Why I will not buy Roon

Well, of course there are lots of different ideas about what “properly organise” means. However, I think that adding appropriate tags to albums can help with that a lot, with Roon. But Roon does not help very much in the addition of such tags.

It’s this second thing, “play matching music”, that’s almost impossible. First off, matching what? An album (what it tries to do now)? A track? A set of tracks? The sub-genre of your organization scheme you happen to be in, a scheme of which Roon has no understanding?

Which brings up:

The big difference here is that Tidal has all the tracks to play with, and Roon doesn’t. Last year I started to work my way through the papers at the MIREX conference. A repeated theme is that it’s hard to get the actual music to analyze, so that you can do proper pattern-matching and other forms of correlation on tracks. Roon doesn’t have the actual tracks. Tidal does. Perhaps there’s a way to fix that, and perhaps Roon Labs is working on it. But right now, nope.

Roon simply does not have access to enough of the right kind of metadata about the tracks, in order to make Valence work “properly”, at least for some sizeable subset of Roon subscribers.

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