If it’s faster and doesn’t need feeding and grooming, I want it, and you can call horse if you like.
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Hello,
Thank you for your letter to the Roon community.
Roon ARC, isn’t at all like Roon. It looks different, it is controlled differently or reacts differently.
Why can’t Roon ARC look and function like its big brother?
Lastly the performance of Roon still isn’t like it was pre splitting of the servers. I have the Nucleus+ so the performance shouldn’t be my hardware platform. I have a 1GB internet service, and wired internally with CAT8.
Can I use an old saying in reverse? It’s you not me.
Best regards,
Tracy
No, it’s a steering wheel for when auto pilot breaks down…
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Impovements to box sets…hallelujah!! 
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More like an old worn out Ass? 
I hope that folder browsing is implemented in such a way that I don’t have to see it, like I said in an earlier post, make it an optional switch, even better a separate app (I realise this is probably ridiculous).
I know there are many users that want folder browsing but personally I think it goes against the whole ethos of Roon. Roon was always meant to be a visual feast, a way to view, interact and listen to your music that was meant to expand on the tangible experience of vinyl, cassettes and compact disc etc.
Fingers crossed that Roon can make it visually pleasing, it just seems like a backwards step to me.
I can only imagine how p***ed of @Danny must feel about this, he has always been very vocal about the original founders vision of where Roon should be. If I was a betting man I’d say he will be the first of the founders to make an exit. I hope I am wrong.
One of the many things I would personally like to see is the ability to view liner notes i.e. pdf’s files directly within the now playing screen, instead of opening a clunky external browser.
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Folder browsing seems to me like a really bad idea. For one thing, how to integrate library members that come from streaming services?
But a virtual analog of it could be interesting, where you can create new “shelves” (folders) and manually place various albums or even tracks in a 2 or 2.5 dimensional space. You could even see automatic placement wizards, which could generate an initial placement via original file folder position, or genre tags, or performer, etc. No reason there would have to be only one set of shelves, either. In a virtual space, albums could be in as many different places as desired.
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I’m not sure I get this. You only browse the contents of your local library, nothing else.
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I was thinking the same. Not to mention, do the founders of Roon really want to be working for someone else? I suspect at some point they will leave to start their own new venture where once again they can call all the shots.
I really appreciate this new turn. Thank you.
Would not be sure about this. At the moment, streaming is cheap and fun and easy and everything is available while paid downloads are out of fashion. This might be coming to an end with streaming services increases subscription fees, charging extra money for particular premium content, copyright owners withdrawing their material and music which one loves appearing and disappearing randomly from the service of your choice. We are just not there yet but the signs are visible.
A lot of people are talking about the renaissance of CD and LP and especially a younger generation of music lovers wanting to own what they love. I would bet there will be a renaissance of locally stored music, and roon focussing on that while integrating streaming services as an additional service is the answer to all of that.
If I would wish for anything in that environment it would be a future roon version being capable of recognizing coherent metadata from clutter, may it be on my drive or coming from a streaming service. Just in order to hide all the broken information of incomplete recordings, badly associated artists and wrong recording dates. In the world of ubiquitous availability of everything, we might be drowning in content, but starving for a guiding tool to let us find what we really appreciate. That will be a future roon, I am pretty sure about that.
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Indeed. In our household, generally, we use both streaming and our local library.
However, if there is an album that we find on the streaming services, and start to listen to more than once or twice, then we will generally purchase it - either as a CD (which will get ripped) or as a digital download (44.1kHz FLAC or better only). Consequently, our local library is still growing and I anticipate that continuing for quite some time.
Whilst internet outages are unusual here, they are not completely unknown. Consequently, to me, offline Roon availability does have value to me even though I bought into Roon post 2.0 introduction knowing that it would not be (reliably) usable in the event of an internet connectivity failure.
The situation now is much better. If I have an internet failure I will most likely be able to continue to use Roon with my local library uninterrupted. If I am unlucky enough to suffer an ISP outage just as the Roon server wants to dial home to authenticate the subscription (once every 30 days or so), I can put my phone into USB tethering mode and connect it to my router for the purposes of Roon authentication, and once the music starts flowing again, I can then reclaim my phone and continue to enjoy my local library.
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It is my understanding (and this was discussed many times before 2.0) that the license server ping just has to be successful once every 30-or-so days, but it’s a rolling period and not checked on a fixed day, so you can be offline for 30 days.
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That’s generally fine for me on lifetime - but, since I am retired and long holidays or other periods away from home are possible, it still not inconcievable that I may need to perform the above. If my Roon server shuts down, it is not configured to automatically restart (my choice), so a power failure followed by an internet failure ~30 days later could still trigger the issue. Unlikely I know, but not impossible.
If you are on monthly, does the same apply? I would imagine that the authentication only extends for 30 days or the expiry of your current subscription. In which case an extended internet failure just before the subscription period expiry is not impossible.
The mobile internet workaround for authenticating has also been discussed many times, more lately in the context of using Roon Legacy (1.8) so it appears that others have found the need to use this approach.
Anyway, the fact that I, will almost certainly not need to use authentication by mobile interet, only makes the offline capabiltiy of the lastest Roon version more attractive. And that was the point of my post.
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No idea about monthly.
Yes, but that’s because 1.8 as a workaround didn’t help if they tried to set it up or log in after the internet was already down. (Without an alternative way to connect)
It’s just that I have been seeing the „what if the internet goes down one day before the license check“ question more than one recently, so I thought it worthwhile to mention that it’s a rolling period before anyone gets the wrong idea 
Sure, if everyone uses Roon only exactly as you may, then Roon is great. But not everyone does. Roon misses identifying many albums - for many people they cannot even find the album or track in order to tag it.
There are many forms of music files that Roon’s metatag dependent paradigm simply doesn’t work for: bootleg collections, DJ sets, music that isn’t commercially released, etc., and then there are box sets where finding something based on disc # alone isn’t effective.
People don’t want folder browsing to replace the metatag navigational paradigm. They NEED it as a supplement because there are plenty of occasions when people simply can’t find their media in Roon when it was not indexed successfully. There are plenty of examples of that.
Put another way: “Roon is cool when it works. Folder browsing ALWAYS works.”
What I find amazing is this almost religious resistance to an alternative and frankly more common means of finding any media. Sure, Roon could make a hash of itself trying to integrate folder browsing too much into the main flow. Or, Roon could provide a simple and straightforward way of accessing files via folder navigation like EVERY other piece of software on the planet that uses local data or media files.
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My post was written simultaneously to the one above. Coincidence.
I really don’t get why so many people think folder browsing is unnecessary. They either have very small or very mainstream libraries, the albums of which roon has no problems identifying.
I have a very large (>250k tracks) library with a lot of classical and a lot of non mainstream material. Roon often has issues identifying albums in my library.
The reasoning why I think folder browsing is a must is the following:
- If Roon had a consistent way of adding metadata to albums it cannot identify AND if roon search worked as intended, one could easily do without folder browsing
- the difficulty is that I have no idea what to search for, if I am looking for an album that roon did not identify. Looking through 10s of thousands of unidentified albums simply is not a solution.
- the only sure way to find such an album is to physically remove it from storage, rescan and clean the library and then re-add the album and rescan. Then the album in question will appear as the first album when sorting albums by date added
That is simply not a convenient way to find an album roon has hidden god knows where.
What I am asking for is simply a way to reliably go to an album that is located in a specific folder of the local library. No integration into all the wonderful singing and dancing stuff roon does so well.
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The folder structure of my local library is static also. I would hate for it to be dynamic. Wouldn’t find anything in my 250k+ tracks if it were dynamic.
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There is „unidentified“ in the strict meaning that Roon doesn’t have online metadata from TiVo and MusicBrainz, which makes Roon show the label „Unidentified“ on the album.
But this doesn’t prevent you from using file tags for artists and album titles. All my albums (though not that many) that Roon labels as „Unidentified“ are found just fine by Roon because they have proper file tags.
Edit: Though I guess it might not be practical if you have too many that preexist Roon usage and you don’t want to tag thousands of albums manually. On the other hand, tagging software will often auto-create file tags based on the folder names.
My primary means of classifying my albums is the Album Artis\Album folder structure where it resides. This is the only sure way I have to find the album if all else fails and roon has plenty of traps one can fall into.
For example roon is not consistent in how it tags classical albums. Mostly the artist is the conductor, but there are plenty of cases when it is the orchestra or even a soloist. If you know what roon did, no problem, if you don’t, good luck. My folder structure still works in those cases, because I know what information I put there.
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Ok, but that’s Roon‘s well documented shortcomings with classical metadata, and unrelated to the „unidentified“ issue. Long term it may be better if they fix that / provide solutions within the Roon paradigm.