This is music to my ears! The last fews years it has been clear that streaming and ARC were the focus of the product and local libraries were being ignored! Thank you!!!
Does this mean lifetime membership is over?? Do we have to pay agsin for the service? Also, you only improving Tidal Max? How about deezer and qobuz?
Well, Roon already plays exactly what Qobuz provides, so Iâm not clear as to what can be/needs to be improved. The updates to the way Roon interacts with Tidal were to deal with the changes in the provision of MQA and hi-res FLAC made by Tidal.
Oh, i was hoping they would do deezer someday. But as long as they still support qobuz, i am all good. I dont do tidal anymore since tidal dropped best buy.
So, i will still have access to lifetime membership???
I understand, but thatâs rather speculative. Also, I donât see such a big limitation from a software perspective. Roon doesnât make copies of local libraries, so it has to consume the files from their existing locations, so it has to have location information in the database to be able to find them when they are returned in a search. Picking up a file directly from a folder may require, at most, an additional index on that, depending on how they identify files, but thatâs hardly the toughest programming challenge.
Well, hope not!! That would be aweful!!! I could have bought another pen with that money.
Really happy with the planned new direction. One of the original promises was to create a digital record store experience. So hoping might get back to that. Things like staff recommendations, pull in more review sites, album art, band photos and posters, liner notes. I know Qobuz has access to pdf, so maybe integrate that to be better experience instead of just a link to browser.
When I listen to music I also like to read about the artist, so the more info the better. When I suggested some this years ago, I got brushed off as saying you can find all this info elsewhere. But the point is to have a service that brings it all together like a record store. Not sure if other people think this would be getting back to the core experience, but thatâs my hope.
No indexes in LevelDB.
I wonder if the Roon folks have ever just wished theyâd gone with a relational store. Some problems are just a lot easier to solve if you have tables, foreign keys, isolation levels, transaction, non-clustered indexes, query optimizers, query processors, help with relational integrity, etc⌠Maybe Iâm just old but Iâd rather be solving this new folder browse problem on a relational database than on a key/value store.
Well, if I understand correctly, LevelDB is a key-value store, and a key-value set is an index. That basically makes it an ISAM. You can emulate a relational database on top of that if itâs simple enough. They donât need all the relational features you mention, since their set of indexes is fixed, not arbitrary, and they have full control on when and how the database is updated. The biggest problem I think they have is that it uses a lot of small files under the covers, and that affects load and backup performance big time.
May I just mirror everyone and add how delighted I am? Itâs lovely to see the back to basics prioritisation. Great to see that this direction came from Harman. It augurs well for Roon to identify its core customers as those with large libraries. Theyâd be the one who pays more for a software like Roon. Light users? Dilettantes? Isnât Spotify good enough? And for those a bit more discerning, both Apple Music and tidal interfaces are improving consistently.
Excellent news indeed.
Whatâs a light user? Someone with less than 1M tracks in the library? And whatâs a dilettante? Perhaps someone who hasnât yet created their room correction convolution filters? Or their headphone PEQs to emulate the Harman curve? And isnât Qobuz good enough?
I donât know what they meant exactly by âcore audienceâ, but something tells me itâs not about any Roon-vs-the-plebes stereotype. If it is, then I guess they can extend Roon certification to people.
Itâs fine to compare a sorted key/value store to an ISAM, but less fine to dismiss the value of a decent RDBMS. If your problem is, ultimately, relational, itâs hard to beat the capabilities of an RDBMS. This is especially true as your requirements evolve, as they are now.
I think youâre minimizing the complexity of adding file browsing. What was a value is now also a key. Sure, you can partition a big table into logical tables by prefixing keys with table names and all the rest of it and then denormalizing portions of your keys into values, denormalizing even more of your data into data on the new keys for perf, and more. You can certainly make it all work, and they no doubt will. But itâs a lot more than just adding another index. I donât want or need this feature and if you asked me if Iâd want the opportunity cost associated with them implementing it, Iâd probably prefer that they spend their time elsewhere.
Be nice if they can revist Roonâs rather harsh upgrade policy. Iâve been meaning to go to a lifetime sub for a couple years but always miss the day my credit card is pinged. This time one week after renewal I asked if I could swap to lifetime - and I could but no pro-rata refund, which seems rather mean. Iâve been paying annual subs for 9 years now so a bit of understanding would go a long way
Congratulations on the release of these useful features. Looking forward to Roon becoming even better.
Time to rediscover my own missing music that imported into Roon but I never listened due to handicapped import and incomplete listing, like this album track 1-7 is systematically disappeared, and I replaced with new copies still disappearing and not found on the error log of library import.
Folder browsing is last resort I can knowing Roon still have it and play it.
I never really looked into why the necessity for continuous internet connectivity was introduced, but, as soon as I learned about the new feature, I made plans to introduce a Wi-Fi extender in my Wi-Fi experience, since there were some dropouts of Wi-Fi in my room at times, and I couldnât imagine having to deal with dropouts of sound Iâm my listening experience.
So, Iâm up and running with the Wi-Fi extender. I never really tested Roon while that feature was introduced, but Iâm future-proof just in case.
Roonâs awesome.
Thanks!
Wi-Fi extenders donât help with internet outages though.
Oh, for mobile listening, I guess, yeah. But, I only use Roon in a dedicated system, where amps are connected to wall outlets, etc.
Happy for the new direction and priorities, but will admit it was disturbing to read the statement
I know many suspected the above, but to admit that system reliability was not paid attention to isâŚ
As for core features:
Hopefully this means true remote access to the roon server will be in the future (Iâm not talking about ARC). The ability to use a secondary system at the office or at a 2nd home, and hit my roon server at home, is a definite need. ARC is great for listening from my phone on the go, but true remote access (similar to being able to hit my plex server from the office) would be a game changer.
I shouldnât have to pay for multiple licenses to listen to the same library (using the same interface) in different locations⌠that should be a core feature.