Understanding Valence and Classical Music

Brian

This sounds genuinely exciting. I trust that you will have the PR team in overdrive, as this should have massive appeal to those classical music lovers who were uncertain about Roon.

Roll on the big day.

This is awesome, can’t wait to see it in action.

Same concern. If this is an issue, I’m hopeful it can be controlled to some extent in settings.

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There is not a heart big enough to tell you how much I thank you. I hope your pay and your holidays are doubled immediately.

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I note that the latest email about Roon 1.8 (“Classical Music Reimagined”) is much more nuanced in its wording about how Roon makes recommendations - no naive language about “no-name” recordings, and being careful to distinguish how Valence operates against your personal library vs. discovery through the streaming services.

I do want to say I very much appreciate the effort to distinguish and improve the Classical experience for serious Classical listeners, and I also very much appreciate the effort to help newer Classical listeners to discover the depths and pleasures of this genre. Being part of the software industry myself, I know the feeling of “no good deed goes unpunished” and I don’t want to add to that.

I realize that when it comes to deciding which of 100s of performances of popular works to recommend, some kind of criteria has to be applied, and unfortunately there is no equivalent of Rotten Tomatoes to aggregate critical opinion on the worthiness of various performances. Defaulting to the popularity of the artists is not a very good answer, but it’s an answer. And beyond that, I’m looking forward to using the new features in 1.8 and reporting back!

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As it’s Valence based so “probably” based on how popular the music is with Roon users.

And thus came the algorithmic discovery that Celine Dion is in fact opera, and that Bruce Springsteen redefined the oratorio.

I think that’s categorisation not popularity :sunglasses::sunglasses:

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I’d add that it’s sometimes a very bad one: Karajan was banned in my household growing up, and that’s something I’d rather not change, for example.

Go explain that to the authors of the enraged posts that will doubtless happen if Roon Radio segues from Pinnock’s version of Handel’s Water Music into My Heart Will Go On :stuck_out_tongue:

In the performing arts as well as in literature, conceited opportunists and egotists are certainly quite abundant. For better or for worse, that alone does tell us nothing about the esthetic quality of their artistic achievements.

I don’t own a single one of Karajan’s recordings, but wouldn’t have him banned either, just because of his opportunistic and egotistic stance during German fascism.

There are users who need no excuse for outrage…

Oh, I’m well-aware of the abundance of raging narcissists in the arts, but thank you for explaining it.

This awareness matter cleared up, I do personally tend to draw the line at “making a career out of entertaining people while they make others into lampshades”, but man - to each their own. It’s just, and this, in my case, applies to Karajan like it applies to Phil Spektor like it applies to Bertrand Cantat, I don’t want to give them or their estates money through a streaming service, nor, should there be a choice, would I want their oeuvre to be put forward. If others want to go looking for 'em, fine with me.

There’s always the option to ban an artist or a composer from your Roon if you feel strongly enough about it… I’m assuming that Roon and Valence will respect your choices.

There is? That’s cool! I have a few I wish to ban from coming up on Radio.

@Xekomi , My father’s family fled Poland before the invasion. Most of my extended family perished in the camps. What I know about classical music I learned from my father, whose two passions were classical music and reading, compulsively skewed to the history of WW II. That’s it. That’s my post.

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Thank you for sharing.

If you haven’t already, and feel up to it, listen to Decca’s Entartete set of releases. What was, could have been, and was lost, shines through.

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Thanks for this list. Much appreciated. I only have Ute Lemper’s Berlin Cabaret Songs (in both the German and English versions) at the moment. My favourite has to be The Lavender Song by Spoliansky and Schwabach. More background here.

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Have you done anything about box sets, sub titles individual artwork etc.

This has long been a bone of contention with users with large libraries. Last count I had over 400 boxes may of which I simply can’t navigate, I revert to my old JRiver system where I can define what I see

Just a thought :grinning:

I’m a Roon user with Qobuz subscription and will be very interested to see how 1.8 improves the Roon Radio feature. I have a moderate library almost entirely classical and am very much a classical music listener and will often set Roon Radio off when working in the afternoons - sometimes this works very well - other times it seems to get stuck in a rut where it will play the exact same item several times over a period of a couple of hours, or will get obsessed by a particular composition playing different performances of it.
I shall also be interest to see how the overall classical music organisation improves in 1.8 as sometimes when searching I find that some performances of composition are missed, even though the metadata seems to be OK, although as we all know, classical metadata is a minefield at the best of times.
Still, looking forward to any improvements.

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