I’ve been using Tidal for a while, but I’m not a fan of their desktop app, so I’m looking for an alternative solution. I like Roon as a player, I like the crossfeed, the support for my iFi DAC and my LCD2Cs. I hear it’s supposed to be great for music discovery too.
I’ve got 487 artists, 560 albums, a little over 3.2k tracks in my library. Tidal is able to provide me some decent recommendations on its own. Why is Roon not utilizing playlists (like ‘My Daily Discovery’) or album lists compiled and suggested by Tidal (‘Suggested New Albums’, ‘New Releases for You’)?
Roon seems completely clueless about the music I listen to, which I could understand, as it’s mostly pretty weird (think nu jazz, shoegaze, various idm-like electronica, some experimental hh), but the fact that it usually completely omits releases from artists I follow in the ‘New releases for you’ section is just unacceptable.
I would like to use Roon as a solution for playing music as well as music discovery, but the latter simply does not work for me at all.
Is there anything I can do to fix this? Are there any plans to improve the recommendation algorithms?
Hi and welcome to the wonders of the Roon community. I agree Roon can seem off on its recommendations but true discovery means trying new artists not just the ones you already have.
As regards new releases for you have you tried sorting by relevance rather than newest? Does that help?
As far as my discovery goes I have found the “what are you listening to now” threads on this forum fantastic and have trouble keeping up with all the great stuff there.
Another way I have picked up a lot of things is by selecting an artist I like and then going to their discography. Sorting this by popularity gives you the albums in order of the Roon user base usage.
Other forms of great discovery are your daily mixes on the home page based around music similar to artists in your library and then for further branching you can try the playlists by Roon that interest you.
There are many other ways such as clicking on artistes mentioned in reviews and bios. Roon is a multifaceted program, play around with it and give it some time.
I don’t mind recommendations, I’m all for listening to new artists and discovering ones I haven’t heard of before. It’s just that the suggestions are not very good, not even compared to Tidal, which isn’t exactly known for having the best recommendation algorithms anyway.
Besides, before I go exploring new artists and genres, I’d first like to discover new releases from my favorite artists. Otherwise what is the point of having a collection and following them? Going through a list of like a hundred artists every now and again to see if they’ve released something doesn’t exactly sound like a fun time.
There were at least 10 releases last week on Tidal that were of interest to me. Out of those 10 releases Roon is not showing me even one of them. It’s not showing me any releases from a week or two weeks before either. It’s just completely useless to me. When sorting by relevance, I’m seeing stuff from June that is somewhat related to what I listen to. As in, deadmau5 is electronica and Drake is hiphop I guess, but I don’t exactly need to discover them, and I certainly have no interest in listening to their stuff over what my favorite artists released recently.
I’m trying to stay positive and accept that some things will work differently, but for a service that prides itself on music discovery, this is kind of a bummer. I guess I’ll see if the recommendations improve towards the end of the trial.
You can then drill down into the sub genre you want and look at those sections.
The best recommendations I’ve seen in Roon come even more granular. Taking your example of shoegaze, I’ll go to my library and find one I’ve been listening to a lot recently:
You can also do this on tracks (by tapping and holding on a track for mobile, right click on desktop) or start the radio by artist.
To go to your point about the new releases section. Roon have said that the section is supposed to be a very general list of albums that you might like I.e. they are in genres you like. It’s not tailored heavily to you. The recommendations on the sections / areas I’ve shown above are.
Those will be tailored heavily based on what you are listening to recently and the album / artist / genre you are looking at.
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AceRimmer
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99% of the new music I find via Roon comes from the recommended albums “for you” section.
Unfortunately it seems to be not too well known area to dive into.
Again though Roon documentation for this could also be better.
Save your Daily Discovery Tracks in Tidal to a playlist and add a few days in a row (or however many you want). That playlist will then appear in your Roon Playlists and you can then do your discovery from there using any of the above hints as well as plenty of others that are available using the tools available in Roon Artist pages such as Key Members, Similar Artists, Performing the Music of …, , Key Influencers etc etc.
Delete or keep the songs in the playlist to your liking.
You should not be experiencing this you should get the latest releases. Try logging out of tidal, rebooting your core and logging in again to see if that changes things.
Don’t bother with new releases for you it’s pretty useless and it takes ages to start getting anything half decent and then you have found them yourself. Best way is Roon radio or just following breadcrumbs from albums and other users. Recommendations in Roon are based on other users and their collections as much as your own and what they play so don’t expect it to rival any music streaming service as it just can’t manage that at all Valence really isnt that good no matter how much they big it up. As for Tidal I can’t agree with your assumptions about its algorithms, for me it’s the best hands down out of any of them it gets my tastes better than Spotify. Roon doesn’t have access to daily mixes currently likely take them a while if it’s now if it’s available for 3rd parties, it was just for Tidal app before.
Thank you all for the responses, wasn’t expecting so many.
@Fergus_B, that’s what I do, though I wish I could just use one platform for everything music related. @philr, I’ve tried reconnecting & rebooting like you said, but that doesn’t help.
I get that recommendations might be different, I’m perfectly fine with exploring manually to find new music. But from what I understand there is no way for me to discover through Roon that one of my favorite artists that I follow and often listen to just released a new album.
Take this guy called Four Tet as an example. He just released a new single called Mango Feedback (August 10.) Tidal alerts me, Spotify alerts me, Roon is silent. No mention in the New releases for you section of course, it’s not in the recommended albums section of the artist page (I guess those are based on popularity,) and it’s not even in the New releases for fans of Four Tet. That just doesn’t make any sense.
I understand what you are looking for you should be able to get the latest releases for artists in your library under new releases for you. That is what I get.
Sometimes there are sync issues with Tidal and my suggestion can fix that.
@support any ideas why @knrd is not seeing this and how he should fix it?
Thanks for the report here! Can you please let us know the exact local time + date + album when you run into the issue again of not being able to see Recommended albums? We can take a look at your Roon logs after to see if there are any specific errors in the logging, thanks!
Hey @noris, I wish I could get you those details, but my trial ended, and I don’t plan on subscribing until this is resolved. Judging by how Roon behaved during the trial period, it seems like the recommendation algorithm isn’t designed to check for releases from the list of my favorite artists.
Not sure if that’s helpful, but during the time period I was testing Roon I should’ve been recommended new release from Four Tet, KAYTRANADA, Anderson .Paak, Connan Mockasin, Panda Bear,Pink Siifu, Aleksi Perala, Thriftworks, Luke Vibert, GoGo Penguin and many more. I did not see a single release from any of them in the entire list of the NEW RELEASES section of the Recommended Albums, even though it reaches a few months back.
I finally found some time to make a comparison between Roon’s and Tidal’s New Releases section. As you’re probably aware, they have the My New Arrivals playlist updated every Friday on Tidal. It compiles releases from my favorite artists as well as some suggestions based on my location (I’m guessing) and location history. Apart from that I also get notifications (the bell icon in the top right) for some (promoted?) releases.
With Roon there’s the New releases for you section in the Home page.
Out of the 12 releases pictured above, only one comes from an artist that’s in my favorites. Let’s explore more releases and focus on the first 50 albums. The oldest album on that list was released August 26th 22. Out of those 50 albums, only 3 come from my favorite artists.
Now let’s look at singles. Again, sorted by newest. This list only contains 23 items. Out of those 8 come from my favorite artists, so that’s a lot better. The two oldest items on that list come from May and July.
Now let’s look at last week’s My new arrivals playlist from Tidal.
Artist - Release name - Release type - Release date - Suggested by Roon?
Pink Siifu - Real Bad Flights - Album - September 16 - No
Om Unit - Acid Dub Studies II - Single - September 02 - Yes
Aleksi Perala - UNITY II - Album - August 27 - Yes
NxxxxxS - No Witness - Single - September 16 - No
Bishop Nehru - Rock Lee vs Gaara - Single - September 13 - No
Jimmy Edgar - SLIP N SLIDE / STATIC - Single - September 15 - No
Partiboi69 - Dog Syndicate - Single - September 16 - No
Nosaj Thing - We Are - Single - September 07 - Yes
DJ Eearl - Inevirtable Shift! > Fear - Album - August 26 - No
Dj Spinn - Give Me Music - Single - August 15 - No
Bibio - Off Goes The Light - Single - September 08 - No
Here’s some additional ones from Spotify that are available through Tidal but haven’t been suggested by Tidal (in their recent playlist or ever, not sure about this one). Can Roon do better?
Artist - Release name - Release type - Release date - Suggested by Roon?
Ivy Lab - Balaclava - Single - September 07 - No
Fred P - Deeper Meaning - Single - September 09 - No
Bonobo - ATK - Single - Single - September 06 - No
Clark - Sparrow Arc Tall - Single - September 08 - No
Wand - Blue Cloud (Live) - Single - September 08 - No
Run the Jewels - Opening Theme (From “Aqua Teen Forever: Plantasm”) - Single - September 08 - No
Freddie Gibbs - Too Much - Single - September 01 - No
Elusive - Macrokosm - Single - September 09 - No
DJ Seinfeld - Never Gonna Get It - Single - September 02 - No
While checking to confirm that the artists above are all in my favs, I’ve noticed that some cannot be favorited for some reason. One such example is DJ Earl. The heart icon does not appear.
Some albums are inaccessible through Roon’s search despite being available. One such example is the album Macrokosm from the artist Elusive. When I search for (elusive macrokosm) it and click on the only available result, I get an error ‘This album was not found.’ I can access the album by going to the artist’s page and going through his discrography. I cannot add Elusive to my favorites either.
Some albums are late to become available through Roon. Even though I can play them on Tidal using its original client, I cannot find the album or play it through Roon (I cannot provide such an example right now.)
