I’m not so sure about this. Roon has written in this forum about other technologies that are licenced, and my interpretation of this is that they would be opposed to such a model.
Since Roon has somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 users, with most using either Windows and macOS or a NUC or Linux server, I think this is highly unlikely, and would result in the collapse of their subscribers.*
One good thing about Roon is that it can be used with almost anything. So, why would they want to change this?
*That’s just an educated guess since I have no insider knowledge.
They won’t be loving it if they have a large music collection and a large number of albums by one or more artists. And now all of a sudden, unidentified albums are an issue. They never were before.
I wish it was that simple. There are several possible reasons for a failure to identify an album or a piece of music.
It may be obscure so nobody knows and cares about it
It may be of such questionable quality that the acoustic fingerprint will not match
It may not be part of the database that is searched
The matching process may be flawed
The list probably goes on.
As I am still very much interested to find out what’s going on I had a second look at some of those files Roon could not match.
I just checked about ten unidentified albums against musicbrainz and discogs and easily identified most of them. That might mean that “Roon’s flexible and vast (fast?) audio analysis service” is not up to the task.
We have two major issues here: Less than perfect identification of music and poor handling of issues resulting from this.
I have attached screenshots to the original thread that show where the samples were taken from and what results were generated by songkong.
My guess is that least 80 to 90 percent of those CouldNotIdentify files are easily identified. These are just not found by Roon for some reason. Go figure.
The argument of bad Roon server performance because of unidentified local library content has red herring potential. It of course may be part of the problem, but by far is not the only cause. As this is off-topic wrt this thread, I won’t go into more detail.
I already found the Nucleus and Nucleus Plus too expensive, here the stakes are raised once more. Personally, I really couldn’t justify the purchase, because I am simply not experiencing any serious hardware-related issues on my current server (116.000 track library). I am running Roon Server on an ASUS PN51 AMD Ryzen 5 5500U mini PC with an Akasa Newton A50 fanless casing, with a combined cost of €650 (about 20% of the cost of a Nucleus Titan). It is not even a dedicated Server, it is a Windows install which I also happily use for home theater (Plex), web browsing, etc. on my TV. Still, it ticks all my boxes.
It’s different because it’s a computer and has nothing to do with sound quality. A speaker on the other hand has everything to do with SQ. I’m not saying $60K speakers make much sense, I’m saying I can at least see a correlation between the price and quality.
I have an Arcam AVR. I also had an older Mark Levinson power amplifier. Both are now Harman brands: the Arcam sounds great but is spectacularly unreliable (mainly software) : my ML sounded fantastic but I wouldn’t buy a current model due to the reputation they have developed for poor reliability and support. My company used to work with Samsung to validate their software, and the quality of their software and developer response was head-bangingly bad. I have serious concerns about the future of Roon under Harman/Samsung
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
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Apparently aluminum is now a “premium metal”? Maybe in 1500 AD.
And don’t the Nucleus and Nucleus+ also have silent, fanless operation? How does the Titan’s cooling design “surpass” those products?
I am sure it works great but placing it in my living room would earn me a comment like ´have you stolen that device from a lab?´ or some unlucky guy probably a quick divorce.
I consider a Nucleus Titan to be the cheaper option…
Haha, do not fear, my girlfriend is no different, she needs all that stuff nicely tucked away. Even with the fanless casing though, it is only 169x116x69mm so it is safely behind the doors of my tv cabinet.
