A fantasy future release from roon; what would you like to see?

Imaginary future roon release:
DLNA/UPnP compatibility
roon had two version where DSP/room EQ becomes a plug in option as per HQ Player for example. plug in price, £2.99 per month.
roon drop the lifetime licence
roon do a monthly sub of £6.99 per account - max 5 instances.
roon add amazon HD, Spotify HD?, and any other lossless sub out there.
roon offer 2TB cloud storage for your personal library (£50 per year) with local backup to a USB drive.
These lossless sub give you a £2 discount for subscribing via roon

Do you think you’d take to an online/cloud based only library and ditch your local HDD/SSDs?

Having come from a UPnP/OpenHome environment, you’d think I’d be sympathetic. But I’m not.

Multizone support (for example) doesn’t work across different transport protocols — a perennial source of user confusion and frustration.

The rationale for supporting other transport protocols besides RAAT is a delicate balance between supporting a wide-enough variety of hardware on one hand and diluting the user experience on the other.

Given the existence of ~$50 Raspberry Pi based streamers, I don’t see the value proposition in adding yet another transport protocol to support the few devices that don’t work with the transport protocols that Roon already supports.

While I understand the rationale for a subscription model for Roon’s core features, I cannot see any justification for a subscription model for its DSP features.

I see Roon’s DSP features as the main rationale for the superiority of RAAT. Unbundling them would make RAAT a whole lot less compelling.

What is an “instance” here? Roon Cores (currently limited to 1)? Roon endpoints (currently unlimited)? Roon Remotes (why the hell would you want to limit those)?

Hey, the more the merrier. I don’t think the reason that Roon doesn’t support Amazon HD is some reluctance on the part of Roon’s developers.

Unless that somehow got me roaming access to Roon, I don’t see how that could possibly be an attractive proposition.

2 Likes

So how do you propose roon broaden there audience?
They need to to keep the game alive roon currently is proprietary and lacks foresight.

Have a look at google for example last year they bought Spotify for $49 billion - If they decide to compete with AmazonHD and a price war breaks out do you think Android platform users would be remotely interested in paying for roon is they have such a vast opensource network readily available?

Most smart TV for example are android DLNA - the best interface for a music collection maybe?
All you’d need is voice command (which a lot do have already, mine has) or a Bluetooth keyboard.

Google bought Spotify!!!
Ha ha ha :laughing::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::laughing::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: ROFL.
Here is the relevant Wikipedia entry
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools’_Day

Therefore, this “I know better than roon” post may lack a little credibility…

I would like to see a search that worked.

I would like to see compositions handled better. In particular roon should allow you to discriminate between a whole composition and a part of a composition.

I would like to be able to design my own views.

I would like to organise my library the way I want.

At the moment roon is like buying a nice car, one with all sorts of promises, and then finding out you can only drive it on Roon’s choice of route.

1 Like

maybe i feel for the prank but it doesn’t change the fact its a multi-billion dollar platform

If Roon didn’t work with my favourite streaming platform (Qobuz) it would be a non-starter for me. Roon doesn’t work with Amazon HD/Apple Music/Spotify/…

If the objective is to significantly grow Roon’s user-base, you need to change that. Nothing else matters.

If the objective is “improving Roon,” then I’m sure everyone has their laundry list of bugs they’d like to see fixed and new features they’d like to see added.

I’d like to play Podcasts with Roon.
This way Roon would be the only Audio-App i needed.

Why would anyone like to see that? What’s the benefit to users?

In order to make it’s all a cheaper sub based application which is combined in a single payment with something like Qobuz or even AmazonHD

OK. I see your point. I am not sure there is such a 1 to 1 relation there, but you do have a point there!

@danny has already said multiple times that it is Roon LLC’s intention to eliminate the lifetime subscription and lower the price of the annual subscription.

@cereal_killer’s idea of further unbundling various Roon features (like DSP or unlimited endpoints) to further lower the subscription price does not seem like a huge winner to me.

I’m not sure there are many people who would say, “Roon with DSP @ $10/month is way too expensive. But Roon without DSP @ $8/month? Count me in!”

Yes, for all those existing Roon users, who don’t use the DSP features, this would represent a saving (and a concomitant loss of revenue for Roon LLC). But I just don’t see this attracting a whole bunch of new users.

There’s a reason bundling is a successful marketing strategy and unbundling is typically a race to the bottom.

As to the idea of Roon getting into the cloud storage business and charging £50/year for 2TB, it takes no imagination whatsoever to foresee what a debacle that would be.

I did a 30 day trial run of Roon but chose not to subscribe. It was a very close decision. The main factors that kept me from subscribing were:

  1. lack of a control interface for my Linux based laptop – it was very annoying to have to pick up and open a second device while I was using my laptop while listening to music to do something as simple as pause the music to answer the phone.

  2. make my folder system somehow visible using Roon. I know others insist this is unnecessary and that I need to reform my old fashioned ways, but I like the ability to view my folder structure.

If both items show up in the future, I’d probably buy a subscription immediately. If only the Linux control program showed up, I’d strongly consider switching to Roon.

Genre play at the track level!

Since you asked…
My fantasy feature is integration with SoundCloud. When loading an artist there are already links to Wikipedia and some other sites. It’d be much more “media rich” to link to that artists SoundCloud page and play whatever they’ve got sitting there. Realizing that sound quality be darned… but a lot of these snippets or tracks or mixes never get released anywhere else. To do this within Roon would be wicked trick.

A better album browser with more metadata directly under the albums (on my wishlist since day one)
A better way to personalize my collection with grouping, nesting according to my own criteria
A better artist browser with more metadata directly under the artist pictures
A better focus function with more preferably personal criteria
A way to organize tags and bookmarks in a visual way
A better more visual track browser
Real user profiles so my family also might start to use Roon
Album based playlists
A new theme that falls between the dark and light, much better yet, customizing colours
Better us of screen real estate, make the tracklist of an album fit one screen without scrolling up/down
A search function based on every imaginable metadata, for example country of origin, recording period, release date, record label AND personal tags etc etc.
LastFM integration

Roons multiroom playback, DSP functions etc are finished for the next years to come imho, time to get back to the core business, becoming the best MUSIC player out there, more focus on metadata and User Interface.

2 Likes

I would like to see the ability of Roon to have the option to pause the music when my phone rings. It is really the only option that I surely miss with other applications.

Press pause.

1 Like

Ok! :laughing:

1 Like

On my Mac client it pauses the stream while my iPhone ringing but if I pick the call it’s starts again…almost there but not quite yet.

1 Like