I know there has been much discussion of the, at best, inconsistent performance of the algorithm behind Roon Radio. But lately I’ve seen even more baffling choices made by whatever software is compiling “Performing the Music of” playlists. Here’s an example of a few picks towards the top of today’s “Performing the Music of They Might Be Giants” playlist that turned up in my feed:
I’m assuming this has to be a different algorithm than radio, but why in the world does it have such trouble identifying which compositions are by particular artists? I posted in a separate thread last week about the dumpster fire that was the “Performing the Music of The The” playlist, which was (I kid you not) over three days long, and was less than 1% covers of songs by The The. While this may be an extreme case, I’d say more days than not I’ll check the day’s “Performing” playlist and find a surprising number of errors.
It seems several Roon products/algorithms shouldn’t have made it out of beta testing. I find the idea of this kind of playlist very intriguing, but not with its current signal to noise ratio.
I don’t tend to use such Playlists. But - from your example - could it be that they are geared towards non-classical; in the sense that it relies on a hierarchical algorithm: Composer > Work > Artist?
It almost seems to be the opposite, where it would probably do very well with classical or tin pan alley composers, but falls apart completely trying to translate between band names and the music their members wrote. I can understand how that would be a difficult bit of programming, as for each band you would have to have a resource that included the band members’ names to include in a composer field search, not to mention members change over time, can sometimes write songs for different artists, or even be in multiple bands simultaneously.
Or perhaps it’s trying to work off of a list of song titles pulled from an artist’s catalog, and then finding title matches, which introduces its own set of problems: covers of covers, exact (or partial) title matches, but different songs…
The more I think about it I don’t see how an automated solution could ever work very well. You almost need curated lists, which Amazon or Spotify might be able to afford, but probably not Roon.
