Roon Radio 1.6 Feedback Thread

Because they don’t do all the things that roon does in one piece of software.
I can’t see the previous radio getting much attention as the balance point for roon is shifting toward streaming users away from collectors as the type of joining user becomes more mainstream.

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But it’s not clear that “all the things that roon does” are necessary to all users. I would be perfectly happy without MQA unfolding or Roon Display, I think, and probably Radio. Case of featuritis, I’m afraid. What I really want is more work on the core and its weak spots, like metadata.

But that’s personal as well for my collection the metadata is perfect.

For now I intend to give the Radio algorithm time to learn.

I do however have the same experiences as many of the other posters: very limited variation in artists, much more repetitive than @brian stated in his extensive explanation and once the algorithm latches on to a album, it keeps going back to that same album (like a live album by the Who and one of the “best of” type albums by the Doors).

I get the “safe queue” approach and I agree with it, but for now the algorithm tends to fish in a small pond.

I also wonder if the algorithm uses some kind of hierarchical links between artists (nodes, edges and boundaries). If so, periodically choosing another of the seed artist’s (or genre’s or track’s or whatever’s) edges to branch out from might result in more variety without going off into the deep woods.

If the algorithm only uses metadata, maybe it would be a good idea to include “similar to”-like data in the metadata model (provided this is not already the case).

I specifically chose a Bowie track for my first extended try out, because Bowie should yield a lot of different paths to explore. The results were - as I stated before - a little repetitive given the versatility of the seed track.

On the other hand, the first experiments were done last weekend when everything did a Titanic impression, so I’m not’really convinced that Radio has been given a fair chance to prove itself.

Very curious to see what Radio will become over time…

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I know it’s no consolation but I had a very similar experience with Radio 1.5. We have a lot of Indie which often seems to end up with a “Folk” tag of one type or another. But we lived in Ireland for 20 years so we also had a lot of Celtic and Dubliners and stuff like that. Radio 1.5 was unlistenable essentially with an Indie seed in that scenario. I don’t seems to be getting that anymore with an Indie seed in 1.6. Has worked very well so far. Also, with Qoboz I am getting very good results with French Pop seeds but that is probably not everyone’s cup of tea.

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First–some framing. Library vs Streaming is the wrong way to think about it–Library has nothing to do with where the files are. You can have a large library from TIDAL and zero files, and you still function in our product like a large library person. Where the content comes from is incidental.

I think the balance is shifting (really…has already shifted, based on our usage data) from files-only collectors to files+streaming collectors. That is the shift that you are feeling reflected in the product with features like Roon Radio.

A steep majority of our users are files+streaming users already. At the same time, we’re seeing the library size statistics slide downwards as we grow as a product and business. We are not quite at the point with the product where someone could walk in with zero library and have a great experience building one up from scratch in Roon, but we will get there. That is an important goalpost in terms of considering ourselves a complete solution.

Lots of people who care about audio are not music collectors first. There is also a batch of relative latecomers to digital music who are introduced to Roon while buying audio hardware. Ten years ago, “rip your CDs” was part of the barrier for entry going digital. Today it’s “log into TIDAL or Qobuz…and maybe rip the few favorites that you can’t find in the streaming services, but don’t bother ripping the other ones.” These people have very different libraries (and disadvantaged experiences in Roon) compared to people like me who have been ripping CDs for 20 years. We are trying to close this gap with some of this work.

The kind of work that you are seeing with radio helps slide the window of “minimum library size required to get a good experience” lower. Other stuff we work on the future will definitely keep this as a goal in mind, in reflection of the actual things that our members are doing with the product.

We are definitely not viewing this as an either or or a shift away from collectors towards streaming users. It’s a reflection of the fact that today’s collectors are streaming users also.

We work on this stuff continuously, and it consumes a serious amount of our R+D budget. It is the only area where we actually have dedicated staff, and it dominates our operations expenses as well.

The problem you’re seeing isn’t “not enough work”, it’s a much more immovable fact of life–improving large, sprawling, mature systems is a lot less efficient than building new stuff. If we spent radio-level effort on metadata over the past year, it would move the needle a lot less for our members. We’ll continue to work on those issues.

One of our most expensive projects last year was completely overhauling Roon’s internal notion of equivalence between artists/albums, which have been the source of the #1 most noisy support topic in the history of metadata and Roon by a large margin. Millions of issues silently repaired in peoples’ libraries, and much less wrong stuff going forward…but not a shiny new feature that gets marketing juice poured over it, so you are not ticking it off in the “effort Roon Labs spent on metadata” column in your mind.

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Couldn’t you switch to the Queue, clear upcoming (if any) and turn on Radio? that would start radio after the song ends and wouldn’t restart the track.

I use (local) radio with Classical a lot. In my experience, the Genre tag weighs heavily in the algorithm. Do you have a good genre classification of your classical works, or do you just use “Classical” for everything? I use a relatively small but effective list of genres and Radio stays reasonably well on the tracks :slight_smile: If you’re interested (and willing to possibly re-tag your collection), I’d be happy to share my list of genres once I get home.

Yes, I’d be interested to see the tags you are using. Maybe they would work better. But actually I use a lot of classical sub-genres. But it doesn’t matter much what I seed with, I get a radio stream of predominantly 19th century symphonies and concertos with a few other things thrown in. Do you use a “Classical” tag at all? I use sub-genres but mostly everything will be tagged Classical as well as for example, otherwise you won’t get a composer showing. But I have often thought is that causing a worse problem than it is solving?

So just as an example I would distinguish between solo piano, piano concerto, harpsichord, and organ but I have the feeling this is being rolled up into “keyboard”. I also make a lot of sub-distinctions in vocal music. So I would distinguish between Opera, Oratorio, Choral, Sacred, Secular and Art Song. And even in Art Song I would sub-distinguish German Lieder, French Melodie and English and American Art Song.

I’m not expecting a radio stream ridgidly confined by the tags but if I start with a light vocal piece with so much to choose from I am hoping the mood will be retained with some further light vocal music with the occasional light instrumental piece, maybe a solo violin/cello/guitar/piano transcription. Even mixing it up with a larger orchestral adagio for example makes sense to me as it would be in a similar dynamic range. It is when, no matter what I seed with I am getting the same range of predominantly large scale orchestral pieces that I don’t like it. A similar comment has been made in relation to Pop/Rock and Folk.

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@brian I’m afraid this is not the behavior I am getting. Here are some screen shots of my queue when I tried radio a little while ago.

Radio selected two different songs from the same seven albums in the same order before branching out a little bit to a few new artists and then going back to several of the same same artists but different albums and then picking a third track from one of the first albums. I gave up at that point and stopped building the queue.

In case the screen shots are not very clear the original seed was Lumia from the Album Relish (20th Anniversary Edition) by Joan Osborne, one that Roon seems to know quite a bit about.



I scanned through two threads on Radio, but didn’t see this addressed -

One request for the Radio. Can you please include in the Settings the ability to turn off the box – permanently – that keeps popping up that asks “Skipped the XXX. Tell us why: [with three choices.]”

I often fast forward, i.e. skip tracks in Radio, and want to just ignore that popup, and prefer it not appear at all.

So I just leave it alone, and let the Radio roll along, so to speak.

At the same time, I’m not suggesting that the box be eliminated, as it performs a useful function if you want to fill it out.

I just don’t want to see it every time I skip a track in Radio.

Can you allow the option to turn that box off?

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This was addressed further up this thread…

I think that only works if the song is in the queue with other tracks after it in the queue. Plus it’s many clicks. There is no reason why starting radio from the currently playing track shouldn’t be a single click, yes?

ahh, I just saw the reference to the post about hitting the blue “end” button. I will try that. But not really intuitive? End?

Great when it works but pretty frustrating experience so far. Some talk upthread about the difficulty with edge cases, in this case hip-hop. Seems to me anything but well known classics will quickly grey out and stop recommending. First, it’s not clear why radio is stopping. If it’s a known thing that obscure seeds will stall radio, maybe there should be an error message along those lines.

Second, it’s not even an obscure track, it’s DNA by Kendrick Lamar, a well known track from the latest album by arguably the greatest rapper of our generation. So…musical taste aside, how would I go about finding related material? I’d start with the label. If the algorithm were aware of labels it would know TDE labelmates like Schoolboy Q, ab-Soul, SZA, Jay Rock, it would know producers like Terrace Martin, Tyler, the Creator and on and on. For example, Tidal has 100+ guest spots from Kendrick Lamar and not one of those has come up. Just my thoughts.

This, I have no way of knowing why radio fails to recommend anything, so this could all be unrelated. It’s still true though. Cheers

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I would like to know if it is possible to tell Roon Radio 1.6 to choose music of one year in particular or music of just two (or three) years old.

It’s not possible to specify a time period directly, but the time period of the seed is a factor taken into account.

Ha, no surprise we share the same frustration here @lorin.

I’ve had so many of these dead ends with HipHop, even with the popular stuff like you mention (popular outside of the Roon world, out in the wider world).

Roon Radio is performing much better with Jazz, older Rock and Classical (I sometimes listen to these too but less).

A few of my friends have been waiting to see/hear how this new Roon Radio thing performs before committing to a Roon membership but after using it at my place and seeing how badly it performs with newer and more popular music, it’s a deal breaker (for them - I’m a Roon lifetimer), just from the Discovery aspect.

They’re not fond of needing to have three subscriptions, Roon+Tidal alongside Spotify/Apple Music.

We tested Roon Radio this past week and I tried to parrot how advanced this algorithm is but when we got dead ends with Radio, my friends said you can talk all you like about how advanced you think the algorithm is but the music has stopped, so it’s sh!t… I didn’t have a good response apart from, let’s give it more time. The same with artist’s heads cut off on Chromecast display. I tried to parrot that it’s using some advanced algorithm but again the feedback was, “great, but again it looks sh!t”. Again, I said let’s give it more time (will revisit in a few weeks - it’s been said something is happening in the background to improve this).

It’s still very early days of course (only 1 week since v1.6) and they’re quite open to re-trying later on but if the Roon user data for this kind of music is low, the experience may not improve as quickly as I’d/they’d like. Time will tell of course.

I’ve recently re-started a Spotify and Apple Music membership just to see how far things have come from a discovery aspect (it’s been 2+ years since I used them) and I’m really amazed at how much better and personalised the experience is. Even the Tidal app. Of course their subscriber numbers are at 100+ million who are probably closer to my age than the bulk of Roon users (just guessing).

That’s my experience, just 1 week into v1.6. It’s very clearly early days of course.

I’m sure (hope?) it’ll be better 1 year from now.

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I’d just like to add that some kind of label awareness would naturally apply to many genres! Pavement is 90s indie rock but selections somewhat favouring Matador labelmates would make for, IMO, a much more curated sounding playlist. One example of many.

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Thanks @andybob. Do you think it will be possible for the user in a near future to specify not to listen to pieces older than two years or to specify elements like this? I would be surprised that the algorithms could not do it. It is because I would like sometimes not to hear songs older than two or three years or to be able to specify this kind of precisions (it could be the opposite : songs just of 2002 or before 1992). For the pleasure but it could be also useful for kind of research or study.

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I suspect that kind of user controlled listening will remain the domain of the Focus tools and in Library Shuffle play. Roon Radio is designed to be automatic. But if it is something that you have a strong opinion about, open a Feature Request thread and explain why you think that kind of capability would be cool.