So, somebody made a post in the support category asking for a refund on his lifetime subscription, citing issues over the past few months that have been widely reported that render it unusable for him. (Whether a refund request is reasonable or something to chalk up to “lessons learned” or an argument for annual subscription that can be easily terminated is neither here nor there.)
His post was delisted. I am reposting my reply to the OP that I guess got delisted with the post. A lot of this has already been discussed, but it deserves attention from roon if they intend to remain a going concern. Anyway…
The OP has a point.
Each new update (not even worthy of being called a “release” in terms of features/functionality since valet or valencia or whatever it was) seems to fix a few bugs and create even more new bugs. Just look at the support forum.
Blaming network, wiring, switches, wifi, routers, dns, isp, opengl, client/server computer isolation, neighbors watching netfix, phase of the moon, cia/nsa snooping, etc. seems disingenuous. Especially when no other streaming, playback, or really other any pc/mac software app seems to be affected by all that. If MS Word or google docs had all these network and infrastructure limitations we wouldn’t be able to open documents or write our congressmen sternly worded letters.
Something is fundamentally wrong at roon. Hope they get it sorted out. It’s still the worst music software except all the others. When it works. So I’ll stick with it until the bitter end.
With so many customers running so many different set-up’s, any update is bound to introduce some issues for some customers. I don’t think anyone would be surprised about that. Usually, seems to me, Roon is quick to fix the problems or help the customers fix the problem on their end. Often, it’s as simple as reboot.
The issue with the thread that got moved to support is a reported problem that has persisted for months. To me, that is something entirely different. If it was a Roon problem, there would be 1000’s of complaints and Roon would have fixed it or tried to fix it. Since there have not been 1000’s of complaints such as this, the problem is either something in his system, network, or environment that has changed or a change in Roon that his system, network, or environment doesn’t like.
I feel confident that Roon can and will help him figure it out if he wants them to.
Whether this discussion should be ignored or not is questionable.
However, I view the ‘delisting’ of the post, if indeed that actually occurred, rather than moved to another section to be akin to another thread that was discussed at length.
If I recall a thread was started a month or so back. It’s neither here nor there whoever started the thread.
However, it related to ‘mods’ deleting/moving/closing threads, when robust discussions are underway.
I think that relates to your desire in continuing the above thread you refer to, rather than have a ‘mod’ move it or the like.
I will comment however, there were numerous people suggesting to the original poster that he look for technical support, rather than just say he wants a refund & likely the issue will get resolved.
I thought that completely reasonable he wait until support came along to troubleshoot the matter.
I don’t know the Roon refund policy, but I doubt they give refunds to customers who have been around for more than a month or two. And, even then, I think the customer would need to have been working with Roon support to resolve the issue and Roon just couldn’t get it done.
Unlisting does not equate to being ignored by Roon, quite the opposite … the topic is still very much visible to Roon and even late on Saturday evening there are two senior people from Roon responding to the OP.
Unlisting of support topics is typically performed for these reasons:
It’s account related and hence private in nature.
It’s a sensitive topic, where certain forum members pile on or offer bad advice.
It provides focus so the Roon team to can work one-to-one with the OP to work the problem.
That’s absolutely correct. Roon is going to hear from probably 90 percent of customers who have a problem. Roon will not hear from probably 99.9 percent of customers who don’t have a problem.
So a lot of good points about support forum protocols and dedication of mods and whatnot. No discussion of the main point, though. Is roon still a going concern, or not?
The user base is growing month on month … and RoonLabs are hiring staff … the company is growing … so that looks encouraging to me.
I know there are some issues with each release of Roon … same with Microsoft, Apple and Google… but that does not make them a “bad” companies that are doomed to fail.
There’s a huge investment in testing and QA at Roon, but unfortunately with an virtual infinite number of computer hardware, network hardware, software and audio devices in fairness to Roon it’s impossible to test for every combination.
Also I know that Roon have a continuous improvement program to discuss issues, identify root cause and implement lessons learned…
The other factor is that for many Roon has been left running for week or months … so when an update arrives just the process of restarting a Roon can find latent external issues waiting in wings when the software reboots.
Disclosure I help to Alpha test Roon, and we see many versions and do our best to break them … but of course our hardware / software stacks / use patterns and testing duration… much as we try will never eliminate all risk.
Are RoonLabs perfect… no of course not … do they strive to be better … absolutely.
There are also probably some of us who have invested a huge amount of time tweaking their software, network and hardware to conform with the latest update to meet our individual listening tastes, only to have another update reshuffle the deck again.
It begs the question, why are we not able to choose whether to update or revert back to a previous version? Seems doing so might decrease the the number of issues that arise after each update. Case in point, I may have held off updating to 571 had I known that the waveform would not be available till Roon updates the Amazon Fire HD 10 app.
Was not aware that the Amazon App Store is not the location to retrieve app updates. Have been checking the Amazon App store frequently since the latest update and it shows version is 537, last updated March 2020. So let me see if I can access the link you provided and get my roon player updated. Thanks.
Okay, I do not see the Apple Fire app listed in the link you provided. Am I suppose to be using Google Play’s store to locate updates for my roon remote?
No, you just think there is. Having worked at a big company and tracked issues with software releases, I know that problems show up in each release that you do not expect…even with a ton of testing. This does not mean the company is failing or that there is something wrong…it’s a fact of life.
Having worked at a big company and tracked issues with software releases,
Well I’ve been SVP and EVP at software companies and been in charge of large multi-million dollar R&D projects and had my own moderately successful software company and written boatloads of code. Sure I’ve had to own up to bugs of my own and others under my supervision at every post. But I never blamed staff or circumstances or anyone or anything else, even when I could have. Instead, I took personal responsibility and brought all available resources to bear to fix them. Sure the bugs caused annoyances, but we never disrupted or shut down operations at federally regulated installations. Not being able to play music because of stupid bugs and oversights is pretty low on my list of first world problems, especially when there are alternatives. But still.
We update Roon’s cloud services often enough that older builds can’t speak to them. You can’t even login with the last major revision any more (1.6). In this specific case, we were combatting piracy and fraud and had to change APIs considerably.
As for reverting, you can do so on windows/macos/linux, but you have to throw away your database. The database makes migrations one-way from old versions to new, but not the other way back.
On iOS or Android, you are at the mercy of 1-release-at-a-time due to the app stores’ deployment models.
