I’m likely late to this type of complaint. Up to last year, I’d never really used a streaming service. Oh, sure, I’ve subscribed to Tidal since 2018, but it’s always been integrated into my Logitech Media Server software. I rarely listen to online music while I’m outside the house—I rely on local FM stations in the car and a bunch of downloaded favorites when I’m riding my motorcycle.
So while I’ve been aware that streaming services such as Tidal—and Qobuz, which I started using last year—have robotically curated the next-song-choosing functionality baked into their apps, I’ve never really had much occasion to pay attention to them.
Three years ago, I started using Roon as a replacement for my ancient Logitech Media Server system. Roon is a huge step up from LMS. Its interface is outstanding, both visually and technically. Its most endearing feature is the way it seamlessly integrates both locally stored music and streaming options. The search function returns all albums and artists that match the search string, and the source is almost irrelevant. Once you decide on an album, you can drill down to investigate sources, versions, resolutions . . .
As fussy as the LMS was, and as unreliable as it was—I had to keep installing patches and nursing its aging Wi‑Fi capabilities along—I have to admit this software had its charms. The feature I particularly loved, and ended up taking for granted, was Don’t Stop the Music, the built-in next-song radio function. Built by Michael Herger, Logitech’s last LMS-oriented employee, who heroically kept adding features despite the company’s abandonment of the hardware, DStM used a subroutine called LastMix that hooked into Last.fm’s auto-scrobbling application program interface.
LastMix was dastardly clever. DStM would query Last.fm with the remaining tracks in the current playlist. Rather than returning specific track info, the API would return metadata describing what’s playing. LastMix would then search the local library and associated streaming services to find possible next tracks. Finally, it would institute a back-and-forth discussion with Last.fm to further refine the choices.
I would let DStM run for days, and I would be consistently entertained. Every hour or so, I’d find myself looking up, checking what was currently playing, and then marking artists and albums for later investigation. That’s how I discovered William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, which became one of my favorites after DStM cued up this hour-long ambient track during a listening session seeded by Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
You could sorta-kinda train DStM by adding ratings to specific tracks while they were playing. I never found that I needed to do this, as Last.fm seemed to have a damn good idea of what I listened to and—somehow—what I liked. It would still get confused occasionally, blasting out a hard-rock track in the middle of a string-quartet session. This didn’t happen often, and somehow this sort of blunder made the machine feel just a little more human. I liked that kind of mistake.
DStM was so good that every once in a while, I’d finish an entire day’s listening and save the whole playlist so that I could listen to it again later. I would have to do this instead of starting another listening session with the same seed, since DStM wouldn’t play the same tracks automatically. Each session would launch with fresh surprises.
But that’s in the past. Logitech finally sunset the Logitech-based server that LMS needed in order to work. Herger and the community that maintained the open-source LMS ecosystem coded up a stand-alone version of the software and rebranded it Lyrion Music Server. It’s still running today, and I know a few people who are using it.
I began using Roon just before the fork from Logitech to Lyrion, and—for the most part—I don’t miss LMS. Except, that is, for Don’t Stop the Music. Roon has its own mix-it-up version called Roon Radio, and for the most part it does a reasonable job. For the most part.
Roon Radio just isn’t as smart as DStM. First off, it repeats itself. I haven’t actually timed it, but after a few hours, I’ve caught RR playing the same songs, just looping back to the start. That’s a touch frustrating, but it’s a flaw I can overlook. Somewhat more annoying is RR’s lack of imagination. It doesn’t have the depth of catalog that DStM had. It’ll play the obvious “hits” and ignore songs that would be more appropriate in tone and tenor. An example: if I play an album like Led Zeppelin IV, RR will dutifully start loading tracks right after “When the Levee Breaks,” but it’ll choose obvious songs like “Back in Black” and “Riders on the Storm,” digging into greatest-hits territory. DStM, on the other hand, would dig deeper, curating a bit more—dredging up, for example, some of the older blues songs that Led Zep drew from.
I think the additional smarts in DStM and LastMix resulted from the link to Last.fm, and its long history of learning both my musical choices and those of a gazillion other music lovers. I’ve attached my Last.fm account to Roon, so I know that Roon is auto-scrobbling my listening habits, but I don’t think it draws any information back from this activity.
Far more egregious, in my mind, is Roon Radio’s unwillingness to listen to me when I tell it I don’t like Andrea Bocelli. When I skip a track via the app on my Windows laptop, Roon asks me why. This query is ostensibly to help RR learn what I like and what I don’t like, and, hopefully, to help it make better choices. Whenever I play a Brian Eno album (which I do quite often), RR finds a way to slide in an Andrea Bocelli song, and I lunge for the “next track” button and angrily mash the “I don’t like this track” option.
The pre-DStM LMS had a shittier music mixer. Back then it seemed to have a strong predilection for Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red,” which I absolutely despise. There was no way to ban a track, so I had to go hunting through my music library for all instances of this slimy, oily song. It was on over a dozen greatest-hits albums, and every once in a while LMS would discover another, and I’d have to hunt it down like a wily rat.
So Andrea Bocelli is my new “The Lady in Red.” No matter how many times I hit the “I don’t like this track” option, RR seems to find another, similar, equally heartfelt clunker by that tasteless Italian.
I can easily overlook these few flaws in Roon’s ecosystem, considering what it gives back. Roon works flawlessly with my Windows laptop, Android phone, and the iPad I had to buy to keep track of my daughter’s screen time. Its server side runs on our always-on computer, and it communicates beautifully with the Meitner Audio MA3 in my reference rig and the WiiM Amp Ultra in the living room. It’s a wonderful ecosystem, and I couldn’t see myself going back to LMS.
That Roon Radio thing isn’t a deal-breaker, but it is a pebble in my shoe. That said, I don’t have experience with any other music mixers. There’s Tidal and Qobuz for us audiophiles, and the three heavy hitters: Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Spotify, the gorilla in the corner. I know that Spotify is now lossless, but that upgrade came late in the game, so most audiophiles will still have misgivings—just like how silver cables sound bright, huh? Okay, now I’m just being pissy; back to streaming radio.
According to Wired magazine, Spotify’s Autoplay feature uses collaborative filtering, natural language processing, and audio models to deliver highly personalized more-like-this recommendations that, according to some folks on Reddit, tend to be quite safe and homogeneous. Tidal and Qobuz are quite tight-lipped about their music-selection software, simply throwing out buzzwords like personalization! and algorithms! and curation! I guess that makes sense, given the competitive nature of this kind of business. It’s proprietary—company secrets and all that.
According to Roon’s FAQ, Roon Radio was “designed from the ground up with machine learning technology” and it uses “your preferences” along with “choices from other Roon subscribers with similar tastes.” There’s not much to go on there, as it’s also kinda buzzwordy.
I guess it’s reasonable that I’d prefer LMS’s DStM over Roon Radio, given that I do like adventurous music and have extremely wide-ranging tastes. I don’t really know anyone else who enjoys klezmer, thrash metal, opera, hard bop, nuevo tango, Rush, John Zorn in all his incarnations, Mr. Bungle, and God knows what else. I’m not trying to brag or make out like I’m clever or anything. I just want to point out that I think I’m hard to predict. And since I’m likely in the minority of Roon’s users in this regard, I’m not important enough to cater to. Roon’s got a business to run, subscribers to chase, and corporate overseers to please. So they need to make Roon Radio cater to the majority of its subscribers, and that means catering to the middle of the road. Hence, I’d reverse-engineer the tendency towards greatest-hits choices.
Michael Herger, and the chaps who have contributed to DStM for LMS and now Lyrion, didn’t have to worry about cash flow—this was purely a volunteer project. And those enthusiasts undoubtedly went beyond just what might be specified by a business analyst, packing in smarts beyond any hope of payback other than the joy of the chase. They could build in some randomness, some Brownian motion, and some real intelligence to DStM. Maybe that’s why it worked so well for me?
Anyway, the upshot of Roon Radio’s focus-group design is that it often doesn’t do what I need it to do. That said, it’s still quite good. If someone time-travelled back to 2000 and showed me this technology, I’d have been totally gobsmacked. These days, I’ll generally let RR play a bunch of tracks until I get bored, or until Andrea Bocelli comes slithering out of the speakers. Then I’ll choose another album or fire up the turntable. This is a first-world problem, and one that still leaves me extremely satisfied with Roon itself and not really angry at Roon Radio. I guess I should feel at least a little proud that the focus groups couldn’t get a handle on me.
. . . Jason Thorpe
jasont@soundstagenetwork.com
