Understanding Valence and Classical Music

It sounds like a few avenues haven’t been closed off in Roon. Worth raising in Support (because it smells like an oversight bug) or Feature Requests, I think.

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Will do - I’d done it before IIRC, lemme see if I can find the thread and resurrect it.

Somehow I fail completely to match this statement from 9 days ago with the realities found in the released (beta?) version of Roon 1.8. But I do see a lot of good intentions burried below the poor execution.

I hope the fixed release will bring those to shine.

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With regard to the danger of the “crap creeping into one’s collection”, I’d like the possibility to “ban” certain albums.

Example: In the discographies displayed for older conductors (try Ansermet, Walter, Horowitz), you get lots of cheap pirate reissues (on Quboz also the plethora of BnF releases, which are mostly mono LP rips).

I hope that Valence somehow learns to avoid these, but I’d appreciate the possibility to ban them manually.

I hope so also. Frankly, just bewildered for now.

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Brian,

I’m afraid the Valence engine, for popular albums of recordings of a selected composer, needs work. A lot of work.

For the discography of a composer it’s pulling up many compilations albums with a single track (usually a single movement of a complete work) by that composer.

Take Haydn for example.

The first 5 selections are as follows:

The first album has one track composed by Haydn (out of 19)
The 3rd and 4th are entirely Beethoven.

Similarly, for Chopin, one of the top 5 is a trumpeter’s album with a single track of a transcription of a Chopin Prelude

For Brahms, of the top 5 : 4 are compilation albums Christmas Adagios, 100 essential classical , 50 Greatest Classical and an album showcasing Decca’s Analogue years…

Then there’s this Lang Lang album that must be on top of some chart that shows up at the top for any of the composers whose music is featured in it - and there are many - all single movements of larger works.

And so on for many composers

This makes the recommendation of popular work for a composer mostly useless.

You mentioned Opera

The first Recommended Album is an album entitled Rhapsodies of music conducted by Stokowski - nothing to do with opera and with a terrible, if entertaining, review.

The 4th album is one of the Boston Pops conducting various marches/rhapsodies and 1 opera overture.

For more see: BUG 1.8: Totally meaningless "Top Performers" for Classical Compositions

And also: What determines "popularity"?

Hope this is something that can be worked on and fixed.

That Lang Lang album is particularly irritating.

Mehul

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Roon seems to be corelating composers against their appearances in general non-composer specific box-sets. For example, large compilations like the 111 Deutsche Grammophone box-set contains works from every major composer you have ever heard off. That’s the point of box-sets such as those.

What this means is that when I do a search on “Claudio Monteverdi”, in my case roon is recommending popular works by Mendelssohn, Brahms and Gluck! The reason seems to be that all four of them, Monteverdi, Mendelssohn, Brahms & Gluck and dozens of other composers are on the 111 disc Deutsche Grammophone set. I have many large general non-composer specific box-sets like this, so that just compounds this basic error of search logic.

I am bewildered by the polarised response to 1.8. It’s almost as if we are all using different software. Of course that cannot be the case so all I can think of is it is the roon use cases that are polarised. There really does seem to very different segments that such basic functionality failures as this are beyond annoying by one group but acceptable, or perhaps even unnoticed by another segment.

So I’m not finding much use for this new functionality either I am afraid.

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Lang Lang seems to be getting recommended for everything. And the other day, Roon told me that Chris Thile was one of the top 3 performers of the Bach Violin Sonatas. He plays bluegrass mandolin! He may be very good, in his field, but he is not one of the top 3.

I agree with all the rest of your succinct and pertinent comments.

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At least it’s not recommending Hooked On Classics! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Just a little levity after a long week with 1.8.

The piano guys? :rofl: it’s all about context and I guess 100% data driven can gives wonky machine learning results. Perhaps some human curation is still required.

Valence can be a genius… but we had an old saying when I was writing software. GIGO… garbage in, garbage out. The problem is that while Roon may employ an army of ninja code kittens, and Valence may be the greatest thing since Pong, it is at the mercy of data quality from a third party provider. And the quality of that data is very bad. The deeper you go, the worse it gets.

I saw a hint here upthread that sounded like a possibility that Valence will/could continue to evolve to be maybe less dependent on that single source data and more reliant on the wisdom of the crowds so to speak. If so, that would be very interesting to see. Seems like we are in early days for Valence still. Looking forward to continuing developments there.

Once again want to express my appreciation for the work that has gone into the classical experience with 1.8. It has really moved the needle.

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What are the Classical plusses you are seeing?

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:rofl: 10 characters

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Roon told me that Chris Thile was one of the top 3 performers of the Bach Violin Sonatas.

I am certain he is, at least by streaming count.

Hi Brian, how do you select the Opera genre? I have Genre set to use Roon. If I Focus on Classical, I have to select Opera as a sub-genre and it shows me 39 albums in my collection, but only those albums and no other options. If I look at Genres from the main menu, there is no such category.

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@rcaudio Opera is a sub-genre of the Classical genre which is on the Main Menu Genres screen. Once you select Classical, head down to the bottom of that page to see all of Classical’s sub-genres.

If you wanted to make Opera visible on the Main Menu>Genre page you could make it a Top level Genre.

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@joel, it would be a lot nicer not having to scroll down a couple of pages to weed thru a lot of (often irrelevant) “Remommended…” “Top…” and “Popular…” stuff and get to the Sub-Genres pretty swiftly after the Main genre.

For me the “Genre” section is mostly unusable for this reason and the fact that it lists Genres that I dont even have in my library and that I will never listen to.

Just a suggestion…

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When I look at the Opera genre, I see the following (local library only)

It doesn’t show me the most important operas, only some albums with Operas on it. List seems rather arbitrary

Doesn’t show me any composers, vocalists, only conductors.

Since Valence requires a streaming subscription to work I switch it on and this is what I see in addition:

call me underwhelmed… the recommended albums are very hit and miss for someone wnating to explore the genre. Top Composers are OK, da Ponte is a librettist.

Notable compositions is not very inviting with only 2 entries for opera, that I need to scroll horizontally…

To be honest, I don’t need this anyway. I know my operas and have the means to explore stuff on the internet. But for an opera novice I don’t see the big value added either, compared to directly to go to Tidal or Spotify.

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This has been a long standing issue with Roon that Librettists and Lyricists (for Lieder etc.) are being classified as „Composers“ - even if they are correctly tagged!

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