Tentative Roon Radio suggestion but seeking opinions

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

I wasn’t sure whether to put this as a feature request because I might be in the minority and other people might actively like the current behaviour but I’ll put this out there as a feature request and other opinions can perhaps influence Roon’s attitude to my suggestion…

When I’m playing an album by [BandX] and have Roon Radio enabled so that once the queue is empty it starts playing similar-to-[BandX] stuff I find on a surprising number of occasions that once the album is finished the very first similar-to track that is played is another track, admittedly from a different album, by [BandX]. I have no objection to Roon Radio throwing in some tracks from other albums by the same band, it’s helpful and interesting, but I always feel a bit cheated when the very first similar-to-[BandX] track suggested is just [BandX] again.

So my very modest feature request would be to put a filter into whatever algorithm is generating the similar-to suggestions such that the first few tracks suggested after an album has finished are by different artists before Roon Radio starts suggesting other tracks from the same artist.

I know it’s not a biggie but I would assume it would be pretty easy to implement and I think it would help to enhancing the “Roon Radio is throwing up interesting stuff” impression rather than give a “Roon Radio isn’t really trying” feeling.

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3

I like the suggestion and have noticed the same thing occurring for me also.

4

Thanks for the feedback. We did make an explicit decision to allow a track by the same artist from the very beginning of the radio stream, though there are rules against many other classes of sameness in this slot (e.g. same album, same composition, …).

As you get into the stream, the rules tighten up to reduce repetition, but at the beginning, we felt that allowing the algorithm the freedom to stay closer to home for a beat created a good feeling more often than it did harm.

Sometimes a track by the same artist can provide an easier transition into more distantly related content. In many genres, it is unlikely to be noticed at all. For band-oriented genres (believe it or not, a minority use case for our user base) it could be more or less noticeable depending on how narrow the band is and whether the user is engaging in active listening or passive listening.

Radio is trying to address a really wide range of use cases across a lot of types of music. It can be difficult to balance the tradeoffs for everyone sometimes. We’ll definitely think about this feedback next time we are tuning this part of the system.

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