Bring back local search / offline functionality for offline Roon Core [restored with Build 1365]

Haha yes this is indeed very weird and hopefully an eye opener for the ROON team, although they are very stuck in their point of view.

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I fully agree!!

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Oh the irony… I was about to acknowledge this comment earlier and I couldn’t. Why? Because my Cable Modem went off-line :flushed: It doesn’t happen often, but YES, it does happen out here in the hinterlands.

I would also be curious to know just how redundant Roon’s cloud infra is, are they multi-cloud? Or are they wholly dependent upon a single provider?

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Danny, perhaps you don’t understand the magnitude of the change you have made here. This is not a “feature request” this is a bug where a good number of long term Roon users have had the rug pulled out from under them. “Local access is broken” is now a bug. Your product is now broken for a good group of people who started their Roon journeys with wanting the best way to do local libraries. The fact that you have provided a mobile experience is great but doing so by breaking the local one without even thinking to ask your customer base is really poor. You may think this is a minor set of people complaining right now, but they may not have experienced an outage yet. Just wait until we have the inevitable next major cloud provider outage for whoever it is you guys are hosted with. Then you will see this “feature request” go viral.

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Is this feature request about local search or offline mode? Because I don’t think it is the same, and it leaves a nice cop out opportunity if they are bundled.
I don’t need “local search”, I need to play my own music.

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Playing local files and the ability to search local files should be possible. Otherwise, what is the use of local server (i.e. The Core) and gigabytes of databases which is stored locally? At the worst, filtering should be possible. But, I believe more could be done in terima of offline functionality. I just don’t think Roon has the intentions to do it.

It’s about being able to play local music for a limited time at least, if the core’s internet connection is temporarily offline.

The title meant to say that Roon could fall back to a very basic search (or just text based filter for local album names, or maybe no search at all) if internet failed.

The mention of search in the thread title came about because one explanation for the always-on requirement was that the fancy new (and upcoming) search improvements require internet.

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Yeah, I just thought that this leaves a handy “we can not maintain two versions of search” way out of dealing with the issue.
The big thing is being able to use your local library when offline.

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Many people have expressed that it would be totally fine for them if there was no search at all when offline :slight_smile:

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I’ve refrained from commenting elsewhere on this forum since I was accused of axe-grinding by one of the moderators which is prohibited.

As long as my subscription fees are paid then when the internet is down I’d like to be able use Roon to locate and play local files, use DSP and RAAT. That’s it.

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I’ll preface this by saying I’m a ‘lifetime’ Roon subscriber with absolutely no regrets, but things change, Roon already has my money and they can and will do what they will.

That being said, I do want a fall-back solution for digital audio playback when the ‘magic’ of the Internet (or software) fails for whatever reason. So with this goal in mind, this morning, I finally got around to flashing Volumio to a microSD card and stuck it in the Raspberry Pi that has been running Ropiee. I connected my NAS to Volumio and installed the Roon Bridge plug-in.

So far so good. I can play directly from my local music library via Volumio using their web, IOS or Android apps using the free version. Or I can also select the Volumio Roon end point and play from the Roon app just as I have been via Ropiee. And switching back to Ropiee is as easy as swapping the microSD card in the Raspberry Pi.

There are a bunch of features enabled by subscribing to Volumio’s ‘Premium’ tier, like Qobuz/Tidal integration, multi-room playback, Sonos support, etc., but none of them are required for my digital audio playback ‘fall-back solution’ (for now anyway).

:+1:

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No amount of online content can compete with just listening to my personal music collection.

I understand what Roon is trying to do and I appreciate the features that can only be created by having an always online system. But I cannot condone the choice and will move off Roon if this is the direction the software is taking.

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Lol what a joke. As a user in trial I will likely not be proceeding with my subscription for very long due to this… The reasoning is clearly disingenuous and leads me to distrust roon’s intentions, therefore strongly discourages me from committing to the platform. As a SaaS software development manager I can say with a fairly high degree of certainty that there is no good architectural excuse for not supporting an offline mode on Core. Search is obviously an entirely separate service to the rest of the application. Just disable it. Then, continue focusing on developing online search as the exclusive search solution… That makes complete sense and is easily justified.

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Yes this is the most voted feature request ever.

But @danny remains stubborn about the decision to not put it on the roadmap. This means the format of voting and interaction with us as your customers does not make sense anymore. Does it?

I was also one of those who voted for the mobile feature. I wish I had not.

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I’m going to hit the voting button at the top of the page.

Disabling Roon from being able to play local files when the internet fails is as annoying as disabling black and white printing on a printer that’s out of magenta toner.

I buy local files for exactly this reason - when the internet goes out, the music doesn’t stop! Please think again.

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Not that we need more votes to emphasise the point that losing all access to local music when the Internet goes down is absurd, but consider this another vote.
I don’t feel like I’m setting the bar high; I don’t even need an offline search function and would happily settle for just being up to scroll through a list of artists, albums and songs. I’ll even forgo all meta data except for artist, album and title! Even streaming services like Tidal offer functionality offline; the fact that Roon no longer does is a joke and makes me start to regret an expensive lifetime subscription.

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They’ve closed, re-opened, and buried this thread - plus added “not on road map” to the title…

Quoting Darko:

The takeaway from my two-hour phone call with Dulai is that he and his team have already done the maths: that fewer existing users will quit Roon (because of 2.0’s move to an always-on Internet connection) than will join for Arc’s remote streaming functionality or as yet unknown software smarts coming down the pike, enabled by a shift to cloud computing.

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I respect Darko for commenting on the issue in his latest video.

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[The comments below are the customer’s opinions they do not accurately reflect Roon’s decision or positions]

Sounds like the Moderators don’t want to be reminded just how bad of a decision this exclusion of local library playback during an outage really is.

Why even purchase a Roon Core if they want to do all of the processing in the cloud?

Then all we would need if a web browser, nor a Core.

This is a terrible decision.

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[The comments below are the customer’s opinions they do not accurately reflect Roon’s decision or positions]

Where is the CEO (Mr. Vandermeer) in all of this? I do feel bad, they spent such a long time working on this project, upon realizing it was not the right move. However, companies have to take losses and setbacks, and sometimes we can’t always get it right. All I hope is they are actively working on a solution to the chaos, instead of censoring loyal users.

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