In some use cases Roon Radio sessions only end when you choose play, play from here or play now options. If one had previously started a session after one artist that may be punk and then you decide to add an album to the queue from a completely different genre such as jazz the Radio session that was running is still active and will pick up again from where it left off at the end of what you added to the queue it doesn’t reset to start a seed from the last track played. So you will get Punk after Jazz. Only ending the session properly or hitting a play option will clear reset it to pick up a new seed. I do wonder if some of the complaints are because of this.
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You think the right hand is talking to the left always? I’ve seen recommendation systems where the incoming features / events have no indication where the ‘input’ was sourced from (for example, was it something a user actually played or an autoplay from the existing recommendation system?)
There’s a bunch of this going on in the ML and “AI” (god I hate that term) space and it’s kind of funny to me, bit of an oversight. Obviously, not everyone is making this mistake and it can be relatively trivial to work around once you realize the problem.
Today, Pink Floyd, ‘careful with that axe’, Live, followed by Tracey Chapman, Mountains O’ things
Lol.
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Roon playlist : “Careful with that axe before you chop mountains of things”. 
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Just swinging by to say just how good Roon Radio has recently become on classical music. It still dives a bit too far off piste, particularly with rock/folk/country crossover stuff, but its recommendations have introduced us to some fabulous new classical stuff, from modern and ancient composers, that we’d simply no clue about.
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I wish that were my experience. Had classical guitar playing the other night and Roon radio inserted an a cappella version of Bare Necessities (Jungle Book). Also not fond of the random opera inserted into the playlist.
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Hello, Sorry to jump on the band wagon. However, Roon Radio remains broken. Today on my iMac, I started a station of Herp Albert & The Tijuana Brass. The next song was Cheryl Crow’s There Goes the Neighborhood and Space Cossacks’ Band Sand. I stopped Roon Radio and started over again with Herp Albert & The Tijuana Brass. The next songs were: Tequila (good), Then Charli xcs With Roses and George Michael Freedom. I have reported Roon Radio issues about 5-times in the last 3+ years. I’ve also submitted extensive Feedback suggestions for Roon Radio. One day it will be much better. Until then, back to Amazon Music Stations or Apple Music Stations!!
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@nathan looked like he might be close to starting on some Roon Radio related improvements a few months back.
Not sure if any stories are being actively worked upon or if they have fallen down the backlog. Any update you are able to give us Nathan?
It’s in the pipe - some internal technical debt came due on some back end systems and so I’ve been dragged away. That said, it’s all feeding in to a cycle of improvement on recommendations systems.
Getting the holiday backlog taken care of but barring unseen priority this is the next thing in the hopper.
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Been playing some war on drugs recently. Not exactly the last word in sophistication, I believe my mate refered to them as sort of Coldplay, which I found harsh.
Anyway following it, all I get is really wet, Female voice led music, not reflective at all of war on drugs, not related in anyway.
Including but not limited to ‘Little May’, ‘Pomme’, ‘Lucy Rose’, ‘Milo Greene’, ‘Cloves’
On an on, female miserable track after track. War on Drugs is generally uplifting, rock, guitar led music.
I think that it’s important to set expectations here. All that @nathan is saying is that we intend to take a look – fairly soon if we can – at the current Roon Radio implementation with a view to making some incremental improvements. As usual, we cannot promise any timescale for this work and other priorities always have a knack of getting in the way of planned work.
Note that, at the moment, a fundamental re-write of Roon Radio is not on the cards. Further, we may determine that we don’t have the metadata necessary – at present – for the improvements that we would like to make.
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Newish user here. Roon Radio is okay when I limit to my library. If I let it go use Tidal as well, and it’s well-known music from the 70’s-90’s, it picks Tidal tracks that are on the surface okay, but I don’t like (otherwise they’d be in my library).
If I play off of something lesser known from 2000’s on, the Roon Radio/Tidal selections are just awful. I usually just leave it off.
Even when limited to my library, PlexAmp is MUCH better. More random if I restart a radio off the same song, and more varied selections. Too bad PlexAmp’s library management is not is good.
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That’s disappointing, because I and others detailed (with copious data) the major issues that Roon Radio was having 4.5 years ago. Based on my experience trying Roon again a few months ago, and what others have said in this thread, not much has been done to eliminate Roon Radio’s propensity to repeat a small number of artists, to never explore more than 2 or 3 albums from an artist even though they may have 15+ in their discography, and to choose songs for the radio that are absolutely not related to whichever song was used to start the radio.
It seems that the vast majority of the suggestions that the community have put forth to fix these issues, and to generally improve the customization of Roon Radio, have been ignored. I would love to come back to Roon since I’m not totally happy with Plexamp either, but it does seem after such a long time that Roon Radio is the bastard stepchild of the service. Which sucks for me, because an intelligent personalized radio is one of my favorite ways to listen to my music collection and also discover new music via Tidal.
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I absolutely appreciate this. What I’m wondering is whether there’s some possibility in the future (indeterminate timeline) that you might make more sophisticated use of sonic profiling / AI to create a latent space / similarity map that goes beyond metadata to provide cleverer adjacency / distance across a broader set of music and more “axes”? Plexamp is beginning to do this - sonic adventures are fascinating explorations that always make enough sense to be worth the listen, and the variety seems both more (wider variety) and less (fewer songs that don’t “make sense”). I’m not trying to be comparative so much as to say that it’s really fascinating what you can do when you have software analyze and “listen to” the song. That said, I recognize the challenge presented by streaming - PlexAmp is local only, and I don’t think you can “listen to” the streaming catalog, though perhaps I’m wrong here if it’s in a user’s library.
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PlexAmp is using sonic style metadata, and one can absolutely do this with streaming catalogs.
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I find Roon Radio to be excellent when running from a single song. But running from [the end of] a playlist/queue it only in fact takes into account the very last song it played, even if the playlist is diverse, which I would say is not expected behaviour. It claims the radio is ‘based on playlist xxx’ but this is false; it is all closely related to the last track and completely ignores the rest.
Running radio from a genre however - which I would really love to do - does not appear to work. If I ‘start radio’ from the ‘prog-rock’ page, I get the same 8 tracks (some of which are not prog-rock by any stretch) and then failure (music stops/go find something to play!), every time across months. Even if it were limited to my library, I have 9,000+ tracks marked up as ‘prog-rock’, and even if it just started a track radio from a random KC/Genesis song it would work much better than that.
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This has been happening for YEARS. I don’t know why they can’t at least implement a simple programmatic check to see if it’s repeating songs / artists / albums too much.
Something with logic like this, where if the song has appeared in the previous 200 tracks on the station, don’t add it. If the album has appeared in the past 100 tracks on the station, don’t add it. If the artist has appeared in the past 50 tracks on the station, don’t add it.
CLASS RadioStation:
INITIALIZE song_history as a queue with max length 200
INITIALIZE album_history as a queue with max length 100
INITIALIZE artist_history as a queue with max length 50
FUNCTION can_add_song(song):
IF song.title EXISTS in song_history:
RETURN False
IF song.album EXISTS in album_history:
RETURN False
IF song.artist EXISTS in artist_history:
RETURN False
RETURN True
FUNCTION add_song(song):
IF can_add_song(song):
ADD song.title TO song_history
ADD song.album TO album_history
ADD song.artist TO artist_history
RETURN True
RETURN False
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It’s very disappointing to hear that the work is considered low priority.
At the very least, please fix the bug where radio slowly spirals into a repeating loop of the same artists and a limited set of their albums.
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It’s crazy to think that similar logic is not already in place…
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