I’ve had similar questions about Roon Radio as well. Earlier this morning I played the same album (skipped a few songs). Roon Radio essentially gave me the same recommendations but not in the same order - there were two artists that it had recommended which were not on your list (I should have written the artists’ name down).
ROON Radio
I usually have ROON Radio enabled. For me, that means that ROON will select further titles to play once my selection completes.
Today I was playing a new album I am starting to be fond of. It is called BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC. After the album finished ROON Radio started playing some phenomenal music somewhat related to the first choice I made.
Now I am curious. If someone else made the same first selection as me, would they get the same content from ROON Radio? If not, is the content determined by my musical listening history on ROON or is it just a randomized list of ROON Radio tracks that are deemed similar to the initial selection.
Fela Kuti albums are also a great starter album for my ROON Radio experience.
For example, BLACK CLASSICAL MUSIC resulted in the following tracks for me:
| Album Artist | Album | Disc# | Track# | Title |
| Masego | Masego | 1 | 1 | Black Anime |
| Ezra Collective | EZ to the World: The Best of Ezra Collective | 1 | 5 | Lady (Ezra Collective Version) |
| Yussef Dayes | Black Classical Music | 1 | 1 | Black Classical Music (feat. Venna & Charlie Stacey) |
| Jorja Smith | falling or flying | 1 | 6 | Falling or flying |
| Matthew Halsall | An Ever Changing View | 1 | 2 | Water Street |
| Kamaal Williams | Stings | 1 | 2 | The Guvna |
| Cleo Sol | Heaven | 1 | 7 | Golden Child (Jealous) |
| Butcher Brown | Solar Music | 1 | 1 | Cozumel |
| Cautious Clay | KARPEH | 1 | 11 | Unfinished House |
| jaimie branch | Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) | 1 | 2 | borealis dancing |
| Jamila Woods | Water Made Us | 1 | 2 | Tiny Garden |
| Village of the Sun / Moses Boyd / Simon Ratcliffe / Binker Golding | First Light | 1 | 1 | Cesca |
| Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes | What Kinda Music | 1 | 3 | Nightrider (feat. Freddie Gibbs) |
| Jorja Smith | falling or flying | 1 | 3 | Little Things |
| Chip Wickham | Love & Life | 1 | 2 | Love & Life |
| Yussef Kamaal | Black Focus | 1 | 1 | Black Focus |
| Ezra Collective | Where I'm Meant To Be | 1 | 1 | Life Goes On (feat. Sampa the Great) |
| Sampha | Lahai | 1 | 1 | Stereo Colour Cloud (Shaman's Dream) |
| Nubya Garcia | Lean In | 1 | 1 | Lean In |
| Secret Night Gang | Belongs on a Place Called Earth | 1 | 2 | Don't Know What Tomorrow Brings |
| Gabriels | Angels & Queens (Deluxe) | 1 | 10 | Love and Hate in a Different Time |
| Johnathan Blake | Passage | 1 | 8 | A Slight Taste |
| corto.alto | Bad With Names | 1 | 3 | xoxoxo |
| Kamaal Williams | Wu Hen | 1 | 1 | Street Dreams |
4 responses Add your response
@toro3 Thanks for the feedback. So it is just a randomized list tied to the original album. Going forward, I think it would be more interesting if/when ROON incorporates the LATEST AI into the playback selection process. The AI should be able to take in some of our input suggestions. I could say that I want the music curated to music similar to what I have been listening to this week, or music similar to my library, current streaming popularity, etc.. I can see some great AI based features down the line with ROON. One of the hardest things about playing music is selecting what to hear. I just looked at my ROON MY HISTORY and see that I have 72 713 plays, so I am doing alright selecting, but I think I could do even better. Every time i listen to KCRW radio on my FM tuner (M - F 9AM to noon) I keep thinking I would like to have a drink with their DJ's and pick their brain on music. AI could be that DJ in some respects.
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I think you are correct from this little experiment. I did a little digging and from my understanding Roon Radio is source (album) dependent - not user hx dependent. Roon Daily Mixes seems to be more complex and data driven from your usage hx. Roon's general explanation of Valence can be found here. Interesting discussions on Roon Radio within Roon Forums can be found here and Valence here. Personally, I'm really big into music discovery in comparison to critical listening. Within the past month I was able to purchase Spotify for three months for $10. I really forgot how good their music discovery was, and it makes sense, especially when compared to Roon. It seems to come down to the amount of users and data - especially when we get into some of the sub genera that may not be as popular. Implementation of AI will only become better, but the level of "better" may be dependent on the amount of data that it has access to - the amount of Roon users vs the amount of Spotify users = variance in quality of results. I found the following two articles about Spotify pretty interesting which can be found here and here. I've been playing around with ChatGPT in both the medical and academic (as an adjunct instructor) settings, and I have to admit, the results are incredible - and this is only a small example of AI. I have no doubt that AI will be our own personalized DJ in the near future, which I'm really looking forward towards. |
I have been thinking about using Spotify for exactly the same reasons you have provided. Though adding another subscription service to my already overloaded subscriptions is holding me back. I am trying to trim these in 2024. In 2023, I had 2 big work clients I was working with. Normally I only do 1 client since that would take up most of my day. I was able to leverage ChatGPT and get one of the client's tasks done faster. A lot of that was answering questions like, "why did this happen". ChatGPT saved me a lot of time researching and also testing out scenarios myself.
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