I am not an advanced Roon ARC user, but i use it to access my library when away from home. As such i generally listen to albums, like i do at home.
I haven’t tried Smart Downloads before but decided to give it a shot today.
To me it seems that it isn’t particularly smart at all, it simply downloads anything that i have been playing lately?
And, as i have been enjoying a playlist of high rez music ARC decided to download individual tracks from this playlist/compilation.
I don’t like that, unless the playlist as an entity is downloaded.
Music (tracks) without context is of little importance to me, as an album-centric listener. Even if the context is a highrez playlist, it’s a lot better than a “wild” track…
And, to be honest, the latest playback history doesnt make much sense to act as a template for smart downloads, do you think?
For me it seems to download all of what I added recently, much of what I played recently, plus some kind of selection of stuff I played frequently in the past.
This makes sense to me because the things I added and played recently are most likely to be wanted offline right now. And remaining allocated storage can be used for past things I liked.
Maybe it depends on how much storage space you allocated. If it can’t download everything it must make choices and you may or may not agree, but stuff you played recently has some probability of being played again, seems to me. At least for me, I never play anything just once.
Also, it can’t read your mind for what you will want to listen to in the future unless it’s somehow related to past listening.
Thanks Mario,
i can see some logic in selecting the latest “listened to” and adding as smart downloads, however, it tends to be very mood dependant, unless the smartness includes some longer perspective as well. Perhaps also look at what kind of music is manually selected for downloads?
It seems, in the link provided that the algorithm is somewhat learning, so i’ll try this out by keeping some albums and trying it out over a longer period!