I find Roon Radio rather poor - whether it’s the curated ones (which I assume are the same tracks for everyone) or when I click Start radio from an artist/album/track.
I’m a few weeks into my trial and most things I really enjoy but this radio/algorithm situation is really lacking. Nothing too exciting appears and often it’s just completely off.
I’m surprised as there’s a lot of material and claims about their Valence backend service.
So I wanted to know do others find this too? And more importantly any workarounds (maybe I’m missing being relatively new)?
I also prefer to stay in Roon if possible and not have to switch to Tidals own app.
It’s gotten better over the years, but still isn’t great. Still plays things outside of the original “seed”, still plays holiday music in the summertime, etc. Pandora is the best at radio curation of everything I’ve tried but of course it’s lossy and not available within roon. Not really a workaround, but just thumbs down everything it plays that you don’t want to hear and give the feedback of why you didn’t want to hear it.
Good to hear I’m not the only one, asking for easy listening and getting disco thrown in.
I know Roon already has a lot going for it, but this seems like a core feature half baked.
It’s a shame as how Valence is marketed it would be solid, maybe for metadata organisation it is, but the suggestion algo needs working on. If there’s anyone from Roon Support who would give some details/work in progress info that would be great.
(I also sympathize that the Apples/Googles have masses of data to train on.)
By the way have you found the feedback you give when you skip songs actually helps?
I think it helps. Overall I like the radio feature for when I either just want random songs to listen to so I don’t have to pick myself or am searching for new music.
If you do a search on the forum you will find a lot of complaints. I rather suspect the roon demographic is the root cause. Other services draw on a much larger user base and varied demographic. From comments I have seen roon weights the roon user base as a whole much more highly than individual libraries/listening preferences. There have been improvements over the years. I don’t know if further improvements are in the pipeline.
the Roon Radio function and its performance was one of the main reasons to choose and continue with Roon and also using it as main mean to discover new music. I am very satisfied with it and prefer it over the Tidal algorithm. But I have also been using Roon for many years now, so eventually it learned and I haven’t checked Tidal for some time since always using Roon.
Roon needs your feedback when you don’t like something or it will never learn.
(AI is meant to be software algorithms that self learn not just simply do a look up)
Also being in your trial spell , Roon hardly knows you, you need to cuddle up a bit
Seriously though the more you use it the better it gets. I personally leave it off there’s nothing worse than getting to the end of a classical piece and some random chosen music starts before you can stop it
For rock I often pick a seed and let it run , after 10 yrs it knows what I want
I agree, Roon Radio is rather poor compared to Spotify. Spotify have so much more listening data to work from so its not suprising.
I think Plex have made the right choice looking at sonic analysis of tracks. Their radio is also much better than Roon, but easier for them to implement due to only local (Sonic analysis is done on local flies)
Hope Roon overhaul their Radio as its a function important to music discovery.
I’m actually coming from PlexAmp and yes, the sonic analysis is great - on track and album selections too. Would have thought Valence has this.
However this evening I am finding the Daily Mixes (based on my Roon listening yesterday) and album recommendations in sub genres solid.
Seems its specifically the Start radio button that’s rubbish.
