Roon Radio 1.6 Feedback Thread

I’m afraid I have to agree. I am getting very mixed results. With some seeds the repetitions are kicking in after +/- 2 hours. That seems ok to me somehow as that is the average length of a physical radio show. But with other seeds the repititions are kicking in much quicker.

So for example, I am new to Qobuz so I am tending to pick artists I am familiar with but maybe Qobuz has their entire catalog and albums I am not familiar with. So Norah Jones would fall into the category of mainstream I suppose. But I picked a track from a more recent album I didn’t know compared with the famous 2004 blockbuster. So far out of 23 tracks, I have got Kate Bush 3 times, Peter Gabriel twice, Liane de Havas twice, Norah Jones three times, Patricia Barber twice, Diana Krall twice, Gregory Porter twice. You get the picture. These are all good picks. I get the “fit”. But not only are the artists repeating they are repeating from the same albums when Qobuz has such an enormous catalog. I think that is what surprises me the most.

On the other hand there has also been a single pick from a Herbie Hancock album of Joni Mitchell covers which I thought was a rather inspired choice.

Fortunately, for me, Roon Radio has been nothing but a pleasure while adding an entirely new listening experience. I’m enjoying Smooth, Contemporary, Lounge, Chill, etc. Jazz along with new artists and studio musicians that I’ve wasn’t familiar with in the past. I’ve added a new Album each night from the selection Roon Radio has offered since installing v1.6 which has worked flawlessly for me since. I couldn’t ask for more.
Again, excellent job Roon!

1 Like

I’ve run into something about this… Play a track, let radio run for a while. Get the itch for a particular track and play that, when it is finished, radio seems to pick up where it left off. Intuitively and preferably, seems radio should start with the new manually played track (or last of the bunch if more than one are played). The trigger would be the “play” or “play next” buttons. ?

Adding a track, or play next, doesn’t directly affect the radio. “Play now” resets the seed.

The problem with that is, it’s more disruptive to have to “Play Now” rather than letting the current song finish first.

My suggestion: maybe allow either “Play” (now or next) to reset the seed.

Otherwise you have to interrupt playback to switch seeds (“Play Now” in the middle of a track) - which sounds abrasive to anyone that’s listening. Or, you have to wait for the exact end of the track, which is pretty awkward.

Thanks for all this info about Radio. It’s very interesting.

Another way is to hit the blue “end” button at the bottom of the Roon Radio part of the queue screen. This doesn’t stop the radio, but will restart the seeding with the current track

3 Likes

That’s more or less what I do. I put the “new” seed on the queue and then hit the “end” button. That will cease the existing radio stream after the current track, play the new seed and initiate a new radio stream. All with no breaks. If you just end the current radio stream then roon will start a new radio stream without an abrupt break but the new radio stream will likely sound very much like the one you just killed.

Kicking off radio on a top-level genre is going to be a super broad “best of” type experience. Pop/Rock covers about half of published music–you’ve given the system almost no information about what you want, so it’s going to do a sort of summary of greatest hits thing.

I know that it can’t be playing the same albums over and over because we force a very long spacing between picking tracks off of the same album within a radio session (at least a few hours under normal circumstances). More on repetitiveness below–

I think you are going to get a better experience by picking a more specific seed. Even stepping down to a sub-genre like “Hard Rock” will open things up I think, but picking an artist will be even better.

We studied the topic of repetitions (at artist, album, track, and composer level) exhaustively and did comparative analysis with other radio products. We tuned Roon Radio to be by far the least repetitive of the industry standard implementations (Pandora, Spotify, etc). Pandora is more repetitive than Spotify. Spotify is more repetitive than us. The gap between us and Spotify is much larger than the gap between Spotify and Pandora.

During alpha testing, we found that a few people seemed to be easily triggered by hearing even the same artist 100 with 80 tracks in between, and others were fine with the Spotify experience, which will allow the same artist showing up 8-9 times within 20 tracks. The results that you are complaining about are about 1/3rd as repetitive as Spotify.

Not trying to discount your feedback–just saying, we’ve had comments all over the place on this topic, including some which would push the algorithm into a crazy low-performance direction if we acted on them. It’s pretty clear that radio products can be successful without taking as much care about repetitiveness as we have. We judged separately that our users would want a less repetitive experience than mainstream users and already have the knob pulled pretty hard in that direction.

Forcing lower repeat rates means the algorithm is more often made “desperate” to find good picks. It’s sort of like the knobs discussion above–adding manual constraints is a tradeoff against letting the underlying learning model do its best work.

It also may help to put this in context. Radio is one of many exploration/discovery features we are going to build on this infrastructure, but it is also one of the most conservative, because it’s meant to be safe for you to turn it on and walk away from the remote without getting shocked by something awful.

We can be more adventurous with other recommendation systems that are more suggest+approve oriented–for example anything that displays content for you in the app instead of just picking + playing stuff.

Some of the people who complained about repetition backed down once they understood that the purpose of radio was not “force feed me recommendations”, but more like “safe background listening for everyone in the household”. Not sure if that framing will help you–but the same thing that makes 80 different artists in a row a good active discovery experience for you might be exhausting when your spouse picks “Beyonce”.

That album is an all-time favorite of mine, and definitely very relevant to a Norah Jones listener–this is the power of learning off of usage data.

I have to say… I tried local-only radio this morning, starting with Vashti Bunyan’s “Train Song”, and all it plays are Thompson songs (Richard, Teddy, Linda, Richard & Linda, Teddy & Linda…) interspersed with various second-rate Celtic cuts – odd that it doesn’t pick any Altan, as I’ve got quite a number of Altan albums. Playing “Nine Stone Rig” right now, soon to be followed by “Four Strong Winds” (one of my favorites) by the Wolfe Tones (far from my favorite version).

Now another Richard Thompson #… No Joni Mitchell or Dylan or Edith Piaf or Beth Wood or Rosalie Sorrels or…

Good Lord! The Dubliners’ “The Rebel”. Still no Steve Goodman or Lucinda Williams. Or Altan.

Hah! As soon as I posted that, I got Leonard Cohen “Famous Blue Raincoat”, followed by Rosalie Sorrels “Ragweed Ruth” (not “Rosemary Sorrells”, senior moment there).

If it would work the way you describe I would be fine, I want a super broad best of experience. But what I get is the same albums, believe it or not. It’s not so much during one radio session. But let’s say I listen to that radio for two hours, then walk away and restart the radio from scratch, I will be given the exact same albums I listened to the previous time. That’s not only happening in Pop/rock, it was also happening with Folk for example or some sub-genres. Not only the same artists, it’s only ONE specific album of them, every single time I start the radio.

Thanks, that is a useful distinction.

I’ll give this a try. Thanks.

Thanks Brian. Very informative.

I also think that 2 hours, the average length of a radio show is a good compromise for spacing of artists. So that would be about 25 to 35 tracks before an artist repetition depending on genre. And I am certainly seeing that with some seeds. So thanks for that. It’s really great. I am a long way from the edge case of noticing a repetition at 80 tracks. But it’s by no means like that all the time. I am also getting spacing of a few minutes. A single track for example:

That’s because it local only.

Not really. I’ve got lots of local music that I’d think should be showing up, but it isn’t.

I’m thinking it’s all about the genre tags.

The seed album is tagged as “British Folk” and “Folk”. Things like the Smithsonian “Folk Song America”, a 4 CD collection, probably aren’t showing up because it is “unidentified” in Roon, and has no tag “Folk”. Clannad and Siucre are showing up because they’re tagged as Celtic, but also as “British Folk”. Altan, on the other hand, is tagged “Celtic folk”, but not “British Folk”. Joan Baez’ cover of “Let It Be” from “The Best of the Vanguard Years” shows up because that album is tagged “Folk” (somewhat incorrectly, lots of Pop and Top-40 on there). “The Essential Leonard Cohen” is tagged as “Folk”, “Pop/Rock”, and “Singer/Songwriter”, so we got one track from that. The Rosalie Sorrels album also has two tags other than “folk” which aren’t on the seed album. More tags seem to suppress tracks; “The Anthology of American Folk Music”, something like 80 tracks, has more than 20 tags beside “Folk”, so I’ll bet it never is selected. Same for Dylan.

Probably more complicated than I think, but this seems like a good first-level explanation.

And the fact that the previous radio was pretty rubbish and is still so and isn’t going to get much better.

Hey, for me, it’s still the present radio.

Well you know how it is then :blush:

Yes, but… Should it be rubbish?

I’m still trying to figure out what I’ve received from this vendor in exchange for my hard-earned cash. Here’s what Roon said in the 1.4 release announcement (and thus what I was promised when I signed up):

As many of you know, our Radio algorithm has been the subject of much debate since Roon launched. While many users like the selections at first, over time they tended to be predictable or repetitive, repeatedly selecting the same songs, albums, or tracks.

As of today’s release, we have enabled an entirely new Radio algorithm for all of you. Radio 2.0 selections draw on significantly more information, including information about composers, performers, genres, influences, and more, and uses a significantly more sophisticated statistical model for identifying similar content, accounting for content quality, and producing a radio stream that is fresh each time.

Radio will take precautions to ensure the same songs, artists, and albums aren’t picked repeatedly, even if you tend to start Radio with similar content over and over. It will also try to avoid interludes, introductions, podcasts, interviews, and other content which might be intrusive. Note that in Roon, “Radio” means “play more like this” and this is the algorithm that we’ve completely rewritten. “Shuffle” continues to mean “play this group of tracks in a random order” as always.

Supposedly, this 2.0 is what I’m using. Yet I’m seeing continuous repitition of the same artists and albums. The “significantly more sophisticated statistical model for identifying similar content” seems to be working entirely from the buggy genre tags that Roon’s somewhat haphazard metadata has (or does not have, in the case of most Smithsonian collections).