A NOOBIE's Perspective on ROON and things that need improvement

So I am new to ROON - had it for 3 days now. And overall I love it. It is fantastic and way ahead of most of the other streaming apps out there. So here are the things I love and hate about ROON.

LOVE:

  1. The interface and layout and the WIKIPEDIA style catalogue.
  2. Love the AI and the personalization features.
  3. Sound Quality is excellent overall for streaming from hard disk.
  4. Very easy to use and setup.
  5. Has a fabulous full featured iOS app that mirrors the desktop app.

SUGGESTED AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT:

  1. DSP is single threaded and causes stuttering, especially when you use upsampling and or upsampling in conjunction with other DSP functions. The whole DSP engine needs to be multi-threaded so that it can take advantage of multiple CPU cores. Currently it is single threaded which means it can only use ONE core at a time.
  2. For Mac OS, ROON needs to be optimized like Audirvana is - it should be ported to Apple Silicon so it runs natively on my M1 Mac mini, and it should disable OS functions that are not mission critical like Audirvana does so that it doesn’t utilize more processing power then need be.
  3. Apple Music integration - I would really like to see Apple Music integration so that the catalog appears in ROON and I can control Apple Music by ROON. Even if Apple gives you the middle finger and doesn’t allow it, you should figure out a way to work around that and even if it requires scripting to remote control the Music App via ROON, do that!

Conclusion: Overall I love ROON and will definitely become a permanent subscriber. However there are many areas as stated above that need improvement.

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I would work on solving Issue 3 thru support. Not really an area for improvement as many successfully use the Sonore. Yes, DSP engine needs a face lift. HQPlayer is a significant improvement should you want to try another DSP solution.

Because of the way Roon accomplishes what it does, #5 is impossible without a mutual partnership between Apple and Roon, which at present seems virtually impossible.

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It took me a lot longer than 3 days to get to know Roon and to formulate an opinion about it. :thinking:

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In response to your comments:

  1. Don’t use it so can’t say.
  2. Many of us use DSP with no problems. It seems like you’re running an M1 Mac Mini. DSP should be no problem for you, so you might consider opening a support thread to address this issue.
  3. This would be a deal breaker for me. Again, you should probably open a support thread to figure this one out. This doesn’t happen to the vast majority of Roon users and it shouldn’t happen to you.
  4. Never used Audirvana so can’t comment on this one.
  5. As stated by others, it’s unlikely Apple would be interested in partnering with Roon considering the requirements Roon has for integration. According to the webs, Apple music has ~72M subscribers. Roon has ~150K. Jumping through hoops to add some portion of the ~150K users seems highly unlikely.
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I apologise if this seems a daft question regarding radio, but are you certain the correct streams have been selected?
I used to use TuneIn but now use Roon with no issue at all, mainly for Radio Paradise and BBC streams.

Michael

Dave,
[Moderated] I’ve been an Apple fan boy since the first iPhone…love their quality, attention to detail and Customer service and I don’t see Apple and Roon playing together either! :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Welcome to the forum, Brent!

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Hi and welcome to the forums!

It’s a great product, but the forums are a bit on the hostile side.

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What DSP do you have enabled? The fact it’s single threaded is not the root of your issue. DSP works well for a lot of people.

In your signal path there is a number when you’re playing. Anything > 1 means your CPU is keeping up with DSP. It sounds like you’ve got some other set-up, network, etc. issues the community can help you with. Need more details though.

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I think you may be right. The multiplier is around 21 times.

The station I am using is KUSC classical station as my test. I can do a sound demo comparison to illustrate the difference in sound quality tomorrow and post it to my Youtube channel.

21x means that less than 5% of that core is being used. 2x means 50% of one core is being used

The higher the multiplier the less core being used

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On #4, try setting the reysnc value to a higher number. You’ll find it under the device settings. Try 2000ms to start and see if that doesn’t solve the issue (did for me on one of my rendu streamers).

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I don’t trust that number. Activity monitor is the true source to check. And roon typically uses 50% of a single core when sitting IDLE. Roon is a cpu resource hog.

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Thanks Charles I will give that a shot.

I’m not sure why you are experiencing this problem, but are you sure that it is a Roon issue. I use a Sonore Rendu with a Teddy Pardo power supply in one of my systems and NEVER have to re-boot it. Roon unfailingly picks it up instantly irrespective of whether or not my system has been powered down overnight or left on 24/7 for weeks on end. It literally never loses nor fails to establish a connection.

One suggestion: I use Roon Rock installed on a reasonably specified Intel NUC that is reserved exclusively for Roon. This seems to be the most stable Roon installation, and I would recommend that you try this if you continue to experience connectivity issues.

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Has its finished processing your library fully? Seems quite excessive. Roon has shown a bug on MacOs with other users where it is maxing out CPU but for others does not affect them at all. So this might be related to that. I run DSP on a not so fancy i7 and it handles DSP fine, but it’s using ROCK and only Runs Roon. Dependant on what DSP your doing will tax the CPU especially using convolution and DSD upscaling.

They will be releasing a native M1 version but it’s not on the top list of priorities yet. Roon is a way more complicated beast than Audivarna so switching not that simple. Even Adobe don’t have their apps running on Apple silicon just yet. Give it time.

Roon currently will never use more than 2 cores as that’s how they have written it, it won’t scale with more. I agree it probably should and may actually work better if it did but as it really doesn’t need to I doubt we will any time soon.

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Unfortunately the station isn’t available to me on TuneIn due to regional restrictions (I’m in the UK) but when I search for it in Roon I notice bitrates on the available streams are very low (96kbps). Maybe the TuneIn streams for KUSC are higher?

Michael

That was it. Now roon uses around 12% of one cpu core when idle. So I guess it was sucking up cpu resources by scanning my library.