local library…adding just a few Tidal explorations is ok but I mostly want to enjoy the 265,000 tracks I already purchased. I especially like my MC and audiophile releases that aren’t in the cloud. I may buy some of the HiRez downloads to fill gaps but not sure if I’ll value the hirez streamers enough to subscribe. I may just get 320kbs for exploration and mobility…
Fun to play with. I’ll try Q when it’s available (on wait list).
LOCAL ONLY (thus no 1.6 logic)
TIDAL+LOCAL w/1.6
The skip in 1.6 was “Stairway to Heaven” from Tidal (not an album version nor my HiRez version local). I didn’t need to hear that again tonight.
With 1.6 & Tidal I eventually got another Neil Young song “Driftin’ Back” from Psychedelic Pill (I have it local as well) which is 27 minutes long…yikes of all the young songs to pic 
As a side note the Tidal Top Tracks (on their site) make sense to me but Roon Top Tracks looks random even now that I have Tidal connected.
I changed the seed to the album version of “Dead FLowers” and started Radio 1.6 w/Tidal again. This time I got mostly local tracks and the Tidal tracks I happen to also have locally.
I am starting to think that I could run Tidal & Roon radio to build a play list and almost all the songs would be in my local library although Radio may continue to select versions from my Tidal account.
The choice of a “From the Vault live track” seems to have sparked several other alt versions, live versions etc. vs. using the studio. Seems good. I got 4 songs from Petty’s "American Treasure which didn’t seem as popular using the studio track of "Dead Flower"s as seed.
Interesting.
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To have access to all bought albums.
Ah, you need the login for Roon to access the “bought” content? Didn’t know that, I haven been able to buy anything yet, in beta. In that case it isn’t really “bought”, is it?
In that case, if there are two kinds of Qobuz membership, we need a setting so Roon can know the difference. Right? Since the Radio malfunctions if you have only bought-content membership? In fact, I imagine ordinary play could malfunction as well…
EDIT What I mean is, this is not a sp3cific Radio issue. If there are two different kinds of Qobuz membership, Roon needs to know that. @Danny?
It’s not a big problem, but it could be a trap for some users. I have disabled qobuz in roon, so I don’t have this problem anymore.
But yes, Qobuz has some kinds of membership. Unlike TIDAL qobuz is a streaming (rent music) and a download (buy music) provider.
Ah the Butthole Surfers, one of the most rememberal live acts I have ever seen.
This is the feature being discussed:
Back for the “feedback” portion of the thread, I suggest Roon put a ten-second timer on their “why did you skip” questionnaire. If it hasn’t been answered by then, just go away.
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I just tried a Jazz seed with the artist Gene Harris, a R&B jazz pianist who hit his stride in the 70’s. No particular track.
Wow! Was I impressed! Honestly, I half expected every other track to be Harris’, but no. He was the first and only of 15. There were more pianists for sure, but also guitar, vibraphone, trumpet, and sax. All were what I would call “lyrical” jazz, most all small ensembles. And not nearly all were '70s names. David Sanborn’s alive and kicking. Lastly, there was not a single duplication of artists or albums (!)
If a DJ had curated this, I would have tipped him/her handily.
Small sample, I know, and I’m afraid to dip into the classical stuff, but Radio is a winner. In particular, it is maybe three steps up from Roon’s last iteration. No need to hang around the computer to hit the thumbs down button.
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I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing them live, but music definitely wouldn’t be the same without them!
Agreed. That the question persists well past the song is a minor annoyance.
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I had my first encounter with the Roon Radio 1.6 earlier this week and like the result. It found Tidal tracks that paired nicely with what I’d been playing, Nguyen Le, a Vietnamese jazz guitarist who boldly mixes traditional rhythms and melodies with western post-bop fusion jazz. That’s a pretty heady mix of attributes to use as selection criteria but Radio 1.6 did nicely and found several Tidal artists unknown to me!
There’s a easter egg in the queue view. If you scroll it backward past now playing, it starts pulling in history. I’d not noticed that before but it is a nice feature. History lets you see what Radio has played so you can track down a title at your convenience.
iPad Roon Controller 1.6 does seem a bit less stable. There are times when it is unresponsive but this may be related to iPad not liking its cover. Occasionally, I have to kill and restart the controller.
Everything has been good otherwise. Roon server is on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and music is on FreeNAS 11.2 shared via CIFS.
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I don’t give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to any song, unless I feel somewhat strongly about it. If I am already familiar with the song that is “up next”, and have an opinion, I’ll give it a thumbs up or down. Otherwise I let it play. When I hear the song, if feel strongly about it, I’ll render judgment. If I’m not sure, I just let it go. When doing it this way, you’re not really “building a playlist” in advance, but instead are continually engaging with the selections in real time. This is, I think, similar to how you would engage with Pandora or Spotify.
I DO think that giving a thumbs up to a song before you hear it probably does have an affect on the “algorithm”. If I’m not familiar with the song, I wait until I hear it to give it a thumbs up/down. I think that the fact that you can build a large playlist in advance by giving thumbs up/down before the songs play complicates things quite a bit.
Okay, sounds like you’ve reached a firm conclusion. Go with it.
This is my experience too.
I love having Radio reach out to Tidal for more content. But the relevance of the tracks selected by radio in 1.6 has not been very good for me, so far.
Before 1.6, the selection was limited to my library, but the relevance was much better. I was in a mood, and left the radio on.
Now I’m in a mood, and I have to turn the radio off, to choose something else that’s consistent with that mood.
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Reluctantly I have to agree. How you perceive Radio 1.6 seems to depend where you sit in the distribution of roon subscriber listening demographic. If you sit in the middle then you will have a very positive experience. But if you sit on the tail you probably will not. The roon subscriber base is not very large so the tail of “minority” tastes that the AI will struggle with seems to be quite long.
Works great for me when I seed indie pop circa 80s/90’s. Works even better when I seed indie pop circa last week. Everything else to a greater or lesser extent I find is not working so well. At the extreme of the tail I am actually experiencing a complete fail of 1.6 which will complain that it cannot find anything similar and just aborts Radio 1.6, shuts down Radio stream access and reverts to a local library 1.5 only mode.
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Playing Radio from a Playlist would be my top use case, and it seems that a workable algorithm would essentially pick a few songs based on one song/album/artist in the playlist, then a few songs based on the next, then another set and so on. This appears to be what Pandora does; I might have classical, jazz and breakbeat tracks in the same playlist for instance, and I would get small clusters of songs from each genre.
Unless I’m missing a way to diversify the seeds in an active Radio session (e.g. base it on more than one song/album/artist), this seems like it would be very useful for introducing some variety to the queue. Equivalence matching would be a non-issue if you simply adjusted the proportion of each seed’s influence based on localized thumbs up/down buttons (e.g. Radio plays 3 classical songs and 3 jazz songs; if I thumb down most of the classical and thumb up the jazz, play 1 classical and 5 jazz next time that set of seeds get a turn at the table).
I’ll also note that it would be nice to be able to automatically generate a Radio playlist upfront. It would need to refresh after each interaction (thumbing) in a similar manner to the existing Queue when you add something while Shuffling, but that doesn’t seem inviable so long as the Radio queue isn’t too long. Maybe 20 songs at a time or so.
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