I have also been having disappointing results with some Classical sub-genres. So I changed my genre hierarchy within roon to match the allmusic hierarchy. Has made a big difference. I hadn’t realised how far I had departed from that hierarchy. I have no idea why it would make such a difference but so far it seems to.
I don’t know anything about DNB but I was curious so I edited my genre hierarchy to match the allmusic one. It’s quite complex with DNB which itself has a lot of sub-genres as you mention. Much more complex than with Classical for example.
I made sure “Electronic” was a top level genre in roon, and made sure “Jungle/Drum’n’Bass” pointed to it. I think you will need to “equivalent” your DNB tags to this one if you are using lots of different ones. I then added 2 or 3 albums from half a dozen artists you recommended and cleaned up the tags so they only had two left. Electronic and Jungle/Drum’n’Bass. A lot of them had Club/Dance, Techno as well. That sort of thing so I just deleted all those tags.
Seeded with genre “Jungle/Drum’n’Bass” I am getting a nice consistent (to my ears) radio stream. It’s not a genre I know so I don’t know if it is really DNB as you would understand it but there is certainly a lot of drum and bass and I am liking it well enough to add most of it to my library. There have been some obvious misses (even to my ears), where Qobuz has tagged some odd stuff with “Jungle/Drum’n’Bass” but they have all at least been tagged “Jungle/Drum’n’Bass” so there is a consistency of style. Mostly where there is a miss it is a more ambient “Electronic” track but I find that breaks it up nicely and doesn’t seem to sound out of place.
Yes I’m using just my local library, I dont stream any music.As Ive said it was perfectly acceptable before 1.6. What is 1.6 doing if I dont use a streaming service ?
It would appear to me that anything in the Electronic genre is used for radio tracks seeded from a Drum & Bass artist, except for this tagged Drum & Bass!
Drum & Bass and Jungle are styles of Electronic, I would include Break Beat in with them too. It would be hard for Roon to determine that these styles are also clique’s and don’t often mix at all with other Electronic styles, in fact they are often considered ‘enemies’ (for want of a better term) by followers of each style. I would hope that Roon would be more discerning than seemingly following the top level genre and focus more on the sub-genre/style that the seed track has. Using Focus to select Drum & Bass and Jungle artists shows I have 246(!) tagged this way.
If I use Plex, who uses similar metadata sources and also integrates with Tidal for ‘radio’ playback, the selections were pretty spot on. Seeding from Calibre (well known D&B artist) resulted in two more tracks from my library that were in the Drum & Bass style followed by:
Granted, not all of these tracks were to my liking and I cannot give ‘feedback’ to any algorithm that Plex uses as far as I know but it did at least keep the selections quite relevant.
Using Roon and seeding from the same artist this morning I get:
D&B (Tidal)
Dubstep (Tidal)
Techno (Tidal)
Techno (Tidal)
Garage (Tidal) - Calibre; same artist as seed
D&B (Tidal)
Dubstep (Tidal)
Techno (Tidal)
Break Beat (Tidal)
Experimental Techno (Tidal)
At least there were no repeats of artists I thumbed down, which happens often for more mainstream genres. But after these ten tracks Roon Radio wen’t way off into R&B, reggae etc… Had to be stopped.
Not sure what to make of it all really… It can be a bit tiresome using Roon Radio for mainstream genres as there are too many repeats from the same albums. I’m going to go for a long walk, where I will listen to more music using Plex… hint hint
My understanding is that without a streaming service roon 1.6 just reverts to the local library algorithm used in 1.5. So in principle you shouldn’t be noticing anything different at all.
The only thing I can think of is that if you have added/changed genre tags recently?That may have a bigger impact than you anticipated. On discogs I notice that your Ry-Co Jazz album has a lot of high level generic tags like “Folk” and “Country”. Tags like that will send roon radio all over the shop.
You might want to play around with aligning your genre hierarchy closer to allmusic. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a direct map for Afro-Latin. But probably making sure you have “International” and “Latin” as top level genres would be a good start and then mapping a close match sub-genre to one of those might help to “anchor” roon so it doesn’t go all over the place as you are experiencing. You can drill down into allmusic’s genre hierarchy here. It has made a big difference for me:
I’m not quite sure how to do this. I’ve never done anything with genres in Roon. I use TIDAL exclusively, so maybe all that works is already done?
Anyway, when I go to Roon’s genres I see “Electronic” as a top-level one. I click on it and see “Jungle/Drum’n’Bass” as a Subgenre. So I think that’s good for the first part?
I picked through the albums in there and removed extra tags (“club/dance”, “techno”, “rock/pop”).
So far so good?
Anyway, hard to say. Genre radio still not finding any DNB for me (some good tunes though! Just not DNB). I cleaned up Goldie’s Timeless in the manner you suggested, and I got maybe 20% DNB tracks in my short test which is an improvement for sure.
I have no way of knowing if these are really DNB. But they do have a lot of drum and base with the exception of the Amaranthine track which was more Electronic Ambient. But nice enough in the context of the other tracks. Qobuz has tagged them all “Jungle/Drum’n’Base”.
I just kicked off a radio stream with Calibre as this was just mentioned as typical DNB in another post to see what turns up. What I can say is that from 9 albums only one was tagged “Jungle/Drum’n’Base” by Qobuz. The rest had a single “Electronic” tag. So I have added a Jungle/Drum’n’Base tag to them all. Liked Calibre but 3 tracks in it’s got a bit too avant garde for me. I’ll let it run for a while to see what you think.
Well, even my untrained ears can tell that with Calibre I am getting a lot of generic Electronic, maybe no DNB at all. This is probably down to Calibre albums not being tagged as Jungle/Drum’n’Base by Qobuz. I much preferred the stream using the genre seed Jungle/Drum’n’Bass. But as I say I don’t know if that was DNB but I did like what I got.
Same experience for me. I’ve had sessions where I’m clicking the thumbs down dozens of times consecutively (if I’m lucky enough that it hasn’t come to an all stop / dead end), that I give up and either just play from my own created playlist in Roon, or I bring up Spotify/Apple Music if I’m more in the mood for radio/discovery, without these issues.
I’m all for helping the algorithm with feedback but if it turns a listening session into a frustrating experience more often than not (for me), it’s not fun.
First world problems of course - as mentioned above I have other options that can get a listening session back on track and fun again (like using Roon the way I was before v1.6 or using Spotify/Apple Music for significantly better radio/discovery with more popular music).
Hopefully this experience improves, especially for those of us that listen to what Roon considers to be low data stuff. We’re only one week into v1.6 of course, so plenty of room for improvement.
I kicked it off this morning just playing a single track from anna calvi and it has behaved itself. Ive just played on track from Ry-Co (the only tags are african and african jazz) its now gone to theivery corporation (acid jazz, dance, electronic and trip hop) and next up is neil young and crazy horse all rock tags and next is a brazilian album ??
I don’t think roon recognises the african or african jazz tags. The album is also unidentified? That is why it is so random. Do you ever use the genre mapping in settings? You can map those two there to something that roon does recognize. Might make it less random. But there isn’t anything there that is close to what you want. There is “african traditions” but I think that will just link to a lot of Mali and other african folk music you probably don’t want. It’s worth experimenting though with genres roon does know about to see if you get a radio stream you prefer. I would probably map them to “International” as the best of a bad job.
That your listening tastes don’t appear to be well represented here doesn’t mean that people here are stuck listening to things from the past. There’s plenty music being made and listened to by people on this forum that is outside of your chosen genres and outside of mainstream crap.
After skimming through this thread, I haven’t found the answer to my question.
The question:
I want Roon Radio to only choose songs from my library. I don’t want a Pandora “experience.” I don’t want recommendations from the cloud.
I do my own music discovery. 95% of what Roon 1.6 plays for me in Radio is pretty awful. I don’t want to have to thumbs-down the seemingly-endless supply of unlistenable music that Roon recommends to me from the cloud.
Sorry if I’ve missed it, but how do I obtain this “experience”? By that I mean 1.5. Do I need to downgrade?
When seeding a classic rock heavy metal song I am trying to minimize the newer speed metal suggestions.
Some seeds get a lot of repeat from seed artist and a few similar. Other seeds can produce a broad list.
I would say I prefer when most of the tracks are from my large library vs mostly all new artists. If I am going to chase all new then I might try a curated playlist. For the most part my radio experience has been mostly tracks in my library although some are same songs but from cloud. The new artists have been mixed in lightly which I enjoy.
I made a recent post with my observations about Roon Radio, some data, and a reasonable suggestion for improvement. Thought it might be useful to cross-link it here for anyone who might be following this thread.
