In theory I really love the Roon radio feature. It is nice when you got company, your playlist is at its end and you don’t have to be DJ all the time. It’s also nice to discover new music that way.
Of course it has its flaws especially in classical music. There are too few genre distinctions considering classical music. People who listen to Schubert’s chamber music, or to very small and intimate interpretations of Bach’s Cantatas normally don’t want to listen to a full-blown symphonic Beethoven or Mahler next. But classical seems to be classical without further distinctions.
Roon radio as of today is to “dumb” for this. So I would like to help Roon radio to learn, by using the thumbs up or down whenever Roon Radio chooses new and unknown music after my playlist is through.
And here is the problem: a lot of the music suggested I don’t know yet… But I can only give it a thumbs up or down when it is still a suggestion for “playing next”. But I don’t know the music yet… so that feature doesn’t make any sense at all. The idea of rating is great, but it should be possible to rate Roon Radio’s suggestion when the track is already playing, not before.
Have thought this before but it hasn’t come out of my mouth.
Now, it’s true that when I skip the track I don’t like, it’s true that it asks me the same question as if I thumb downed it, soo assume it’s learning the same way, but it seems inconsistent about when it asks vs doesnt.
I was referring to the “queue-view“. You can only rate the following track there, which I may not even know yet.
Furthermore - to do the approach of machine learning justice - I would suggest more complex ratings.
For example: thumbs down may not mean that I don’t like the chosen music at all… maybe it’s just “not now”.
I understand the issue and I would agree that the Radio feature could be better, but in this case, asking for a very specific solution isn’t the way to go (saying this as someone who worked for more than a decade as a senior software engineer and had other titles in the same field).
There are many ways to solve this issue. For instance, Roon could opt to maybe show multiple song recommendations at the same time, with you having the option to add a song from that list, and every time you add another song, the list will be updated with more tailored list of recommendations. That’s just one other idea from the top of my head.
If Roon uses Agile, then the Product Owner of this department should be the one who should decide the type of solution for the problem, which is: “Roon’s Radio feature isn’t as useful when presented with a recommendation that’s unknown to the listener”. Feel free to disagree with me, but that’s my two cents and at the end of the day, it’s someone at Roon who has to make the creative executive decision.
