Why I will not buy Roon

I think the OP put a lot of time and energy into his experience. Roon wants this feedback. This was a good post and if you don’t like the post (which you pretty much know from the title), don’t open it. The OP even posted suggestions which not all do. I do think the OP could have posted first with some requests for help.

  • mostly agree on Roon Radio
  • totally agree on Roon not calling one track an “Album”
  • totally agree on the request for greater Tidal integration

Thanks @Markus_Derflinger for posting!

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FTR I was responding to somebody who dismissed the post - I am in agreement with you and the OP. Best to read old threads carefully. Take care, CP

Sorry, my reply did not come out right! I was endorsing your post! I can see how it didnt look that way.

and yes, I don’t like when old posts are brought back to life… this one was new to me and was on top of my screen

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This data is licensable Bill and can be kept up to date. When I ran Gracenote we had a DSP team (led by a guy that had previously ran the media team at Fraunhofer Institute) that developed tech that could extract dozens of music attributes from a music file. We got direct feeds of music from the labels to extract this info. It was also integrated into music players like Apple iTunes (and others) so any time you loaded a track in iTunes it extracted these attributes and used them in Genius (and sent them to Gracenote). When I left in 2012 we had over 100M tracks of detailed music attributes – all licensable. They would have substantially more now and vastly more than any individual music service (the world of music is soooo much larger than that of any single music service). You could do amazing things with it. Although I don’t know for sure, I think Roon’s Valence is using mainly AI techniques to drive music similarity. We felt strongly that to do real music similarity you needed a combination of deep music attributes, AI, lyrics and some editorial (and some user controls) all mixed together in the right doses to get it right. I don’t think Roon is using enough of what is potentially available to them and therefore has limitations in Valence.

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Interesting! Thanks for sharing that, Craig.

Perhaps they are still developing it. Roon does not seem to proceed at what you might call lightning speed, for some of their feature developments.

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Craig, I suspect you might be right! Even as a Roon fanboy I’m starting to raise an eyebrow about the lack of surprises from recommendations - they seem almost static offering the same suggestions every time.

If Valence is AI then it should be using machine learning to detect patterns of usage (genre, dates, composers, country of origin, time of day etc etc ) between myself and thousands of other end users. When it detects a similar musical pattern to mine it can use that to make new recommendations, or something like that (hey Im not saying I’m an expert here, but hey if Valence knows what @xxx or @Rikkipoo and thousands of others are playing and if there are similarities between our patterns and then make me a new recommendations based on those changing patterns.)

The static nature of recommendations indicates Valence is not AI or ML, it’s just a simple formula based on genre identification?

Sometimes I wish forum members would stop going on about Roon SQ and technical mambo-jumbo to @danny and focus on the information intelligence aspect of Roon ie the discovery of MUSIC! It then I’ve had a wee dram :tumbler_glass::tumbler_glass::tumbler_glass:

Cheers
H

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Music discovery is as important as sound quality for me. When Roon Radio starts after my selection finishes its about 50 50 if I like the selections. But when I do hear something new I like I appreciate I can click and go the artist and roon will play the artist from Tidal or Qobuz or my hard drives. [Moderated] I have discovered a lot of new music I like that way. I also discover new artists from the playlists on Tidal and Qobuz.
I think Roon is getting better at suggestions. I have had it less than a year now.

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Glacial is the word that springs to my mind :roll_eyes:

Then perhaps you should have read the post?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PZZ7uIp_7A

Victim of Love?

Catchy screen name you got there.

Valence uses a lot more than just genre because Roon genres (which come from AMG … bought by Rovi…now Tivo) are only at the album level vs track. If that is all Roon used it truly would be terrible. It also is taking into considerations the thumbs up / thumbs down selections users are inputting during roon radio selections. Last.fm is also listed in the credits so it’s also likely using it’s scrobbling capability to help in music similarity algorithms. So at minimum it is using all three aspects in some intelligent fashion. Beyond this who knows…

Well, it isn’t great.

Last I heard on this, it was recording them, but not using them internally. Could be that’s changed.

Thanks for this, @Craig_Palmer! This is without a doubt the best joke of 2020!

Intelligent :rofl::rofl::rofl: My sides hurt!

It’s all relative…:slight_smile:

I knew eventually we would get down to the thorny issue of debating what constitutes intelligence :slight_smile:

That post would fit perfectly in another thread I was just reading.

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I think they closed it again :wink:

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I am a Roon lifelong subscriber. I didn’t went through thousands of post about the discussion of its running, that’s simply too much. I actually don’t like something from Roon:

  1. It will never set up a ‘folder’ view for those who don’t have the time to organize music HER WAY. I endup using Foobar more often.

  2. I heard some non-Roon-ready devices which could be identifiable and could run with Roon, were barred from connecting to Roon since AUG (?) 2019. I was stunned by that news.

Roon has been saying it has to find a way to survive and make it profitable - no one could know the validity of this claim unless you are inside the financial core of the company. I really can’t say any comment on this.

But from my two points stated above, me, as an average user, I have the feeling that Roon likes to create a ‘zone’ which bar people out (Roon-ready) rather than let people in. This ‘Roon-ready’ thing, to me, isn’t purely a technical issue. In a world celebrating diversity and inclusion, I hope the company won’t make the worst use of ‘Roon-ready’.

Simply put, blame less about those who are not Roon-ready, or audio manufacturers that don’t even have a chance to be considered as Roon-ready. Roon-ready itself is something beyond technical.

My two cents.

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Maybe if you read a few of the posts on the subjects you mention you wouldn’t miss the target so much.

I will not comment on the folder browsing as I’ve never used that. For Roon Ready there are license terms that must be followed, but there is no license cost involved. It’s free. I do not remember that anyone from Roon has expressed any restrictions on who can add Roon Ready to their devices. It’s more the opposite, the more the better. That is probably the main reason why it is free.
Keep in mind that manufacturers got information on the Roon Ready license enforcement a long time before August 2019 (not August, September actually)

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Roon Ready enforcement protects both Roon and the customer.
There were to much claims for Roon Readyness that were not true, and people bought equipment on those claims.
They end up being cheated by the equipment manufactorer, not by Roon.

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