What Happened to Editorial Ratings in Roon 1.8?! [Resolved]

Sorry to be the outlier. I hated those stars. Hated. Them.

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+1 for ratings back in Roon. Feel free to ignore them- but can’t ignore what is no longer there.

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Most importantly for me, Roon’s use of editorial ratings was one of the key factors that differentiated it from other streaming services. With that feature obscured, Roon might just as well be a pretty skin and interface for Tidal. I’m struggling to see what will continue to justify the use of Roon apart from conventional music streaming services if they convert their interface and algorithms to the tune of whatever is most popular. Roon cannot compete with something like Spotify on that basis, because Spotify’s user-base is effectively, infinitely larger than Roon’s.

I might have change aversion, but, as far as I can tell, functionality was actually removed. For example, on an Artist’s discography page, I can not use the focus feature to find albums by that artist with a 5 star editorial rating and I also cannot sort albums by their editorial rating.

I could live with the change if it was available in either one of those places, because I could still functionally do the same thing, but there is no way, as far as I can tell, to decipher which albums a critic may recommend. I, myself, as a highly critical person respect and highly value the opinions of other critics much more than the opinions of the mainstream.

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Roon Radio + editorial ratings are what made Roon a vast portal to musical discovery for me…and what prompted me to recommend Roon to others.

Now? Not so much.

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Agreed with everyone else. The ratings are certainly not gospel but were a useful guide to help decide what unfamiliar albums to sample. Please bring back that functionality.

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I’d be curious to hear an instance where an album that scores among the top albums based on popularity has such a low rating one wouldn’t want to hear it. And vice versa.
The point is, how much worse off would you be to take of the top 3-5 albums listed by popularity rather than a certain star rating? It’s different, but is it functionally worse?
It sort of comes down to credibility of the herd vs credibility of one review. If the popularity score isn’t credible, that’s certainly a problem.

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It’s irrelevant to displaying ratings. Like I said, many of us use our OWN ratings across albums for artists. Especially if you have a large collection. Especially if you’re listening to live music.

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That’s a good point @Matt_Simpson !

I dont have any specific examples off the top of my head, but you often find cases where an artist’s most popular (or well known) song is on one of their worst albums. Cases like this tend to skew the amount of attention these albums as a whole deserve.

The star ratings serve as a pretty solid guide for the artistic interest within a song. Needless to say, most popular music in the mainstream (especially from my generation) is not artistically very interesting.

One other thing i think we need to fact check is that the ratings do truly come from one person. As I understand, the ratings come from AllMusic, which are not only the ratings of one person. Perhaps the synapsis of the album is written by one person, but i have reason to believe that the star rating is not necessarily only one person’s opinion.

yes: after listening at them
editorial ratings, even if I (almost) never agree with them, are useful to start exploring unknown albums/artists :wink:

Interestingly, the ratings appear if you expand the ‘recently added’ albums and browse that way, but don’t seem to appear anywhere else.

Are you still able to make your own ratings too?

Yes - I can click on the ablum and update my rating, which is then shown in purple instead of the default black for the ‘stock’ rating.

Still there is no 5 star rating for tracks. :roll_eyes:

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I challenge any users who are not familiar with the catalogues of Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra to find their best albums.

Come back and tell us how you got on next year.

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In their prime took me about 30 seconds for Frank Sinatra 1954 to 1967.

This was great, Elvis Presley was listed as an Engineer on Alison Moyet Raindancing album. So I corrected this to my satisfaction whilst I was there, good old Roon.

The Elvis recommended albums was a good start for anyone to explore.

Please check out our latest release, Build 763! We’ve now added the ability to toggle stars as part of the album info, and we’ve also made sure that this information is displayed more consistently, including on the TIDAL and Qobuz pages. You can enable star ratings from the General tab of Settings, under “Customize Album Display”.

Full release notes here:

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There are no stars in:

Home
Genres > Albums
Tidal > More
My Library > Artists > Album
My Library > Albums

I can only see the stars in the
Tidal > Album Strip (they disappear if I select More…)
Specific Album page

The AMG stars are essential for my Roon experience, but now they are completely unusable.

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Hello @simoneratti,

The new Roon update (Build 763) has restored the ability to view AMG ratings on the album browse pages.

Once you’ve updated, make sure to go to Settings > General > Customize album display and enable the “Show album rating” toggle.

-John

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