When I purchased sotm sms-200 streamer, I received a 2-month trial subscription to roon. Overall, I am impressed with stability, flexibility and depth of content in roon. Being a programmer, I appreciate the difficulties in not only meeting system requirements but pleasing various users’ wishes and preferences. Furthermore, I am a big fan of open source, open architecture, and open specifications. With that allow me to enumerate the reasons why I have, for now, decided not to continue with subscription.
Value-add content like album/artist info and session credits are great and fun to read. But of course, my goal is to discover and listen to music, old and new. So, are value-adds worth the cost?
Android app after a long suspension would spin forever in listing a playlist or album. Upon restart, the list appears without any problems. Not quite repeatable but happens just enough to be annoying.
Roon Core has crashed couple of times. I reported the stack trace on the support page but heard no feedback. A paid subscription service should have an official bug reporting/resolution system.
Tidal integration needs improvement. Most missed for me are the My-Daily-Discovery and My-New-Arrivals. I’d love it if roon endpoints could serve as Tidal Connect devices. I prefer Tidal app when playing Tidal.
I like to see album covers, as large as possible. So, I really tinkered with the web controller extension created by a fellow forum user. Roon needs to officially adopt and support such product.
If I’m listening to a radio station and then, wish to jump back to music in the queue, it does not work intuitively. As I recall, I have to stop the radio and then, start the queue, i.e., I can’t just hit the Next button.
In place of roon controller, I’m now using mostly BubbleUpnp and occasionally mconnect. My raspberryPi’s are running gmediarender. sms-200 runs in mpd/dlna mode along with minimserver. On Ubuntu desktop, I run upplay as the controller. Tidal Connect is still missing but somehow, My-Daily-Discovery appears in BubbleUpnp.
To be sure, this is all messy and DIY but I am in full control without a paid subscription. Most importantly, audio quality does not suffer in any way. In fact, in one room, sound has noticeably improved.
Yeah, the features vs. niggles vs. price equation is a little bit different for everyone. I’m still in the Room fold but I’m not a million miles away from going DIY instead. Sounds like you’ve weighed it up and it’s the right decision for you. Keep enjoying the tunes
Indeed it’s a thoughtful post and anyone who bothers to relate why they prefer to shop elsewhere is useful.
When I owned a retail shop the one thing I wanted is that customers who were unhappy and left would at least tell me why. Leaving in a puff of smoke taught me nothing .
Do any of these offer DSP or upsampling? What about connecting various endpoints from commercial sellers like Auralic, Bluesound or any of the myriad of Roon Ready devices. For Upnp endpoints your solution is workable but this may not work with all products.
That’s it? Picayune stuff like albums images not large enough for your liking? Can’t jump from live radio to next in play queue? You said you like to listen music. That is what Roon is all about.
I too like listening to music. And I did so long before Roon was around. Roon is supposed to make the experience more enjoyable. For me, this mostly is true. But it isn’t true for everybody nor is it true every time. And I think we should respect that, instead of belittling those with points of view different to our own.
I am a Roon user and Nucleus owner (also a Sooloos owner that has now moved to ROON). I love my Roon and the ability to easily explore and find new music. I was previously using Napster but I had to change to Tidal once I bought a ROON. I didn’t like that too much because I had to convert all of my albums from Napster to TIDAl and I didn’t like the Tidal interface as much. Now that I have been using Tidal/Roon for 3 months I have also enjoyed the music suggestions from Tidal, although as this person points out, I cannot reach My-Daily-Discovery and MY-New_arrivals from Tidal thru my ROON. I can only listen to those when using the Tidal App. I contacted Tidal and asked them why and they said not all 3rd party (I guess ROON) allow access to all of the Tidal features. I agree with this person that I should be able to essentially run my tidal account through my ROON and play the music through my ROON set up. Now if I want to listen to My-Daily Discovery" I have to listen to it through my computer but not through my stereo system. Then if I find songs/albums I like, I have to go into ROON and associate these through Tidal into my library. This just seems like a waste when I have to pay a subscription to both of these entities. I would like to see this fixed. ROON or Tidal, if you are listening, please improve this situation. It would improve the listening and music exploration experience.
This is an uncommonly thoughtful and measured post about why one might not choose Roon. You’ve got great reasons, especially as a programmer and someone familiar with Linux and open source. You’re not wrong! Probably not the primary Roon persona, in the end, but good post nonetheless.
Agreed, the concept is great, but the execution is poor. My roon core has been unreachable for a couple of weeks despite all my attempts at troubleshooting. And I’ve heard nothing from my Support inquiry, except for a few suggestions from the community that were unavailing. Why pay for something that doesn’t work? My goal is to listen to music while I work, not work to listen to music. So, I’m outahere unless something starts to work by the end of the week.
There is a simple workaround to this. You start the Discovery playlist in Tidals app then save the current playlist as a new playlist give it the same name if you want. Then this will sync to Roon as one of your Tidal Playlists. Not ideal as it won’t update but it’s a way to get that data into Roon in a few steps… Roon can’t add features that are not available to 3rd parties. Qobuz do the same for their Q Weekly playlists. I guess they feel they need to still keep some exclusivity in their apps.
Yes it doesn’t take long to do if you really want them. Every app has stuff missing from the APIs in one way or another. Bubbleupnp is a pretty simple UI supporting one platform so they are always going to be more agile at adding new API things. Roon is rendered like a game engine so it needs a little more work to add new features as it has more of an affect of layout and will not always be high on the list of priorities for their development . It’s your choice though if you happy with Bubble stick with it.
Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed post. Obviously, we’re sorry to see you go, we’re continuously adding new features to Roon and don’t want you to miss out on anything. Despite that, we’re happy to hear that you’ve daisy-chained a few products in a way that meets your unique needs.
We hope that you’ll give us another look in the future. If you’re interested in another Roon trial at some point just shoot us a message, and we’ll happily get you fixed up.
The Roon experience depends on how much content you have, i.e. physically on your drive(s). If you use a streaming service to obtain content, there is little point in licensing Roon.
The performance of Roon also depnds strongly on the machine that runs it. In my experience, running it on some old jalopy that isn’t usable for anything else won’t do the trick.
I’m running it on a Core i3 with 16 GB of RAM. That isn’t nearly enough, to be honest.
