The static lyrics with the huge font are a major problem. Based on my own limited survey, less than 1/3 to 1/2 of the songs offer streaming lyrics, and for the rest we are left with huge, ugly lyrics that must be laboriously scrolled through line by bloody line. This is completely a non-starter in a home theater setup. The good news is that Roon has said they will look at the issue – I am hopeful that means they will fix it in weeks and not months. On the plus side, the automatic scrolling works very well, even if the size of the text is VERY large and must have been designed for users with cataracts. It is the static lyrics – which is what we see most of the time – that is the problem.
This is discussed in the below thread. I encourage you to offer your opinion here as well, so Roon knows that a number of us share this concern.
The issue of the large static lyrics is also discussed at the bottom of this thread:
In other threads, I referred to this as the Curse of Sonos. Sonos periodically changes their entire app. In the process, Sonos throws out the baby with the bathwater, and abandon the parts of their app that work really well. In response, many of their customers loudly object, and complain that with each successive version, Sonos becomes more difficult to use.
To some degree, Roon did the same thing. Roon wiped out the use of large album covers in the Now Playing screen, which looked great and worked well. Roon also threw out the text box of lyrics, which worked much better for lyrics that aren’t live and don’t automatically scroll. In both cases, the UI developers behaved like Sonos and abandoned features that worked well.
But on the PLUS side for the Roon developers, the new ability to quickly click on the icons for artist bios and summary information on the albums is really helpful and well done. My primary reason to subscribe to Roon is for those features, so I appreciate that part of the new design.
I would urge the developers to RETAIN those new features.
Those icons should be on the very bottom, just above larger font that says what is playing. Instead of putting those icons across the middle of the page. Then, when we click on the icon for the artist bio, or for the description of the album, the bio would fill most of the screen, instead of only the top half. For many shorter bios, that would completely eliminate the need to scroll through the bio.
And when we click on the icon for the album cover, it would be restored and occupy the same space – most of the screen above.
Agreed. Many of us have spent hours downloading high res cover art, and now we are left with a thumbnail in the corner.
The photos that replaced the cover art are comical. Because Roon must automatically crop the photos to fit a home theater screen or an iPad, Roon ends up showing us the knee caps of artists, or the nose without a chin, and in one especially comical bit of auto cropping, from the knees to the chest. You can guess what part of the anatomy was then shown in the center.