Thanks for all the posts in the thread. Until this year Roon was a “set it and forget” application for me.
Now it seems because I’m running on an old Mac Mini, Roon 2.0 doesn’t work and my entire Roon ecosystem has “collapsed” because I can’t get it all restored to 1.8. I can’t understand why the clients all have to run 1.8 forever rather than just letting 2.0 and greater talk to the 1.8 API.
Now reading this thread…
Can anyone recommend an alternative that just lets me merge a modest local collection (maybe 600 CDs) and a full-res service like Tidal or Qobuz? I don’t think I care about anything else that Roon is working on.
Plex. But not as good as Roon for audio.
Endpoint support is…, well it isn’t.
No hqplayer support. Well not easily.
It works with tidal.
It was designed from the ground up to do what ARC does.
It has a web interface. Local and remote.
It has a Plex app with movie and audio and photo support. It has an audio only app, plex amp.
It has a Linux app with gui.
And it does play locally if your internet goes out. And the Search works well too.
It works with movies.
It’s not Roon though.
At any rate, I still maintain a small plex server. It’s old faithful when I’m away from home. It shares the same roon computer and files.
But it’s not Roon. Sometimes it is a good thing, and sometimes it is not.
It’d still like to be able to use Roon when the internet is down.
I just got my whole system downgraded to 1.8 (because the server is a 2012 Mac Mini, all devices have to be on the legacy version). Now playing locally or streaming Tidal, Roon skips and stalls.
Most posts here are about Roon playing when the internet is down. I just want it to play :). Oh, and stop prompting me to upgrade to versions that won’t work on my hardware.
I appreciate your response as one that didn’t just tell me to buy new hardware.
It’s not the hardware that’s the issue. It’s where the hell this product’s roadmap is taking it. All I wanted from Roon since its launch is:
Improved stability
Support for AppleRemote so I don’t have to open a device and load an app just to press pause or skip. (I have settled for using mute on my pre-amp’s remote instead of pause.)
From my experience, Roon has been getting less stable. I all but stopped using it months ago because something was always failing. When I work I just listen to Tidal. If I’m going to use my stereo I have to keep CDs around. It’s now only when a guest is coming I think about Roon and then I have to schedule about 30 minutes to get it working properly.
I’m in software product development and the way they have handled EOL on 1.8 is terrible. And given its status it won’t get any more stable. I just got my whole house back on to 1.8 and already it either skips on tracks or just stalls.
It’s not my network because it fails locally. And nothing else runs on the Mini…it’s a headless server that’s just there to run Roon.
Support, which seemed to be active in the early days, also appears silent now.
So I keep coming back to my meme: I’m not sure I can follow them down this path. I don’t care about ARC. They might “get there” with search but most days I’m perfectly fine with Tidal’s search so they may be going too far to give me an experience I don’t really value at the expense of even more instability (because if my network’s down, the whole thing is down).
As I wrote above and below, it’s not about the hardware but about their roadmap. Roon has gotten steadily less reliable for me and their massive initiative for ARC and overhauling search (and their analytics capture) are less important to me than improved stability. The decision to adopt an architecture that’s potentially less reliable – because it requires network/cloud app availability – seems to be going in the wrong direction for my priorities.
I though you started talking about Apple for a bit there! Well maybe not the require internet part, although, if the network gets screwy, I’ve noticed the new Mac OSes seem to become quite unresponsive and laggy.
Glad that I found this thread before making purchase of lifetime or yearly (or even monthly). This let me immediately cancel my subscription. Local playback without internet connection is absolutely no go, just imported all my music to Apple Music so I can use it and sync all those albums to iPad and iPhone, at least those work without Internet.
Hopefully this will be fixed in future, like the app but this kind of design decisions are just bad for music local music collector and listener perspective.
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Jim_F
(Remember - It's easier to Keep a Customer than to get a New One)
288
I mostly use Apple Music away from home using Verizon wireless. I guess I could download my Apple Music files to iPhones and iPads, but I don’t really want to expend the effort to do that.
It’s wonderfully cheeky to turn requests to rollback loss of functionality into “feature suggestions”. Because of course customers are not angry with the latest changes, they are merely making suggestions for future improvements…
I hope so. IMO, Roons direction here needs seriously reconsidering, especially in the light of the competition now seizing upon it as a weakness. But hey, it’s not my rodeo.
i still find it curious that Roon do not mention ‘internet required for functionality’ on their homepage. For something so fundamental you’d have thought they’d want to make it clear from the outset, seems a bit disingenuous not to do so…!
I don’t post much. Ever really. But I have been a Roon user for many years. Currently running a Nucleus+ and keeping it offline. I was fortunate to read the forums prior to upgrading to 2.0 (because of horrible update experiences in the past), so I realized what was going on and stayed on 1.8.
I just saw a comment somewhere that Danny posted that most are happy, and not many users are complaining.
So I’m speaking up to share that I’m not happy.
I use Roon because of the ability to get high quality streams to hifi gear in the house.
For listening when away from home, the Tidal app is more than adequate. I could care less about ARC. It’s not the core product that Roon was built to be (it seems as if they are trying to rebuild itunes or something?)
I deinstalled all ARC apps now. Completely useless. It never managed proper network connections to the core anymore after the first updates.I preffer Qobuz.
Will we get back offline functionality or shall we prepare for other solutions for that too?
