MAGAZINE
Roon's artificial intelligence (AI) "Valence" works with extremely detailed, complex metadata and knows over 100,000 listening experts – anonymously, of course, and in compliance with all privacy regulations. The latest version of Valence understands the context of pieces of music and the relationships between the people who compose, perform, and produce it even better, and takes into account, among other things, listening history before filtering for the most popular matching results. With this multidimensional approach, Roon can display and suggest music with higher sensitivity and expertise.
In Roon 1.8, the "Focus" feature combines multi-criteria filters with sorting- and text filters. The feature has been brought together in a unified, clean interface that is available virtually anywhere in Roon. Users can focus specifically on album titles, artists in a genre, albums in an artist's discography, collaborations between artists, or compositions by era, instrumentation, and form – and sort them by title, popularity, and composition date. Also new in version 1.8. is the option to use "Focus" to filter and sort not only music in your own library, but also content on TIDAL and Qobuz, as well as the new calendar view that shows your detailed listening history for the last four weeks. Roon Support and the Roon Community are faster to access thanks to new Quick Links.
For fans of classical music, Roon 1.8 offers a new information layout that makes it especially easy to find exactly the classical recordings you're looking for, with special consideration given to the particular complexity and diversity of classical music. Valence does this by identifying relationships between composers, performers and conductors, and it can sort out less interesting releases from the start. This makes it even easier to find the performances of each composition that have been rated best by experts.
The new discography also includes a clear "Performances" view, which Focus uses to find exactly the performance you are looking for. Martha Argerich plays Chopin – or a Nocturne? All the Bach recordings with Glenn Gould? Focus finds everything you're looking for with just a few clicks.
