I never tried it - and just did out of curiosity on a White Sands album (what I would consider ambient). The first page (of many) brings up everything from Adele to The Adolescents to Agnes Obel. Absolutely useless if Roon automatically categorizes pretty much everything as Pop/Rock. Oh, but no ambient albums because the White Sands isn’t tagged as such - what the heck is ‘Experimental Rock?’
Another main gripe is the Qobuz page and the ‘view all’ and genre filter. So in order to see ALL of the new releases one must filter by genre and then click view all; if not and one only filters by genre and opens a title and then backspaces it reverts to the main non-filtered, non view all page. Rinse and repeat to get back. Again way too many levels and clicks to get somewhere that the user should just be in the first place.
But there are many things to love about Roon, and I hate to come off as constant Debbie Downer. It’s just these fundamentals of UI that so often get in the way.
As a business owner, one or the most difficult things to hear, or react to, is negative feedback: “Your product sucks!”
It is also among the most valuable information someone can share.
It takes a talented executive to repress the initial emotional reaction (“FU! You’re wrong!”) and ask: Is there anything I can learn from? Is there anything in this criticism that could yield improvements in my product or service?
While I don’t support needless bashing of anyone’s product, in this case it seems like @Markus_Derflinger took the time to point out some use cases that weren’t working for him. It is entirely possible others have had similar use case disappointments, which, if valid and addressed, could improve everyone’s experience.
I think it is cool that @danny and the other moderators at Roon let this thread stand, so it could be read, considered, debated, and potentially learnt from.
Hi Charles, isn’t the purpose of a radio to offer different sounding music. If a person really wants the same sounds over a certain period of time you select several albums. Remember the HAL 9000 had to learn too.
Not as it’s been sold to us (Roon Radio and Valence). If I want a true random radio experience then I just choose shuffle all, which I do enjoy now and then, esp when working.
I would imagine that given the high frequency of releases of EDM by fly by night DJs, you are not going to find many databases that cover the broad range of tracks. Perhaps Tidal is targeting Spotify and others who want electronic music. For every other genre of music, I believe that Roon with Qobuz integrated is unbeatable. I don’t use Room radio, but I do use the side panel that recommends similar artists from Qobuz. Additionally, Roon gives me superb access to other Qobuz albums by artists that I have on my NAS. These feature makes Room a killer app for me. That aside, Room has been amazing for navigating my massive EDM library on my NAS.
I have to say that, for me, Roon Radio has improved quite a bit over my time using it, not sure if this would be case for everybody, but, patience may be needed. Everyone once in awhile Roon does throw me a curveball, and it puzzled me for awhile, but noe I don’t mind it at all. I think it might just be part of the algorithm to throw something different in on a rare occasion. Shakes things up a bit, and might introduce you to something different. Then again, Roon Radio is not the reason I pay for Roon, mostly that is the RAAT and the hi-res streaming integration.
I really hate to put it this way because it makes me sound like a snob, but I’m serious about this question. Why would an EDM fan actually need Roon? I like the genre, too, but EDM is produced with such high compression there’s not much to squeeze out of it in a high end system.
If you’ve got a huge collection in areas like classical or jazz and you enjoy the hunt for the diamond in the rough, and you enjoying devising your own playlists… Roon is perfect.
While I guess it’s to be expected, but with some of the observations in this thread, I’m surprised Roon is not at least saying somethings in it’s own defense, or maybe it’s just soul searching…
It appears to me that roonlabs is relying on users clicking the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons for the fuel to drive their system that might eventually make relevant recommendations.
Besides the fantastic roster of artists on Contemporary, they had a groundbreaking sleeper of an engineer in Roy DuNann. Check out this article on how he created this fantastic sound in Contemporary’s stock room. https://www.stereophile.com/interviews/402roy/index.html. He was famous without knowing it until late in life.
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Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
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Yes, that’s their story. All I can say is, good luck with that. It would seem to be too coarse a feedback control, with too few users.
Hmm, I use Roon with just Tidal and absolutely love the Roon Radio. It plays music about 8 hours a day at our home. I just select an artist I like and then Roon Radio and it plays music I like very well. Much better that Apple Music that seems to play same songs every time.
Maybe Roon isn’t just about SQ, and you’re paying for other stuff, like management and metadata, which in turn allows you to browse your library in ways that are interesting to some people, and that an EDM fan might hope Roon would help 'em make sense of the genre like it does others ?
(oh, and in the fun SQ / bass tests, have a go at Emika’s 3 hours from a few years ago )
That is a misconception. A lot of EDM has quite a lot of low frequency content that makes it very hard for all those tiny audiophhile loudspeaker to keep up with. I have heard a pair of kef ls50w litterally choking on an edm track that sounded highly compressed, flat, harsh etc while the same track sounded 3d holographic, very dynamic, full bodied on my own system. Many times I hear people complaining about recordings but in most cases it is not the recording to blame, it’s the loudspeakers that simply don’t have the capability to subtract the quality out of the recording. Anything with a 6.5 inch woofer or smaller in it is severely lacking, nomatter if you paid a million dollars for it and nomatter if it does sound nice on Diana Krall.
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