SKBubba
Senior Member
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2018
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For better or worse, Valence (which power Roon Radio) is determined based on the listening characteristics of other Roon users. That's why you get the thumbs up/down option after it chooses each song - was that a good choice or not? All of that information is compiled and used to make future recommendations. As a result, it is unlikely ever to be the curated list that you are looking for. If a bunch of other users thought that Soundgarden was a good choice after a Nirvana song, then that is what it will keep serving up - which is why you end up hearing a bunch of obvious choices. It works much better for exploring genres you are less familiar with.
This is the fundamental problem with Valencia or whatever it is they call their "artificial intelligence" learning machine.
The first problem is, who sits glued to their screen, anxiously waiting to hit thumbs up/down to help train roon, versus just listening to music?
Second, they say they have 100,000 users (who are "experts") influencing their AI.
Even if that number is true (which is debatable), it pales in comparison to Spotify's 120 million++ users, and who knows how many Apple and Amazon users, all of which have non-intrusive, passive algorithms that figure out what people like to listen to, and curate based on that, resulting in pretty good suggestions and playlists of what you might want to listen to.
Unlike Roon, which seems driven by people who seem to only like Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen, and Mungo Jerry.