Roon Radio playing a limited selection of artists

As an example I played 40 tracks from Pink Floyd radio and 19 of those songs were from just 3 artists! 8 artists in total were repeated more than once.

The worst offenders were as followers:

Emerson, Lake and Palmer - 7 tracks
Yes - 6 tracks
King Crimson - 6 tracks
Supertramp - 3 tracks
Alan Parsons Project - 3 tracks
Pink Floyd - 3 tracks (multiple to be expected though)
David Bowie - 2 tracks
Santana - 2 tracks

I see this time and time again no matter what the seed is.

Is it a known issue that is being investigated or is it something perculiar to my setup? I’m connected to both Tidal and Qobuz by the way.

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It is indeed an issue experienced and reported by several people since long. But not sure if Roon Staff is investigating this.
There is a hypothesis that it mainly happens with people having only a Qobuz integration, contradicted by your setup.

I reported several examples in the past, but never received feedback and gave up.

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Yes, I too would like to see Roon Radio/Valence take me away from, e.g. artists from the same time period as Crosby Stills and Nash (e.g. Joni Mitchell, James Taylor…) and play music of a similar type/mood but from a different decade (e.g. Fleet Foxes, Iron and Wine…), but if you select a 70s artist like the above as a “seed” or starting point, then it seems as though you are locked into the 70s singer-songwriters all day! I wonder how Roon Radio relates to the Daily mixes–same exact algorithm? Just starting to listen to those mixes, though, so please excuse my ignorance…

I’m curious as to what the relative impact of a thumbs up or thumbs down has - clicking the thumbs down from memory stops playback of the current track and skips to the next but also gives a little pop up notice thanking the person for their feedback. There presumably is a knock-on effect to play less from the track given the thumbs down - but not sure if that would be the artist, the decade, the tempo or a mix of lots of factors. It’s no doubt a complex thing to achieve as people are complicated and listening mood varies - it’s all very clever though.

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I’ve noticed a fair bit of artist repetition (not the seed artist) in the daily mixes already, so I’d guess it uses part of the same algorithm as Roon Radio.

I find Spotify fills radio and mixes with a much more relevant choice of tracks and artists but not sure if this is down to a better algorithm, what I’ve marked as ‘liked’, an element of curation, or the size of the Spotify user base.

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I just wish Roon would comment on what the cause of the artist repetition is.

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It’s very frustrating that Roon support won’t comment or even acknowledge that there is an issue here yet if it was some MQA related bickering they’d be all over it.

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Hi @kwangomango

Sorry for the late reply on this. I checked with the team on this, and we are aware of an issue where Radio can be a bit more repetitive than we’d like when Qobuz is used. We are working on a solution for this.

You mentioned you have both Qobuz and Tidal — If you disable Qobuz temporarily and use only Tidal is there any change at all to what you’re seein?

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Hi Dylan, thanks for getting back to me.

Yup, same problem if i disable Qobuz and just use Tidal. Using Pink Floyd radio again as an example, it’s like it has a limited set of artists to pick from and eventually ends up repeating the usual suspects.

I just did a test with Tidal, and the first 15 tracks were unique artists. It then has a period where it mixes new artists with previously played artists and eventually gets stuck for long stretches where every artist was previously played.

88 songs had 33 unique artists. The usual suspects of Yes, ELP, Deep Purple etc were repeated many more times than others.

Edit: I just clicked through the next 50-60 tracks and again they were all from previously played artists.

Hi @dylan.

Just so i can manage my expectations here, has this been investigated yet or even put on a backlog to be investigated?

Or is it considered to be expected behaviour?