When I’m shuffing a genre, why doesn’t any of the upcoming music show up in the Queue? I see one track that is currently playing, but not any of the upcoming tracks? Also, why doesn’t it play everything in the genre? I have a couple albums from a local artist, but it will NOT play those albums, even though they are listed in the genre.
Very interesting, what I see looks like the actions of Roon Radio, I wonder if it just uses Roon Radio to make the selections, normally when I play some music, after it ends, Roon Radio kicks in, and at that point there is only 1 item in the Queue, with the right side panel of the Queue used to showcase the next item, and I see the same thing with Shuffle, except the wording is changed from Radio to Shuffle.
Well, it seems this is being done by the Valence engine, which also drives Roon Radio and Play Artist Now. Because of that, the selections are made on the fly, and Valence is picking from everything it has available including your local library. You don’t have a lot of control over this, but there are two things you could do.
While viewing the Queue screen you’ll see the thumbs up/down buttons. If you repeated press the thumbs up button, Valence will populate the queue with its selections so you can see what it is picking. You can also edit those choices.
At the top of the Queue screen (just left of Shuffle) you see three stacked dots. Press that and you can see the option to limit the Queue selections to your local library.
edit: I should also point out this function has it’s limitations. It is probably not going to exhaust every track choice because of how the choices are made. It is also common to have some tracks be repeated. When I use the “Play Now” function its not uncommon to see a number of track repeats, especially after it has been running for a while.
So I actually just cleared the queue, and it in fact does say “Roon Radio”. I guess I should ask, when I select a Genre from ‘Genres’ I have two selections, Shuffle and Roon Radio… they are both just Roon Radio; is there no old school Shuffle?
Selecting Roon Radio does say “Started Roon Radio” and it takes a minute to start up compared to select ing “Shuffle” but in the end they are really both the exact same thing?
Like many things in Roon, it is context sensitive. If you selected an album or playlist and hit shuffle, it would shuffle those discrete tracks.
I’m not 100% sure about Genre, but I suspect that since it can span beyond your local library, it uses Valence and it works like Roon Radio. I just tried playing shuffle for Punk Blues and limited the selections to my local library and it seems to behave like a usual shuffle in the sense only my library is played, but you need to ‘thumb up’ (a Roon verb) to see what the queue will be.
With shuffled albums or playlists, the shuffled track list appears in the queue.
Not gonna lie, that’s kind of dumb… queue’s historically (for most digital apps) will fill your queue with upcoming songs, not just one at a time, you can add/remove tracks from your queue. They might as well just get rid of shuffle and just have Roon radio.
Also Roon Radio/Shuffle does not play everything in your genre if you aren’t connected to another service (I removed Tidal) it will (for me) only pick from 2 albums.
You aren’t the first person to feel that way…
They are not the same. First, shuffle only plays tracks that are in your library. Since you are starting with a Genre, it will shuffle tracks from all ALBUMs which are in that Genre. This can be confusing if you have a sampler album that is in the selected Genre, that has tracks from other Genres on it.
Roon Radio, takes one track and bases the choices around that track. However, the selection logic is different between using "“only your library” and “using your library AND/OR a streaming service”. Only the later will invoke Roon’s Valence AI.
1 Like
@Rugby, let me make sure I understand this…
Does shuffle in a genre actually play every track in your library? If you let it go long enough it would only play each track once and only once? (as opposed to some Valence things like Play Now that may repeat tracks).
Regarding Roon Radio played locally vs. with a streaming service, is the selection something akin to random selection if not via Valence?
In both cases, do you have a sense of why the tracks that will be played are not presented in the Queue? If it isn’t because Valence is involved, is it ‘simply’ that it just presents them as the track is selected (either by thumbing or playing)?
In my testing, it plays in random order, each track once from all the albums listed in that Genre. You can test this yourself. Take an album and add a Genre for which you have nothing else. I made a top tier Genre called “Miscellaneous Test Disc”. I assigned it to several albums, and played all the tracks through comparing them to the actual disk tracks. Each track was played once, randomly, until everything had been played. Then it repeated the process.
Not random. Roon Radio with only local material is what Roon Radio used to be before Valence launched. Valence is only applied if there is a streaming service active. Otherwise, Roon defaults back to the pre-Valence Radio logic. Which is not Random, even if it feels like it is.
Roon Radio has never pre-built a Queue. Whether Valence, the old logic Radio, or the randomized shuffle, only the next track is selected for you to thumbs.
2 Likes