A message from the Roon founders

[Fabrice75017]

Great move !

[Charles_Peterson]

@Bill_Janssen

@Shawn_H_CO

if I ran a shop I would presumably want to make as much money as possible

But not everyone has that as their main goal. Money is boring. Some people want to build something new that excites them, and I always had the idea that’s what the Roon guys were doing. It wasn’t a product – it was an adventure! And we were sold tickets to go along on their ride! Cool! Or at least that’s what I was seeing.

Looks like that kind of idea exploration may not fit with Harman’s goals.

I think I’d rather be on a stable piece of city transportation that continuously gets upgraded for functionality than on somebody else’s ‘adventure.’ To me, that just reads as if we were are all beta-testers, sitting in the back seat, tapping on the driver’s shoulder trying to get their attention before they drive over a cliff, because, you know, it’s an adventure!

[Benjamin_Gold]

Well said! This should have been addresses back in version 1.6! In a database there are tables, views, & PTR’s so there is absolutely no reason why we could not have a “folder view” or folder search option. This no folder view and very draconian behavior! Just my .2 cents!

[James_I (The truth is out there but not necessarily here)]

@Bill_Janssen

it was an adventure!

Bill is a great poster and there was a time, 5-6 years ago, when it did feel a bit like a fun adventure.

However, if we are going to use the “adventure” analogy, then for the past 3-4 years, those with local collections who see streaming as supplemental, and those who are fine with the streaming service’s app for mobile listening, have been on a stalled bus watching other buses drive by on the highway. And then with the Internet-always-on requirement, were told to get stand in the bus to make seating room for more stream-focused listeners.

Basically, the message Roon was sending was that it wanted more mainstream users without local collections and who don’t care about library organization.

I’m glad to see Roon saying it has reversed course and going to focus on music collection enthusiasts again. Looking forward to seeing the resources and version releases backing that up!

[Alicja_Lach]

Supposedly, business theory says (and in practice it is probably so) that customer centricity generates more income in practice then profit maximization due resulting from “greed” of the Brand.

[gTunes]

@James_I

I’m glad to see Roon saying it has reversed course and going to focus on music collection enthusiasts again.

I’m not sure this is actually what’s happening. But this thread has changed my opinion about folder browsing.

I wrote earlier that every tool doesn’t need to solve every problem and that it’s an option to solve the “big folder of untagged / untaggable / hard-to-tag music” with a different solution. You folks have changed my mind on this. I’m biased because my local collection has been growing and evolving since the early 90s and just works in Roon (as it has for decades across Audiotron, Slim, Sonos, and the rest). I don’t collect bootlegs, shows, and other stuff that’s hard (or impossible) to tag in ways that make it work well in Roon. I get now, though, that if I did, I would be seriously annoyed if I couldn’t leverage the large investments involved in getting Roon to work well in a home.

Roon is big in my house - many zones, now playing screens of different forms, automation, volume controllers of different forms, etc. I think it’s reasonable to expect to be able to play what you have. Thanks for the education on this.

I wonder, though, if the “we’re pivoting back to enthusiasts” assertion is what’s really in play. That might just be the best language they could come up with at the moment to explain the changes they’re making. The actual strategy could be that Samsung wants this thing to become their Sonos compete and get bundled with $300 receivers sold at Best Buy and the equivalents. For that market, which is not “enthusiast” in the sense that folks here might mean the term, the goal would be “Get your collection playable quickly and easily without having to call tech support”. I wonder what else we’d see if this is the case. Maybe a freemium tier with a very dumbed-down version of the product.

In any case, thanks again for the education.

[Joachim_Herbert]

@Wade_Oram

Unlikely I know, but not impossible.

It works pretty well with Adobe Creative Cloud. They got a user base many times that of ROON.

[Arlen]

@musicjunkie917

What I care about is that the folks making the calls now care about the user’s with local libraries with plans to focus on their needs instead of the streaming remote content crowd and ARC crowd.

These are not three different groups. My library consists of local files and albums from Tidal. And I also use ARC. This is what makes Roon interesting for me.

[Wade_Oram]

I agree. My local library is important to me and access to it when no internet is available in some form is essential. Now that Roon does not have an online requirement, I don’t need to worry about alternative solutions.

However, streaming is also important. It is our primary music discovery mechanism and it should not be neglected.

[James_I (The truth is out there but not necessarily here)]

@gTunes

I’m not sure this is actually what’s happening. But this thread has changed my opinion about folder browsing.

I guess I am not either, which is why I referred to it being backed up into actual new versions. But at least there is more hope than their used to be.

While my collection is also fairly well tagged and I don’t have constant issues trying to find something, I am looking forward to using folder browsing to listen to my cassette tape transfers and my folder of Albums That Never Were, which don’t index well for obvious reasons.

(If anyone is not familiar with the ATNW blog, I suggest checking it out. These are well researched hypothetical releases from various genres. The guy is clearly a big music fan).

[Sharon_Westfall]

There is no reason to use the internet to search a local database. I’ve built database applications for over 30 years, and any decent database will do keyword and attribute searches just fine. The only use case would be complex sounds like searches for misspelled groups, sons, etc; but that should be a feature that is enabled by users.

[Julian]

@Wade_Oram

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.

That’s exactly what I do too, partly to put more money in the artists’ pockets than my likely number of streaming plays of any given album would, but also so that I can download a compressed version of the album to my phone for access when I have no network connection. Even when I do have network access on my phone I prefer whenever possible to play locally stored content rather than streaming in order to reduce battery drain and data usage.

Yes, it is possible on pretty much every streaming service’s app to download music for offline playback but I find doing it all via my local Roon library more elegant, unified and convenient.

[Aldo_Borgna (AB)]

Big ROON! I agree with Harman’s mandate. I’ve been using Roon for 2 years, I really appreciate the quality of the sound and obviously the interface and it would be difficult for me to go back…
In particular I really appreciated: “…we’re announcing a return to Roon’s pre-2.0 behavior. This means our users can once again enjoy their music collections without the need for continuous internet connectivity.”
It would also be useful to be able to disable ARC for users who don’t use it without having to do strange tricks.

[musicjunkie917]

@Arlen

These are not three different groups.

They are…you happen to have different unions than I do…

[Coltrane]

Probably because it just didn’t matter all that much haha

[Aaron_Turner]

@enno

We put real effort towards enhancing the product experience for people with smaller music libraries, as well as casual listeners in hobbyist communities like gaming and headphones.

I’m curious or perhaps confused about what the mention of “headphones” means here? Surely Roon isn’t suggesting those people with thousands of dollars into headphone amps and headphones aren’t part of their “core audience” that they intend to be focusing on?

Or is this more of a suggestion that ARC and remote listening in general is not going to be the focus like Roon Client?

[Mike_Scheinkman (iamoneagain)]

I was sort of thinking about this too. It sort of seemed like code for catering the audiophile audience with deep pockets and most headphone listeners are in a different spending bracket. But if they are not worried about where the money is coming from if no longer expanding their audience, that could mean price increases. Or I’m over thinking it and it just means they will no longer do things like Audeze headphone presets. But there are plenty of headphone listeners with deep pockets but less so than the speaker audience.

I’m headphones only but benefit from all the things roon brings. I do play music casually in other parts of the house and have 2 headphone setups and can easily switch between the two. My library of local and Qobuz is over 12,000 albums, so that qualifies are a large library. So think most headphone users would still benefit from roon other than the cost.

[Aaron_Turner]

The other thing I don’t get… “gaming”? What does gaming have to do with Roon? Or is there some hack to get Doom running on Roon that I’ve not heard about yet?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6k72DI0Qo0

[jacobacci (Rudi)]

Adding an unidentified album to musicbrainz does get it into the ‘identified’ category, but the album’s metadata will remain outside the roon universe. One of the great things is that roon allows to follow various paths when exploring music. I can go from the album view to a composition contained on the album and then move to other instances of this composition in my library on on a streaming service.
I may be wrong here, but AFAIK roon relies on allmusic / Tivo as its composition database. To get compositions on an unidentified album correctly identified, one has to enter the track titles exactly as defined for the composition in allmusic. Once that is done, the composition is magically identified.
So to stay with the musicbrainz ‘solution’ to unidentified albums, one would need to enter the track information exactly as listed in allmusic into musicbrainz. Then one is able to browse further from the album view of the newly identified album.
The concept of roon is really unique. It is the first attempt at categorizing (classical) music. The music industry has unfortunately never made the effort of structuring its assets, as the books / library industries have.
I am sincerely hoping that Roon and Harman (maybe using some clever AI and some deep thinking on structuring metadata) can crack this problem.
A big thanks to the Roon team for moving this industry forward.