I built a music discovery app for Tidal and Qobuz users. A lot has changed since launch.

Good question. Roon and Audirvana show "similar artists" based on metadata. You get a short list of names, usually well-known artists in the same genre. It's useful, but it stays close to what you already know. Roon's radio feature goes a bit further, but it creates a temporary station. Once it's done, it's gone. Nothing saved, nothing to go back to.

Sonic Oracle does something different. You give it a seed artist and it builds a full playlist of artists connected to them by taste, style, and sound. Three depth levels, from close matches to deep cuts. Most of the results are artists you've never seen in any "related artists" tab. And those playlists are permanent. They stay in your Tidal or Qobuz library.

It doesn't compete with Roon or Audirvana. It feeds them. The playlists land in your library and Roon, Audirvana, and everything else picks them up instantly. I use Roon myself. Sonic Oracle fills my library with music I'd never find through Roon's own recommendations.

Alessandro

Pretty awesome, Alessandro. I was able to create a Tidal playlist from a rather obscure Russian band to test its limitations - the results were more than impressive given the genre (Post-Punk, Dark Wave) and artist exposure, which is very much non-mainstream - even within their own sub-genre. 

From my understanding related artists’ recommendations are reliant on the size of the user base, and now AI, which is why I’ve found better recommendation results from Spotify (751 million) in comparison to Tidal (5 - 7.5 million), Quboz (250k- 500k), and Roon (100k - 150k) - guesstimates per Gemini AI.

Even then, your results were more focused under the “balanced” playlist creator than Spotify’s recommendations within an established playlist of the same artist. 

Maybe I was lucky with that first search, but the results, integration with Tidal, and slick UI are impressive - wicked job there, sir. 

Really appreciate you putting it through its paces with something that obscure. Post-punk and darkwave are exactly the kind of genres where mainstream recommendation engines fall short because, as you noted, their models depend heavily on user base size.

Sonic Oracle's engine isn't constrained by a single listening pool, which is why it holds up even for non-mainstream artists with small followings.

Glad the Tidal integration and UI landed well. More updates on the way.

Alessandro

Impressive. See a need, fill the need and then start improving the solution. The only problem is that the music I was hoping for shows up so much sooner I have more time to do chores. 

Haha

I'll add "saves time on music hunting, loses time on chores" to the feature list. Appreciate the kind words.

Alessandro