When will we see improvements in Roon Genre functionality?

When will we see improvements in Roon Genre functionality? I am starting to think that nothing has changed since 2015 and that Roon is using the money it gets from Roon licenses to diversify into other products. Is this correct?

I am a lifetime license holder of Roon and now I am regretting it. The Roon Genre functionality is (in my opinion) not very good as follows:

  1. The Genre Settings to “NOT Use Roon’s Genres” does not work in my system. Roon still keeps showing me Roon’s genres. Is that a bug or is it to do with my system? Please don’t ask me to send you basic screenshots. I have set the settings appropriately.

  2. When I use Genres from the main menu, it does not give me the track from the album that meets that Genre. It gives me the ENTIRE album. SAY WHAT? Even Linn’s Kazoo (which I used to use) can do this. How can I tell which track in the album is the Genre I am looking for? Is this a bug or current functionality or a user error on my part? Please clarify.

  3. The “User Manual” is a combination of a white paper, and bits and pieces of a user manual. I would encourage you and your staff to research what a user manual should look like and write one.

  4. Your user support seems to be one person who tries his / her best to run around and respond to everyone’s questions. I do not think this is satisfactory.

Here are my suggestions (all short-term):

  1. If it is a bug, fix the bug where Roon still keeps showing Roon’s genres even after it’s deselected.

  2. Get rid of Roon’s own genre system. Currently, it only solves the problem of novice music listeners who do not have an opinion about genres. If you don’t want to do that, please fix #1.

  3. Enable user import through Excel up to three levels (or even two levels for goodness sake!) of the user’s genres.

  4. Make it easy for us to change the (user’s) genre hierarchy. If we need to re-import the Excel spreadsheet (see #3), so be it. I have found it so hard to change Roon’s Genre hierarchy. See #2.

  5. For the love of all music lovers everywhere, enable us to identify the track for the Genre we select, or show me how to do it if I am doing something wrong.

Right now I am switching back to Linn Kazoo (which I was using before I switched to Roon).

I would appreciate a response from the Roon CEO. If you are not the Roon CEO, please do not bother to respond.

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One additional point. I am the husband of the license holder. I was unable to use my own name for this license because I had previously downloaded a trial version of Roon before it was usable with Linn DSM, and I couldn’t use that user name again.

Harish Ganesathasan

I agree, the Genre functionality is, simply, broken.

I have Roon set to use ONLY my own file tags, and my files are fully tagged. Roon consistently ignores my Genres and presents useless Genres that are meaningless to me.

I disagree with your position. You have focused on a very narrow issue ( I respect that this is a issue for you and am not challenging that ) and have made this a key point of your critique in a public forum which is in my view is not warranted and in my view you have ignored all the innovative work the team in Roon has achieved for us that has enhanced the experience of listening to music for the majority of the community (see comments from members Why Roon is fabulous, with or without Tidal).

In the my view Roon Software is the best in the market and in many cases has assisted hardware manufactures to leverage of Roon’s platform to deliver audio fidelity sound. I have tried several audio software for hi fidelity sound - in my view what they have achieved in such short time is streets ahead of its rivals. This is not just my view - have a look at the various awards they have been winning from audiophile critiques (CA Reader’s choice awards 2017 (Congratulations Roon !)) and (Congratulations “Roon” Budget Product Of The Year & Accessories of the year 2017 Stereophile).

Also as a lifetime member should not entitle you and me to infinite product development (see comments by members Alternative Pricing For Lifetime Membership Suggestion?) - I think we are lucky that the team in Roon has not levied additional fees for providing us with additional optionality. Really the expectation for new development should be no more than 3 to 5 years for the amount of money you have paid (even that does not equate to the software development and benefits you have received as against lifetime membership sunk costs that for an ordinary member would be spent in one year). The Roon team have continued to upgrade functionality with continuous software releases since 2015 and have been working hard to provide us with better audio experience in broad terms.

All in all I respectfully disagree with your position and in my view is not worthy of a response from Roon - rather I think your argument should be put forward as a feature request as a “wishlist” item, I am sure the Roon team has too prioritise the “wishlist” and match firstly the demand of its existing broader community and also needs to focus on new sources of revenue from attracting new subscribers.

I say to Roon - keep up the good work!

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Mods have unlisted this thread to avoid further user responses. Admins have been notified of the request for a response by Roon staff. After such response the thread will be publicly relisted.

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Thanks for getting in touch. I am obviously not our CEO, but I am the CTO, and I am responsible for the product as well as the support team, and I am the person best qualified to address your concerns.

The Genre Settings to “NOT Use Roon’s Genres” does not work in my system. Roon still keeps showing me Roon’s genres. Is that a bug or is it to do with my system? Please don’t ask me to send you basic screenshots. I have set the settings appropriately.

@support – this needs to be investigated by the QA team. If something is broken, developers need a ticket in to fix it.

When I use Genres from the main menu, it does not give me the track from the album that meets that Genre. It gives me the ENTIRE album. SAY WHAT? Even Linn’s Kazoo (which I used to use) can do this. How can I tell which track in the album is the Genre I am looking for? Is this a bug or current functionality or a user error on my part? Please clarify.

Roon’s data model does not work like other software. That is where a lot of our more advanced/unusual capabilities come from, but there is also a learning curve sometimes. Genre is an album or artist level field in Roon. We do not keep track of it at the track level.

This was a conscious design choice, made by studying the quality/quantity of track vs album level genre data available in file tags and other sources in the real world and considering where it came from. We are not planning to change this.

The idea of a single static user manual is outdated, and does not work for software that undergoes continued release/improvement. We don’t plan to write one. The choice to go with a knowledge-base approach was carefully considered, and it is something that we maintain/improve constantly, both as the software changes, and as we discover areas where people are frequently in need of more detailed documentation.

If there are specific pages you’d like to see enhanced, or areas that need more coverage, please make a post in #support so that we can address it.

This is simply untrue. There are 7 people-- @eric, @ivan, @mike, @dylan, @noris, @john, @vova dedicated to support and QA who man this site. It’s over 1/3 of our total staff.


If it is a bug, fix the bug where Roon still keeps showing Roon’s genres even after it’s deselected.

This will be investigated

Get rid of Roon’s own genre system. Currently, it only solves the problem of novice music listeners who do not have an opinion about genres. If you don’t want to do that, please fix #1.

When we studied the problem, we found that only a few % of people have anything even resembling a clean/consistent genre structure in their file tags, and of course ripping out our genre system means that TIDAL content would have no genres. This would greatly harm the experience for most people, so we’re not going to do it.

Enable user import through Excel up to three levels (or even two levels for goodness sake!) of the user’s genres.

Make it easy for us to change the (user’s) genre hierarchy. If we need to re-import the Excel spreadsheet (see #3), so be it. I have found it so hard to change Roon’s Genre hierarchy. See #2.

Please post this in the #roon:feature-requests area. If these ideas get enough traction, we will make them a priority.

For the love of all music lovers everywhere, enable us to identify the track for the Genre we select, or show me how to do it if I am doing something wrong.

As I said above, we have no plans to change this.

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Thank you for dropping support a flag here @brian!

“The Genre Settings to “NOT Use Roon’s Genres” does not work in my system. Roon still keeps showing me Roon’s genres. Is that a bug or is it to do with my system? Please don’t ask me to send you basic screenshots. I have set the settings appropriately.”

@Claudia_Locsin we are going to look into this observation you have made and see what we can come up with on our end. If I may kindly ask you to please provide us with an example that you are noticing this behavior with it will help expedite this process.

Many thanks!
-Eric

Firstly, many thanks to John Walker, Rash and Brian Luczkiewicz of Roon for responding to my post.

Also, my apologies, for understating the number of support people you have. My experience was that (the same) one person was answering all my questions, and often many days later, if at all. There may still be a post from me that is unanswered (or answered so many weeks later that I stopped looking), leading me to the perhaps unreasonable assumption that this was the only support person that Roon had.

Eric - This is a rhetorical question, but do you really need me to provide you with examples of the above mentioned issue? I’ve seen this posted a few times, including as a response to this very post. Surely, this is not a surprise one-off request.

Brian - I believe you have answered all my questions to enable me to make an informed decision on whether to continue with using Roon or to go back to using Linn Kazoo. This was indeed what I was looking for and so it’s back to the drawing board for me.

Thanks again.

Harish Ganesathasan

Assumption is the enemy of diagnosis. I might, for example, assume that a user who is continuing to see Roon genres could have altered Album settings but not the Global import settings. There is no substitute for working through the actual screens and steps.

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I know this is an old conversation, but as a new user of Roon and, I must emphasize, a fan of the product, this response just baffles me.
I would very much ask Brian what are the advantages that lead the team to make this “conscious design choice”, because I am having a hard time finding one. On the other hand, I can mention many, many difficulties as a consequence of this, up to the point that, only two weeks into my subscription, I’m finding myself in the position of resorting to alternative methods for such basic tasks as conforming genre based playlists. Just to illustrate: I am putting together an “Art Pop” playlist, and artists like Bowie are a pain in the ass because they have art pop songs scattered all along their albums, next to very different songs. So I am recurring to the “composers” cheat to single out “art pop” songs, which is exhausting and forces me to pollute the metadata.
So what I want to ask Brian and the rest of the team is, simply: ¿why? (and it is an honest question, because I want to understand).

In order to deliver many of our advanced features such as Roon Radio, Recommended For You, New Releases For You, and other future stuff that we have in the works, we need:

  • A single genre hierarchy that is essentially the same across all users
  • Genre annotations for a large portion of the musical content that people actually have and listen to
  • Genre annotations that are made by people who are applying a consistent editorial standard

This is a difficult set of requirements to meet, but we have data sources that meet this requirements at the album level, and not at the track level.

Our genre hierarchy isn’t perfect–I disagree with some of the specific choices made in there, but it’s more important that it is consistent, and that the genres tagged on the content are applied consistently. It’s easy to dream up a way to “fix” it, but very difficult to go back and re-tag millions of albums to make them consistent with a change.

Track-level genre data primarily comes from file tags, and is assigned by random people to no particular standard. Since the beginning of developing this product, we have made many case-studies of real-world libraries and looked through/analyzed the file tags that are actually present in peoples’ files, and only a very small minority (<<1%) have done the work to make their track-level genre assignments worth very much. Of course, they still don’t meet the first and third requirements even when they are perfect.

It’s hard to overstate how much value we’ve been able to deliver as a result of this approach.

Looking at the sheer number of albums whose only genre entry is Pop/Rock I’d posit the consistent editorial standard is a relic of the past rather than what your metadata providers are doing today.

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Thank you for the quick answer, Brian.
A couple of comments in this regard: first, I have to strongly disagree with the priorities the team has set upon. Services like Roon Radio, Recommended For You, etc. while cute, only work for very limited situations, and for people like me in South America are completely useless when a pure punk band like Attaque 77 is labeled as “Latin” and I get Camilo Sesto as “Recommended” instead of Ramones or Die Töten Hosen. I assume customers from outside US and Europe are far from the priority, and I understand that, but I hope you can see my point.
On the other hand, what you say probably means that I will forever be excluded from any improvements regarding those services, since I had to re-write the whole hierarchy of genres, because of things like Emile_Lemmer explains in the previous comment (the absurd Pop/rock genre being assigned to a huge chunk of the non academic music), any genre related construction is pointless as long as that hierarchy is used.
Let me be clear: I choose Roon because in other aspects like zones management and interface is head and shoulders above competition. Even when usd120 is big money for an Argentine to spend in music software, I do not regret it.
So please take these comments as interest in the product, and not trolling.

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This is because they went with the absurd Tivo/Allmusic hierarchy, which is mostly nonsense.

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