I’ve noticed this is nothing like random.
I have a group of artists tagged - mostly highly progressive rock or metal, mixed with similar approaches in the jazz genre – think King Crimson, Mahavishnu, Miles Davis, and Animals as Leaders.
I hit “Play Tag” and then “Radio” and 10 times out of 11 Radio started out with a fairly poppy Santana Song (like one from Supernatural). I don’t view this as anywhere similar to the artists within this tag. One of the artists is John McLaughlin and one of his albums is Love, Devotion, Surrender which has Santana on it. But Roon seemed determined to take this tenuous relationship to Santana and apply that as a gloss over the obviously jazz and hard-progressing leaning choices I had in my tag. The last thing I expect to hear from a tag that includes Eric Dolphy and Bela Fleck is Everlast.
I guess Santana has been, at times, a jazzy guitar dude and from there you get to it. But I am just curious about how Roon chooses tracks in Radio mode. That may help me refine my method of tagging to better match what I want Roon to play for me, when I want to venture outside of simply playing the tag directly.
As an aside, I have also noted Roon’s radio tendencies towards more popular and obvious choices. Maybe that’s the point - it’s like what your taste would be if on the radio - and if so, OK. But I’d really love a version that does more deep scraping of my collection and finds things I’d neglected to tag but which fit right in.
I would love to see many more shuffle options - from obvious hits to deep scraping, and with varying degrees of either depth (deeper into artists) or breadth (wider out into related genres) and maybe even allowing for choices like beats per minute (i.e. as a proxy for lively versus mellow music) or however we could slice and dice it. I want Roon to be my DJ, and to be so, it needs to have the logic to read what I’m asking and the options to meet my wishes. This could be really, really powerful given the metadata and the opportunity to dig into Tidal as well as my own collection.
Just a little Saturday morning musing. I decided just to directly shuffle my tag. Roon kept trying to play “Maria Maria” and I want something with more intellectual rigor this morning, as the tag implies…