Hi, here’s the thing. My friend and I used to listen on Friday nights to Deezer. Mike’s Deezer had a the best Deezer Flow! (I listen all over the place so it was a mess but he was more focused on classic and prog rock.) I asked Deezer if they could clone his account for me, but no dice.
Anyway, now I am full Roon (just got a Nucleus) and and trying to replicate Mike’s Deezer Flow. He stored his Recently Played (189 tracks) and sent me the resulting playlist which I now have in Roon.
So, here’s the question- how can I get Roon Radio (or other Play Similar functionality) to select music-not the 189 tracks (which I can do via the playlist) but using Roon’s track selections based on the characteristics of those 189 tracks? Basically recreate a Mike’s Music Roon Radio station…
I liked Jango (years ago). You could pick a bunch of artists/songs and it would create a station based on all of them. Most services now can only create a channel based on one artist which doesn’t really represent my taste.
I think this would be hard to do in a way that gets it right for most people most of the time.
As a workaround, could you pick the most representative track from the playlist and start RR from there? I know it’s not quite the same, but it should get you to the same place…
Peter, alas but Mike listens to a ‘cluster’ of styles which is what makes his Flow so entertaining. I’m thinking as a next step to look at the Roon tags for some of the 189 tracks and create a bookmark that hopefully will tap into that cluster.
Understood, which is kind of my point: how does RR pick a song from a cluster of styles to be the seed for the songs it selects to play? I know there are other streaming services that (like Pandora) that can create customized stations based on a single artist or genre (which usually work ok) but then try to take it a step further by blending artists and genres (which usually results in a mess, IMO). I’m interested in seeing what you come up with…
Seeding Roon Radio with a playlist, or even just the entire contents of my queue, is something I’ve wanted as well.
I think a playlist is just as good at expressing a particular mood or style than a single song or album. With all the newfangled AI available these days I can’t imagine a technical reason to not do this.
Put another way: if Deezer and Pandora can do it, Roon can too. In theory.
I too had assumed Roon could utilize multiple tracks/artists to seed Roon Radio after reading all the glowing reviews of Roon Radio. I swear I recall someone mentioning that it uses the previous queue to seed the radio, but after my own testing I can confirm it simply uses the last song you played to seed Roon Radio.
I listen to a very wide variety of music and my favorite playlists jump genres constantly.
The ability to utilize multiple artists to seed a playlist was/is Pandora Radio’s best feature (I don’t use Pandora anymore so I can’t speak to it today).
Just to chime in, Amazon Music HD has this capability. I’m not using it now but when I was I had a large playlist called Reading Music that was full of instrumental music like jazz and classical. More often than not I would create radio from that playlist and get a nice combination of different genres of instrumental music (although not always instrumental - I would skip over the ones that had singing). Although not hi-res yet, Spotify has this option as well. I’m in the late stages of my Roon trial and this is definitely one thing that I wish existed. I would also like to see the ability to start radio from Focus instead of just play and shuffle.
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