I don’t know the details. Only roon does. But they have been clear enough what they are doing depends on a streaming account, so I am sure they have their reasons.
But it’s not all bad if you don’t have a streaming account. I actually get better results with some genres with 1.5. Mostly that seems to be where I have a large local catalogue in a minority taste genre. Those results are very dependent on removing over-arching tags which tend to make bridges to other parts of your library that make no sense to you. I’ve done that in a few cases but TBH it is just too much work for me so I tend to use focus and shuffle instead. One example I was finding was that Indian sitar music is often tagged Classical and Chamber and World Fusion. So I was finding that a Classical session was quickly being bridged into Club/Dance.
They do… Tidal and / or Qobuz is required in order to provide a rich enough pool of content for playback. It’s highly unlikely there’s sufficient correlation between individual libraries to enable meaningful playback without leveraging content from either streaming service.
Anders, it’s not about searching, it is about deep indexing or even semantic analysis of music. I do not know to what depth Roon is analysing the user’s musical database, but I suspect it’s only on the level of lexical entries and relations in a genre thesaurus. This is by far neither appropriate nor state of the art of musical indexing and retrieval.
Did you see Brian’s explanation? He said that they investigated doing that, and said it was a lhuge effort for a 5 - 10% improvement, and most customers want the joint processing.
@brian do you have any suggestions for training Roon on things it doesn’t do well? Or are individual listeners just too small of a sample size, and it needs to be fixed upstream?
For example, how do I get Roon to play jungle / drum & bass? (I would prefer it help me find jungle / DNB that I like, but any would be a good start)
Also, I am getting tons of TIDAL errors, which I’ve never seen before. So, I would give you more examples, but most of my choices are failing.
Seed: Basement Track by High Contrast Result: 0/10 jungle / DNB tracks
I don’t think I could distinguish Jungle D&B from nearby genres/artists by eyeballing a list or by listening–just not my area of expertise, so it’s tough for me to understand those lists and see a pattern of what might be going wrong.
How would you describe the stuff that it’s picking?
Can you name 8-10 artists you’d like to see for this category? Maybe I can look around in the data and identify some axes on which they are deemed related and get an idea.
Not in practice… I haven’t had luck with artist, track, album, or genre seeds.
(I have had good success with other genres, including hip hop which others have complained about)
I wonder if it’s the “electronic” tag which seems to go side-by-side with the “jungle/drum’n’bass” tag? “electronic” is super wide-ranging.
You know how people who know nothing about electronic music describe it all as “techno”? That’s how I would describe the selection
It feels like a random-ish selection of music made by electronic means. There’s some house, some acid, some ambient (no drums!!). The closest thing to DNB in there is some UK garage type stuff.
But basically none of the tracks would be identified as jungle / DNB by anyone who listens to it.
Super broad but accurate description from wikipedia:
The style is often characterised by fast breakbeat typically 160–180 beats per minute with heavy bass and sub-bass lines
Dillinja
Goldie
High Contrast
Calyx & Teebee
Ed Rush & Optical
Roni Size
Stakka & Skynet
Netsky
London Elektricity
Nu:Logic
Danny Byrd
Commix
Photek
Lenzman
Shy FX
Caveat: High Contrast and Netsky are both venturing out of the realm of DNB (e.g. Netsky’s latest EP “Abbott Kinney”, very cool but not a single DNB track), but started life as DNB artists. The rest of the artists on the list are squarely in DNB-land from what I know.
Some albums:
Fifteen Years of Hospital Records (compilation)
Roni Size - Take Control (artist album)
Dieselboy - Dungeonmaster’s Guide (DJ mix album)
High Contrast - High Society (artist album)
Jungle / DNB has all sorts of different vibes (Calyx & Teebee is a very different vibe from High Contrast, for example). If Roon shuffled the artists I talked above, my response would be “Roon doesn’t know much about DNB, but at least it can identify it.”
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.
