How do users have to “contend with” features they don’t care about?
2 Likes
Obviously if folder browsing is built into the Roon’s GUI I’d have to contend with it.
I don’t want to ever see or use folder browsing in Roon’s graphical interface, so making it optional for users i.e. a switch to turn on/off this function would suit my preference.
3 Likes
RoonLabs always said they don’t want folder browsing because it encourages certain ways to manage libraries that from then on every other Roon feature must take into account, so that it doesn’t interfere with or break these habits.
I’m not sure how big this danger is, but I do think it’s a valid concern that is difficult to foresee and wasn’t completely made up by RoonLabs. I have had to deal with similar things at work, where manual workarounds that we made possible at one time to satisfy user needs, while we couldn’t „do it right“, then continued to hold back the „right way“ ten years later.
In this sense, allowing folder browsing has the potential to force everyone else to contend with any restrictions it might impose elsewhere.
5 Likes
Why not buy a few more just in case?
11 Likes
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!!!
8 Likes
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 I’m 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.
1 Like
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 that’s rather speculative. Also, I don’t see such a big limitation from a software perspective. Roon doesn’t 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 that’s hardly the toughest programming challenge.
1 Like
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 that’s my hope.
12 Likes
No indexes in LevelDB.
I wonder if the Roon folks have ever just wished they’d 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 I’m just old but I’d rather be solving this new folder browse problem on a relational database than on a key/value store.
5 Likes
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 it’s simple enough. They don’t 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.
2 Likes
May I just mirror everyone and add how delighted I am? It’s 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. They’d be the one who pays more for a software like Roon. Light users? Dilettantes? Isn’t Spotify good enough? And for those a bit more discerning, both Apple Music and tidal interfaces are improving consistently.
3 Likes
Excellent news indeed.
What’s a light user? Someone with less than 1M tracks in the library? And what’s a dilettante? Perhaps someone who hasn’t yet created their room correction convolution filters? Or their headphone PEQs to emulate the Harman curve? And isn’t Qobuz good enough?
I don’t know what they meant exactly by “core audience”, but something tells me it’s not about any Roon-vs-the-plebes stereotype. If it is, then I guess they can extend Roon certification to people.
1 Like
It’s 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, it’s hard to beat the capabilities of an RDBMS. This is especially true as your requirements evolve, as they are now.
I think you’re 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 it’s a lot more than just adding another index. I don’t want or need this feature and if you asked me if I’d want the opportunity cost associated with them implementing it, I’d probably prefer that they spend their time elsewhere.
3 Likes
Be nice if they can revist Roon’s rather harsh upgrade policy. I’ve 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. I’ve been paying annual subs for 9 years now so a bit of understanding would go a long way
1 Like
Congratulations on the release of these useful features. Looking forward to Roon becoming even better.
1 Like
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.
