From my perspective, more of an overhaul. But I’ll try to pay more attention to my particular issues and see if I can find some trends.
Edit - to be clear, Radio does pick good follow on songs sometimes. But inconsistently. Last night the seed was Gillian Welch/Empty Trainload of Sky, and the follow on was Amos Lee/Madison and I just don’t see any connection there at all.
I would say that variation of Tracks/Songs , albums and artists played is for the better . I experience that Roon radio can play the same Track twice during a session of 4 hours. Repetetion of songs from the same album is happening very often and should be limited especially if the user bans 1-2-3 tracks from that album. It seems like Roon struggles to treat the same song/track across several releases of the same album.
Just thinking out loud ; i believe that “last played” for both track and album should/could be a part of the algorithm. For me looks like Roon is keeping track of play-count also on non-libarary tracks so this should be possible. This would also avoid Radio playing tracks that has been played outside of Radio lately.
IMHO, the gist of all the radio discussion is exemplified by the two posts by @ravyn and @Paul_Melde: one size cannot not fit all at all times. One person may prefer radio to assemble a nice travel through one’s own old favorites based on the seed, another one may want to find new music that is liked by other people who like the seed. Either is legitimate and heck, the same person may sometimes want one or the other.
Then there are many possible different transitions based on a seed, such as sticking to a mood and BPM or slowly turning it up over x minutes. Or if seeding, I dunno, a reggae track, one might want to stick to reggae or throw in some punk.
And real radio can deliver on this by having more than one channel and ideally DJs with an interesting opinion, leaving the user the choice which one to listen to. So there’s two problems here:
Unfortunately in this particular case it is just that a lot of folks who listen to Amos Lee also listen to Gillian Welch and the genre rules as currently exist don’t consider them different enough to be separated. It’s an interesting case and I can review if there’s a good rule that can be gleaned from this one. I’m not sure if there’s a specific reason that you’d expect these to be separated given what you know about these artists?
I, for one, would love to know more about the Genre rules if that’s permissible. Happy to sign an NDA if need be.
Good call on the difference in use case. For me, once I’ve set the genre/theme/groove, I expect Roon to continue to recommend within the parameters. If I wanted a human-curated “Hey have you heard this” experience, I’d go find one.
That said, I totally agree with your UI/UX comments here, and the follow on comment about it being time for a rewrite. The reasons allowed for “This doesn’t fit” are too constrained; there are only 3 choices, and one is “Holiday Music.” That’s not the conversation we’re having. I’m ok with the 20 seconds or so to approve the next track - I think it’s more session oriented, so you sit and pick for a while. Makes it easy to weed out the repeats - but by the same token, makes them very obvious, and discloses the coarseness of the control for eliminating them.
@nathan Happy to beta (or alpha) test.
Personally i can see why Gillian Welch and Amos Lee is in the same radio stream just by looking at the genres they share though not Americana and Jazz respectively. I have tracks from both sharing the same Tag for play from Bookmark/Focus but then hand-picked tracks.
In case of total overhaul of Roon Radio i would propose to build a solution around Focus by adapting Focus to also include non-library tracks in addition to library. In this way each user can prepare it’s own Radio Stations by creating bookmarks as the seed. In future versions additional features could be added like the option to adapt the bookmark/seed as You listen by giving the user the possibility to add or inhibit the actual artist that is playing to the bookmark/seed from the queue screen.
Another feature that could be added later is for the user to decide to what extend this Radio should “play safe” or be adventurous compared to what is defined in the seed. That could be portion of (non) Loved/Library stuff, stick to Genre stricly (or not), etc.
I think that a solution using Focus would adress both the different preferences of the Roon users and also @Suedkiez point that the same user may have different idea of what Radio shall provide for each session started.
// 1: Radio as playlist
Radio can also be a playlist with X tracks created from the Bookmark/Seed up front. This playlist can then be added to the queue or replace it similar to how adding to que is handled today. Both Spotify (last time i used it) and Tidal has pre-prepared playlists for what they define as Artist Radio’s.
// 2: List banned non-library stuff
Extension of Focus to include non-library stuff would also solve the request to be able to see what is banned outside of library.
// 3: Thumb Up/Down , Skip
The thumb’s handling, as commented by @ravyn and @Paul_Melde should also be evaluated. These has never been intuituve and often misunderstood since it does now follow defacto industry standard. Now after the introduction of Ban in addition to Love it is even more confusing. If Focus/bookmark and pre-generated playlist they will have no function related to the actual stream/session.
From my understanding the feedback given after thumb down/skip (This doesn’t fit / Holiday music / Not for Radio / etc ) does not add to the users Radio/profile directly and has little or no effect on what will be played later in the actual radio stream or later radio sessions for the actual user/profile.
// 4: Possibility to hide
Depending on the implementation the option to hide menues, buttons etc related to Radio/Ban/Focus-extensions should be considered.
// 5: Usability of personalized Radio and Daily Mix’es
To ease the use of own Radio (chosen) Focus-Bookmarks could be put on the Home page similar to how the Daily Mixes are shown today or even replace today’s mixes based upon user decision. Possibility to add own graphic to each Radio-Station/Bookmark would have been nice.
In general home screen should be adaptable and could also include the most used playlists for the actual user-profile, also with own graphics … 
& the option to add “last played” filtering/sorting and shuffle to have fresh music every day even from own static playlists. This could also sync with Arc and download to refresh.
An adaptable personalized Home page would also play into the overall user experience of Roon as a Music Player that presents Your music as a Magazine.
// 6: Sonic analysis
Considering adding the option to do Sonic analysis of the tracks to be able to match them for Radio/Playlists. I have Bookmarks for both “Late Night” and “Training/Work-Out” music . They are very different but can include the same artists and genres. Plex and Pandora has this feature.
MusicIP/Spicefly has similar features , found this in tread started by @armandhammer in 2020. I believe this was integrated into Spotify as MusicMatch in the early years. Roon does not have to develope all features themselves if available from a proven trusted supplier.
// 7: Use of AI
Make use of AI for later-later releases if/when more mature and resources available.
I have a few playlists in Roon today for discovery music/genre’s that is AI generated from Soundiiz to Tidal and Qobuz. The generation of these would be improved if the rules could include to avoding stuff i already have in my library and enable user interaction on the fly to adapt the source/seed/text.
Edit:
// 9: Library vs Non-Library tracks in Radio
It would be nice to have the option to decide if Radio (and Daily Mixes) should prioritize the (i) track from library or ii) track with highest quality independent of location.
/Edit
==> Einar needs to stop now …
Figure below shows example with Focus for the use case above with Gillian Welch as seed where i have added, (i) last played, (ii) artist not to be played, (iii) genre and (iv) releases from 2000 onwards. The latter just to save the classics of the John’s (Hiatt, Prine and Cash) for another radio dedicated to “old favorites”.
My experience would say overhaul. It’s repeating of same few artists in a session is far too common, it slaps repeats too many tracks from the original album that seeded it. It needs to be aware if the seed has been played as single track or as the last track of an album so it can avoid playing any of these again.
Its also very prone to play one track that completely is out of wack genre and style wise then go back in on point after it. This is unacceptable competely. I was listening to an artist the other folk rock from 60’s 70’s Shawn Phillips. Radio played lots of similar music although I have more of this style but missed out lots, not sure Fleetwood Mac fit either but would leave this what got my goat was GoGo Penguin ended up being played this is very modern Jazz and nothing at all related to what I was playing.
At moment I have limited Radio to my own library but it is the same as when using Qobuz. Too many repeated artists and tracks and random tracks that bare no relevance at all.
It’s been like this for years now it’s like Valance has rebelled like a moody teen and refuses to conform.
Yeah I didn’t make my point very well, which is: music and listeners are complicated; this is hard stuff. I don’t reject the idea that Gillian & Amos are related on some level. But those two songs? I don’t see it. Reasonable minds may differ on this, I understand. But I think one of the things Roon excels at is the deep dive, which in this case I think should mean the ability to build a playlist with songs that are related by more than the fact that the artists have crossover fans.
Speaking of, if you folks rebuild the Radio engine it would be sweet to have the ability to build out the playlist by more than 1 song at a time.
Slacker Radio had this UI when I used it many years ago. You could fine tune the radio. Roon should absolutely add something like this, and expand on it. Ideally with ways to save them as different “DJs”. For example a “Deep Tracks Discovery” DJ or a “Popular Favorites” DJ. It would also be great if for the Year you could limit it to specific decades, and not nebulous ideas like “Classic” and “Older”.
For another idea, Plexamp has “Guest DJ” functionality accessible from the Now Playing UI:
If Roon could implement both of these ideas, along with some code in the background to eliminate repeating certain songs/albums/artists too often, it would make the radio a million times better.
Also YES to these ideas:
Thumbs Up / Thumbs Down affecting your personal preferences and having an immediate effect on the current radio queue. See: Rdio and Spotify, circa 2012.
Sonic Analysis similar to Plex. Genre is not enough.
Ability to use multiple artists or tracks as seeds for a radio. e.g. make a station that’s a mix of music similar to Madonna + Led Zeppelin + John Coltrane + Daft Punk. Or Punk + Synthpop + Bluegrass genres. Why not?
Get rid of Valence. It clearly has problems. As I outlined in this post, Roon seems to have a very good idea about the relationship between artists and tracks in my library (I guess this is the Focus part?), but from what I can tell the Radio is blind to all of it.
Fix the repetitiveness. I know it’s common for users to say “How hard can it be?” but a good start would be as simple as “When artist XYZ appears in the radio, don’t put artist XYZ in the queue for the next 50 songs”. Also use better fuzzy matching so that Album Title ABC and Album Title ABC (Remastered) are seen as the same thing. Also fix the thing where if an artist has 10 albums in their discography for some reason the radio frequently plays tracks from only 1 of those 10 albums, even when all of the albums are well-regarded and have hit songs.
Spend some time digging through my thread from November 2020 which detailed a lot of these issues, from many other users, with copious amounts of data (including a spreadsheet) and also included many suggestions for improvements. Based on what I’ve read in the replies above in this current thread, it seems like most of the same problems still exist. I would love to come back to Roon, but not if the radio (my most used feature) is still broken.
Lord have mercy. I just came back to Roon from Plex and played the “New Jack Swing” genre radio. This is what it spit out right away. Note that I have dozens of New Jack Swing songs in my library and I’m connected to Tidal as well. The majority of these songs are not NJS. It seems like the knowledge of Valence here is “Artist has a NJS song somewhere in their discography, therefore all of their songs are NJS” or “Artist is black”. And Amy Winehouse… I can’t even.
Boyz II Men - In the Still of the Night 
Bobby Brown - My Prerogative 
En Vogue - Giving Him Something He Can Feel
Michael Jackson - Billie Jean
Janet Jackson - Love Will Never Do (Without You)
Alicia Keys - Why Do I Feel So Sad
Fitz and the Tantrums - Dear Mr. President
Kelela - Something Else
Amy Winehouse - Valerie
Ike and Tina Turner - Save the Last Dance for Me
Please Please Me - James Brown
Commodores - Lighting up the Night
@nathan I gave up on Roon Radio a long time ago as it was too repetitive overall. Whilst it did not repeat the same song I found it would just cycle around the same few artists and albums. I decided to try it again after reading this thread. Here’s what happened in the next 50 tracks.
Only 17 different Artists played in total. 9 of them were played more than once, including 4 of them played six or more times. Furthermore on 20 occasions these were from albums already played. There were 7 tracks played from one album alone and 4 and 5 from two other albums!
The first 11 songs were from different artists and then after that there were only six new artists in the next 39 songs.
This is still not radio for me. I hope you are able to break Roon Radio out of these ruts.
FYI the seed in my queue for this one was Wildflowers Vol. 1 by Kurt Elling / Sullivan Fortner
I’m looking for examples of tracks/albums/performers who when you play end up having repetitive radio sessions.
I’m not talking about cases where the same content is present in multiple distinct sessions - but some item that when you Start Radio on it you see multiple of the same performer, album or track in the resultant playlist.
Hello @nathan
Appreciate that You are looking into the repetetive behaviour of Roon.
If You are looking for use/test cases i have a session of 82 tracks with Bruce Springsteen radio where i get “Drive” by “The Cars” 3 times, one from Qobus and other two from my local file. If i remember correctly i started this session one day, paused it, and then continued the next day.
Four of the Bruce tracks are from the latest Best of compilation with Dancing in the Dark twice. This session happened on the 1st of September. I have a playlist of it if you do not have access to the profile history-log (Einar).
A quick review of the session shows:
In addition to the 3 times “Cars-Drive” in the Bruce radio session i also got “Drive” in my Daily Mix the day after together with 3 times “Addicted to love” by Robert Palmer in 3 different DM’s. Attached PRTSCRNs of the DM’s of 2024-09-01 below , Time-Stamp (Norway) in filename.
From my point of view it would be good it Roon Radio and DM’s included “Last Played” in the algorithm where “manual” plays was considered as well.
Start a Pink Floyd radio session. After around 50 tracks it starts repeating the same handful of artists and the same handful of their albums. It rarely if ever repeats the same track though.
I’ve documented this in greater detail on another thread.
This is exactly the problem I have faced. A radio session eventually gets stuck in a groove of playing a few albums by a few artists.
@nathan This for me would be the key issue to fix. I have never really had it repeat the same track from the same album, except maybe once or twice.
I think fixing the repetition would be a great start, but there are some excellent suggestions in this thread now for making Radio much improved.
Check out the thread where I documented this exact problem 4 years ago. As far as I can tell, they haven’t fixed the issue nor implemented any of the suggestions that I and other users put forth way back then.
The main reason I subscribed to Roon was to discover new music and get away from how stale other services (Apple Music, Spotify, etc) are, but if the radio function is repetitive and extremely limited in options then there’s no point to me. I have plenty of ways to listen to entire albums or specific tracks that don’t require Roon. What I want is a Radio / Custom Mix / Discovery that I can “set and forget” for hours or days on end with few repeats and music that matches whatever input parameters I gave it. Right now Roon Radio is not it, and I’m baffled why Roon hasn’t fixed it nor improved it in 4 years – at least not that I could tell when I re-subscribed and tried it again a couple months ago.
