I have read a few different posts on how the Radio functionality works - however unfortunately I´m still not clear why I´m experiencing what I am experiencing.
For example, I have many CD´s that I have tagged with the “metal” genre, while ripping them. If I play a track from one of those albums, and let radio take over - I find that it will then continue to play tracks from a very small group of artists/albums again and again (around 5) , and it never really diverges to any of the other 200+ albums that I have added the “metal” tag too .
Is this the intended design of the Radio functionality, or is it a result of the way I´m organising my tags (or the way I´m using the software) perhaps ? Ideally, I would hope to just begin playing a song from an album, and then Radio continues to play songs from albums with the same tag/s across the entire range of my collection - to give a wide variety of playback.
The Radio algorithm appears to be slated for change and feedback from users as to how they would like to see the radio feature work is being welcomed.
One idea might be to have it select music from genre tags on an album or group of albums with a “temperature slider” that determined the breadth of parent/sibling/cousin genre tag inclusion.
Apart from broadening the algorithm within a genre, how would you like to see the radio feature working ?
Hi there, and thanks for the quick reply and links to the other threads. I realise I´m not alone on this topic!.
For my own personal use, in a very simplistic way - I would like the option to 1) Play a song or album, and once that is finished it should play another song from another album, that is in the same genre as the first, and 2) Play a song, and the next song can come from any other album I own - as in true “random” across my entire collection - as if I have added all songs into a single playlist, and just hit shuffle. Not taking into account genre. (or anything really).
Although the problem with with first option, as I see it - is that in addition to user created tags (during ripping), Roon adds it´s own tags (such as Rock/Pop) to the same albums. So if I start out playing Slayer which has “Metal” (Tagged during Ripping) and “Rock/Pop” (A Roon added Tag), then Roon may move onto another album that has the “Rock/Pop” tag, but not the “Metal” tag. Ending in an odd radio experience of going from Slayer, to Fleetwood Mac
So an option for that, would be to somehow choose to remove all Roon generated tags from the Radio algorithms. Then it should stick to the genres I have specified myself and give me a better radio experience (as I feel I know what genres my music should belong to, in the context of my own collection).
Now that I think about it - I think it makes more sense for the Radio algorithm to base its selections on user generated tags only. Or at least give more weight to those first. And if none exist, go to Roon generated tags.
I used to have an audio analysis/player programme that fingerprinted your collection (MusicIP) then you could create playlists by seeding the list with a chosen song and then apply characteristics to the resultant list the characteristics were radio like but also allowed to change the similarity, replace artists etc.
I am not saying that this could be done in roon but some of the abilities that this gave is sort of replicated in the thumbs up and down in the radio pre-list. It would be good if in some non-resource constrained future a more complete radio function allowed more tweaking with
I would like radio to integrate all of the Tidal library for the genre/artist/composer I want to hear, not just the Tidal selections I have added to my Roon library. I liked the way MOG radio worked. Thanks!
I’m a Roon lifer and am very pleased with it but the lacking Radio implementation is disappointing.
It seems that the objective of Roon was the maximize the metadata and linking to facilitate manual music discovery and while that is fantastic alone, a robust Radio would work in concert (LOL) with it. Imagine having access to the metadata and links for music that the Radio discovers for you in Tidal!!
What I find the most odd is that every other service, to a greater or lesser degree, has Radio figured out. Apple’s “Genius” does an incredible job of “intelligently” selecting songs from my 15,000 iPod library - 25 at a time, well chosen and with no artist and album dupes. Spotify does a much better job as well.
It seems like a non-trivial thing to have intelligent music matching that goes beyond using tags. I don’t know if there’s a service out there that Roon could use without having to write something based purely on tagging but the fact that others do it [Pandora, Apple, Rhapsody, Spotify, Tidal (?) ] suggests to me that maybe there is.
I would rather the Radio have the intelligence to pick hits/preferred songs from any given album rather than just picking anything with a similar genre tag. If Radio randomly picks the worst song from an album/artist that I’m not familiar with, that leads to a bad first impression. If it picks a song that’s been played to death, I could either enjoy hearing it again, or it could still lead me to choose something else by that artist. Eras are just as important as genres and as albums are remastered and re-released with current year tags, that metadata is also very unreliable.
I’m looking forward to a update to Radio. The promise of metadata + Radio is what I really want from Roon. That and HQPlayer integration! I have every confidence that the Roon team will come through on all counts and at that point, Roon will be better (IMO) than even they initially imagined.
I was wondering if this will be addressed in version 1.3? Apple Genius now works with Apple Music. Having the same functionality with Roon/Tidal would take Roon to a new level for me!
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
13
I sure hope so. To me that’s the biggest downside of Roon so far. I’ve been using it for 4 months and the current shuffle functions make my 5000 album collection seem a lot smaller, with predictable shuffle and Radio. I expect this will be rolled out soon, because Roon has been admitting it needs work for quite some time.
This thread is between two and four years old. Radio was completely revised in Roon 1.6 earlier this year and now includes tracks from streaming services not in the Library.
Feedback on the current Radio implementation can be given in this thread:
