Yeah, or it’s a haven for users who personally find J River or Foobar too hard to use. Those are, in their own right, incredibly powerful pieces of software. But they lack the unique Tidal integration and metadata (faulty as some of it is) that Roon offers.
IMHO, the best software offers the ability to customize an experience while still offering good out of the box functionality. The best of both worlds.
I recently found that I can zoom the complete Interface of Tidal for Mac. That would be a great feature for Roon. As Roon seems to use web technology it shouldn’t be hard to make the interface more adaptive.
Roon uses OpenGL for the UI, not HTML5. It has more in common with a video game than a web browser.
Yes this is interesting to me, that Roon seems to have those two areas of functionality- audiophile, and music lover (with plenty of users falling in to both). Roon already has more audiophile functionality than I need, and has potential to add more music lover functionality that I would appreciate. So personally I hope that’s where they focus their efforts, but I’m curious to know where their attention is over the next 6 months or so.
That’s interesting. That explains the strange/uncommon behavior of text input fields (direct double click does not work).
Funny. The “audiophile” parts are mostly hidden unless the person that sets up Roon wants them exposed. My wife, who is just a music lover, loves Roon because it works like a web browser for music.
I don’t understand these complaints. Roon has something for everyone and a much better interface than any other product I have used. Instead of being negative about Roon what does or doesn’t do, let’s focus on constructive criticism and look for ways to make Roon better.
I was surprised by that quote too. I certainly think the opposite: the user interface, both the browsers and the more sophisticated scenarios of following relationships of artists and composers, are all about the art, while the audiophile stuff (DSP, multiple zones…) is hidden in dialog boxes behind clicks.
What led them to that view?
It’s not my view. I have friends that are into music and friends that are into highend audio. The music friends allready use websites like discogs, lastfm, musicbrainz etc etc all over. They did not see any added value in Roon besides something they allready got. They all had the feeling Roon was not for them but for audiophiles with a ‘fancy interface’ and ‘audiophile stuff’ (not my words) Don’t ask me why, it just was their first impression. It suprised me as much as you, believe me,
As for being negative. I’m not. Englisch is not my native language so my expressuon are more the often interpreted as negative. It is quite frustrating sometimes not to be able to explain what I mean in English and I can get a bit grumpy because of it. I do like Roon and I also want to make it better. I just would like some metadata on some parts of the interface that would make it easier to navigate my collection. What’s wrong with making life easier.
Often people come up with very good sounding reasons to justify that it’s not free. 
This may well not be true in your friends case but…
Yeah, I think price would have to do a lot with their opinion. Who else then audiphiles spend money on music playback instead of music itself? Shouldn’t have told it. But it’s hard to keep it a secret
I’d say “good software” - the best wouldn’t need my help to work like I want it to, it would just do so. 
I hope that’s what roon aims for … I might forgive them that some things I’d usually could get by customization (jriver MC for instance lets me add my own thumbnail descriptions, even with regexs and on more than two lines – but hey, that is not really about the music) aren’t present while roon figures out how to become the best integrator between my music collection and my hifi devices.
One important thing to consider is: the more customization is allowed the harder it gets to move on to new levels. Once you gave the choice you cannot take it back without risking users getting mad at you – and adding more migration planning & testing for changes to get thru smoooothly.
I cannot disagree in concept. However, as I think is quite established by the widely varying opinions on the forum, a single configuration is not likely to please everyone, or even a majority. Thus, my thought that Roon would best develop some level of configurable options, one good example being what information to display in the album browser. They did this with the queue and one button play, and it works OK once people got used to it.
Absolutely. 
I’ve just tried to rationalize why it may be a good thing for roon to carefully consider which of our wishes to implement. It also helps me to not get angry with my roon purchase. 
Isn’t it odd to describe your friends as belonging to one of two exclusive groups? Roon’s raison d’être is to create a music player for music lovers and this surely includes hi-fi enthusiasts too. I’ll rue the day when Roon has too numerous options and settings. Roon is and should always be about the music.
So, getting back to the original topic, I think browse (View All) could be improved and should be more consistent with the Overview and TIDAL screens, but I wouldn’t want to see unnecessary embellishment to the UI.
I have never heard anyone complain about the Genre view page of being cluttered or having too much information on it or too less genres on one page. Persoanlly I find this information of artist names that belong to a genre very usefull because it creates a nice overview of the genres. Without this info I gues I also would almost never use this page like I never use the artist browser
Let’s compare it to the artist viewer
Doesn’t look better in my view, visually less appealing, less information and more cluttered in my opinion because it looks like pictures cramped together. Now all I mean is that the album browser could be a bit more like (no not 100% excactly like) the genre browser instead of the artists browser. Better overview, easier to scan for the eyes, more informative and therefore more usefull. But any wich way it would look, I’m not especially talking about how I would want things to look, I’m talking about the metadata I would like to see in an overview. That’s what interests me the most. Most of the reaction are about how things would look and a fear of clutter. I’m more interested in actual content, implemanetation is to the Roon team. I have had a discussion about this some time ago with Danny from Roon and the consensus was to focus on metadata and what kind of metadata we would like to see, not on looks. Well I think there is a pletora of metadata allready (could allways be more in quantity and interactivity offcoarse) it only has to show up in the right places to be even more usefull.
While I never have any objection to additional options for customization of any screen, I like the way it works now. My only request would be to be able to change the scale to allow either more or fewer thumbnails to appear per page in album view. Unlike some of you, I would put a lot more on a page since I usually identify albums by the image, and wish I didn’t have to scroll through so many pages, but, that being said, I can easily live without this.
Thank you! I’ve misunderstood this setting for over 6 months (thought it was something to do with showing extra art for each album) - can’t believe I didn’t just try it out before…but am happy to have found it now 
Today I fired up Roon for the first time in quite a while. For me, Roon is about discovering new music. For listening to my library I have a few options (recently bought a Naim Atom… fantastic bit of kit). I find the album browser confused and disjointed. Here is the Tidal Masters page…
It shows a level of information about the albums - including the review rating (the stars). Whether we agree with the reviews or not is another debate and thread, but it is there. Some information is customisable (eg if it is live, what format) but much is not.
First gripe… If I want to see more albums I have to click “View all”. Ok, I get that this page is “What’s new” and viewing all isn’t what’s new - but if they are sorted by release date then do I need a what’s new? It isn’t what’s new since the last time I was there. If they were combined - then why can’t I scroll right to see more albums with the same information on it?
Which brings me to point 2. I click on View all… now I have the scroll left / right that I wanted in the previous screen. But look at the album info…
Maybe it is because the albums are too small. So let’s turn off “Allow for more albums and photos”…
Sorry, it’s a c**p experience.
