Wow, another King’s X fan. I knew there must be more than just me! This does seem to be an unwelcome feature, when Valence doesn’t seem to know where to take it so it just repeats the same artist. I think the few times I have let Roon Radio work on King’s X it did manage to find Platypus and Jelly Jam, but still rather insular in choice. Not tried this recently though.
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Blockquote[quote=“Aaron_Turner, post:19, topic:119432”]
I do really wish it populated the play list in advance so I can get a feel if this is what I’m looking for,
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I’m not at home to check, but my recollection was that in the Roon Radio ‘panel’ you could see the next selection, and could give that a thumbs up or down, after which the next selection would be displayed, and so on, allowing a ‘curated’ queue to be dynamically built.
Haven’t looked at this recently, so it may have changed, but I did quite like that way of discovering new music in a slightly more involved fashion.
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Ah, that’s better. Sorry about that.
Yeah, it’s “radio” so you get to peek at the next song. Rather than an auto-updating playlist based on your feedback. It’s a different (and frankly more limiting) user experience. Like the King’s X thing I mention… makes it harder to know if it is ever going to pick another band. I don’t give Roon any points for me picking Queensryche and it then pivoting to Black Sabbath- it’s a good pick, but it’s not doing anything I’m not able to get for free elsewhere. I dunno… maybe the answer is “listen more/longer”, but I’m kinda annoyed I can’t just quickly glance over the playlist and get a feel for things nearly immediately.
And I haven’t even really dug into what it’s going to take for me to listen to Roon remotely (say at work, post-covid). Sounds like “special VPN settings are a must and not officially supported config” which raises a number of alarm bells- both on the technical/Roon side and how happy my employer will be with me creating a VPN tunnel/back door to my home network. Probably would prevent me from buying a lifetime subscription which is something I’d do if I really thought Roon was right for me.
Honestly for $120/yr I just kinda want it to “work”. That’s why I run MacOS and not Linux on my laptop. I can totally use Linux for 95% of what I do, but I’m willing to pay a premium for something that “just works”.
A few more thoughts:
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Roon Radio seems overall pretty good. The ability to pull in tracks from Tidal is a great combination. I threw Charlie Hunter at it over dinner last night and it was exactly what I was hoping for. After dinner I tried some In Flames (melodic death metal) and I was impressed Roon was smart enough to stay pretty well rooted the melodic side of things.
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That said, I really wish it had Amazon Alexia integration. For just picking some background/mood music just saying “Alexia play some XXXX” is so much nicer than getting my phone out of the pocket, unlocking it, launching the Roon App, selecting the correct zone, searching for an artist or something, then clicking on Roon Radio. Just typing that out makes me tired.
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Spent most of the day in my office today working on my computer and wanted to listen to music. But I needed to be on a different network than my Roon core is on. Oh right, now I can’t talk to Roon.
So I launched iTunes which frankly worked great for what I was looking for. -
On a side note, I spent a few hours debugging the networking that Roon uses to communicate and figured out a way to get it working across VLAN networks. I won’t go into details here, but I posted in the Tinkering section how I solved it.
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Really wish there was a Alfred plugin for Roon on MacOS like there is for iTunes. I miss that.
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Was pleasantly surprised that the multi-media hot keys on my keyboard do work with Roon.
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Listened to Roon on my phone through my Fiio headphone DAC/Amp on the couch and some Argon MK3 (semi-open) headphones. My wife asked me if I changed something in the headphones because she could hear them leaking. I guess I turned up the volume a bit much since I was enjoying things so much.
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Crap, now I need to find a set of closed back headphones I like for everyday listening on the couch so I don’t annoy the wife.
Honestly, I think the next thing I need to do is dig in and compare Tidal to Apple Music. I already have Apple Music (got it free) and need to see if $250/yr or whatever it ends up to be for Roon/Tidal is really worth it.
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A few other thoughts and another question:
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Ran in to the 400% CPU bug today on MacOS. Apparently it’s been a problem that’s been around for over a year? Looks like Roon is written in C#. Makes me wonder if Linux/MacOS are second class citizens. While technically cross-platform thanks to Mono, C# is pretty low on the list of languages that people typically write if targeting Linux/MacOS.
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Picking an Album and choosing “Focus on Similar” is another bad joke. Why is that front & center and Roon Radio hidden? Also, it only seems to work on albums I own and not Tidal? Ugh, I have no idea how I’m going to explain to my wife “click here, but not here or over here or really bad things happen”.
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Pulled the trigger on a Focal Elegia. $400 + tax on Adorama (they’re discontinued, so if interested I recommend buying now before they’re all gone). Hoping that the reading glasses I wear while reading don’t kill the seal, but figure worst case I can sell them on eBay and recoup most of my $$$.
The question:
- My Roon Core (Linux PC) is in the closet with my home theater receiver and whole house audio setup. Right now I’m streaming from the Roon to an Apple TV, but I could go either HDMI or S/PDIF. I assume HDMI would be most preferred, then S/PDIF and Apple TV least?
I dont have lots of answers for you but here are a few thoughts;
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No idea about macOS but ROCK is a linux based system so I dont see why that would be considered second class.
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Focus on Similar works on any album in your library whether that be local files or TIDAL/Qobuz
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Very nice. Happy with them so far?
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For multi-channel audio (if that’s what you are asking regarding the home theatre system) you have to use HDMI as far as I know. For stereo of the options stated I’d use SPDIF, but it might depend on your DAC etc.
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Mostly because .Net / C# was developed my Microsoft for Windows and then the open source community led by Miguel de Icaza ported it to Linux/etc as part of the Mono project. While some languages were designed to be cross-platform from day 1 (Java and others), .Net & C# were definitely not. The number of Mono apps I can recall running on Linux/MacOS can be counted on two fingers and I’ve been running Linux since the early 90’s (pre 1.0 kernel days) and MacOS since the early days of OSX on PPC.
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Huh. Because I’m only seeing my own albums. Honestly, it’s such a random number generator that I wouldn’t use it either way because as best as I can tell it looks a the genre of the artist and then picks more of that so if you pick A Perfect Circle it gives you Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (like before). Charlie Hunter is better, although limited to only a few artists (Joe Satriani and Henry Connick, Jr. mostly). Anne-Sophie Mutter gives me only classical which is a relief. Kenny Wayne Sheperd is pretty much everything- including a Windham Hill album?? Apparently Roon has REALLY bad meta data for that one:
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Can’t say. Placed the order yesterday and gonna take 7-10 days to show up. Honestly, I’m a bit concerned about the lack of bass (especially if I can’t get a good seal) and being overly detailed for my tastes, but I really like my Focal/MassDrop Elex so figured it was worth a shot. Originally was thinking the LCD 2 Closed, because I love my LCD-2C and it shouldn’t have issues sealing with glasses but the closed version has a significant drop at 1k and 5k which just isn’t going to work for the kind of music I enjoy. The best option from what I can tell is probably the ZMF Atticus, but 3 month wait and $1200 made me take the risk on the Focal.
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Thanks for the feedback. I’ll give the optical a try.
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Im not sure that clarifies anything about the ‘second class’ suggestion but you’re obviously free to believe what you like on that front. I take second class to mean missing features or not keeping up with other platforms. There are a few issues with Roon on Windows too if that makes it any better, the odd memory leak being the most obvious.
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Focus on Similar uses genres in your library not valence. So its use is dependent on the accuracy of metadata which as we all know is variable at best. Focus in general is about what is in your library not discovery outside of that from your streaming platform.
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Well fingers crossed they perform well and you get what you want from them. They are well thought of I believe, but I think I’d have auditioned them first personally.
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No worries, hope it turns out ok!
Maybe the “second class” thing is harsh. Without knowing the details, this 400% CPU bug smells a lot like the kind of bug I’d expect to see because of C#/.Net is running on a Mac. And as a software developer, when I see someone writing code in C#/.Net there’s a strong signal that it’s targeting Windows and other platforms are less important. Don’t get me wrong- there aren’t many good languages out there which are actually good at generating GUI apps across Windows, Linux and MacOS. I wouldn’t want to pick C++/QT either. And I hate Java. I’ve seen some commercial “MacOS” apps which are really just Windows apps running under Wine which is definitely worse.
Regarding Focus and Valence (people keep using that word, but I honestly have no idea what it is- I assume it’s some Roon music categorization thing used sometimes but not always) and Tidal/etc. Honestly, as a listener I don’t really care? At the end of the day it’s all music and I just want to listen to it. If certain features are relying on metadata which is various levels of bad than you have a bad feature, even if expertly coded. Garbage in, garbage out. Looks like I can add my own tags, but can’t delete tags I disagree with so apparently that Windham Hill album is forever “Hard Rock”. I have Apple Music as well and while it’s not perfect by any means, it’s never that bad.
Don’t get me wrong- Roon Radio seems to be exactly what I’m looking for when I want to passively explore by discovering new music. I’ve already found a few bands I’ve never heard of that I’m like “oohhhh, let’s listen to more of that!”. I just wish it was more front & center and more integrated.
As for the Elegia’s… Yeah, I would liked to audition them before buying… but, it’s kinda hard right now with that covid thing. And they’re quickly going out of stock everywhere since they’re discontinued. Worst case I loose a few bucks reselling on eBay. Best case I don’t have to wait 3 months and spend $1200 on something else.
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I was looking for that.
Thanks for the link Anthony.
So I guess Valence is mostly Roon Radio today. Some of the other features are nice of course, but I guess I’ll have to listen more for it to provide really useful results.
I guess I’ll have to wait to see more features/integrations that are powered by Valence.
A lot of really great comments/thoughts/feedback here @Aaron_Turner.
I think for the expensive service that Roon is, that it is falling way behind on such functionality as voice integration. When you are listening to music in the background and a track comes on that you want to skip, having to open up the app (and then it locks up or crashes) on your phone or tablet and the hit skip to the next track can be somewhat annoying. I guess that it because we are now used to having apps that use voice commands. I use Siri regularly especially in the car.
Heh… I’m full of ideas.
Honestly, I’m not really sure what I’m going to do when my eval is up. There’s no point for me to get Roon without also getting Tidal. So now we’re talking a really nice bottle (or two) of wine/scotch . That’s cool, in the grand scheme of things it’s not like I need to worry about Roon or food or anything like that, but I do want to feel I’m getting my monies worth. And for that I’m looking for that one killer feature that is just so much better than iTunes/Apple Music. Arguably, “not using the iTunes UI” is that feature, but I was hoping for something more musical?
Definitely there are things it does do well. The multi-zone is really well executed and being able to send music from my phone to the whole house audio without having to buy anything else is really nice. The apps are pretty and searching is fast (faster than iTunes). And for all my complaining about UI / navigation and the wrong things front & center, it’s not the disaster that is iTunes Music either.
I get that Roon Labs is a small company. Their ability to get a lot of hardware vendors to support RAAT is pretty amazing- but fundamentally not that interesting to me right now. The vendors I wish supported Roon are extremely unlikely to ever add support because they like their walled garden. Dunno, maybe I’m wrong and the new Apple Music/Siri announcement happens later this week. 
So yeah, right now I feel that Roon’s focus has been in these amazing hardware integrations and I just want to listen to music at my desk (dedicated DAC & Amp) or on the couch (phone & dac+amp) or while having dinner with my wife (whole house audio w/ voice control) or while hitting some fire road on the mountain bike. Roon does 2 out of 4 of those really well. Oh and listen to music at work… Roon doesn’t really have a story for that. So I’ve spent a large portion of this weekend figuring out how to get Roon to work over a VPN which isn’t supported.
Right now I can do all 5 of those things with iTunes/Apple Music. Would the music sound as good? Maybe not. But I’d always pick music I enjoy over music I hate or no music at all regardless of DSPs or bit rates or whatever.
So yeah, what I want and what I hope Roon can do is introduce me to a bunch of new bands and music I didn’t even know existed. Of course everyone else selling music is hoping to do the same thing, because that means I’ll either buy some or stay a subscriber too.
Is Roon is going to be so obviously better than the alternatives? I dunno… I guess I’ll find out?
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Fair points and as they say, horses for courses. That’s why the free trial in handy. However, for me the real game changer with Roon is the DSP capabilities, particularly PEQ and convolution, and how these can improve the sound characteristics of a room and the response of your headphones. These alone can save you money by improving the performance of your existing equipment (sometimes significantly). To me, this makes it easy to justify the cost. But that’s just me.
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For me that one killer feature isn’t the squirting data to endpoints, there’s lots of programs out there that do that. It’s the music discovery and the recommended artists. If you combine roon with Qobuz or Tidal, the suggestions are great for music discovery.
For me discovery is the “killer feature”, but if I was content to just listen to my library then I would likely still be doing the iTunes thing.
The one thing I’m doing is going yearly for a couple years to see how it shakes out and make sure it’s the right fit for me. A yearly subscription with Qobuz is the same sort of money as my wife and I eating out 3-4 times. So it’s not really going to poke a hole in our finances.
But you are right, when you first see roon, you expect fireworks and this amazing new experience, and it’s good and all, but there is certainly a tempering of expectations. There is also the issue that I have a mac and iPhone/iPad ecosystem, so I will always be married to iTunes to some level. I subscribe to apple music as well, and siri is getting better, although she is still pretty hopeless.
But in general, roon has improved my music enjoyment and the effectiveness of my large investment in music and playback hardware. Is it the most amazing thing, no, but it is an improvement over iTunes and way better than anything else I’ve seen.
Sheldon
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Well I ended up deciding to sign up for a year or Roon & Tidal. Honestly, I’m not blown away… Roon’s Valance/Radio is an odd beast. Sometimes it’s really good and other times I really do wonder what it’s thinking. I know Roon talks about it is learning thanks to “20M/mo tracks played” but I’m sure only a small fraction of those tracks are related to the kind of music I enjoy. Even still, areas that I would expect sometimes are just ???. Like playing Opera when I picked Classical. Sure, I kinda get it, but uh, I can’t be the only one who likes Classical and doesn’t like Opera. I do find myself browsing/reading about artists a lot more than I expected which is cool.
Anyways, it’s just good enough right now that I’m going to give it a year and see how it improves.
Semi-related, the Elegia’s are an interesting beast. I really like them for some songs and then others it just seems hollow. At least they’re not hurt by me wearing my reading glasses. Maybe they’ll improve over time as they break in.
The good news is I totally solved all my networking issues with Roon. Meaning my Roon server can be on a different subnet/VLAN from other devices. I can even connect to Roon over an OpenVPN tunnel. So in theory, when I’m back at the office for work I’ll be able to listen to Roon remotely.