Maybe given your feature priorities, Roon wasn’t a perfect match? That is OK.
But solutions like Audio Station connect perfectly to DLNA and/or AirPlay endpoints as well, including multi-zone playback. Sure, maybe you won’t be able to do native DSD streaming to all of your devices, depending upon your hardware. There are other parallel solutions that are equally easy to run and provide even more/better features if you look around. But honestly, Internet outages are temporary, and I like to think that any of our chosen parallel systems can provide what we need in a pinch.
Yes but for many of us, quite a few judging by the aforementioned feature request thread, this is not Roon’s core value proposition.
For them, Roon’s core value proposition is the ability to be the best possible player for local files and to conveniently add streaming to create a seamless library with both. Combine this with the provisions of a best in class, built for purpose audio transport protocol and you have Roon’s true value.
Many of us could not care less about TiVO or Allmusic and frankly are not fans of their ratings anyway and have to annoyingly replace them with half stars until we make up our own mind on albums lest their default rating pollute our own focus usage.
My definition of Roon’s value is Local Files streamed with RAAT with Qobuz/Tidal library supplements.
Roon for my money is meant to be a library combiner with a lossless, reliable transport to my DAC, not a music gatekeeper that relies on Internet connectivity to lord knows who. Just like it was when I first bought into it.
I have no argument with you wanting the stuff it has that you think is great, that’s fine, just don’t make playback of local files dependant on it. I don’t need to “search” or have them “recommended”, I already put down my card and bought them.
I want to click on them and play them, is it that hard? Didn’t use to be.
7 Likes
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
471
But not to my Chromecast speakers. One of the features of Roon is its catholicity.
Well I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole, but AudioStation supports Chromecast audio. Nonetheless there are many other pieces of software that are relatively catholic as well.
I get your point, though. It seems that there is an opportunity to “fork” the product into something very simple that does only what you want - and it seems like that it could be something that could be a very low cost offering, to be honest. But I don’t think that was previously high on the roadmap for the creators of Sooloos or Roon.
You are so on the point!
When I joined Roon in April of this year, my decision was based on “the best management of my local music files, that can be merged with online content from streaming service”. Even now if you look at the marketing on the front page, it revolves around “your music, anywhere, etc.”.
Now, after I purchsed my lifetime, I experienced an Internet blackout and to my surprise Roon stopped. This is not advertised on the front page… you have to dig in system requirements to find out that Roon requires an always on connection. Sad.
Anyway, my mistake. But I do not see how this cloud comptuing can scale to your over 300K customers spread around the world without a distributed data centers and CDN. Everything now is cloud API calls, from Artist page, to Album view - an API call is made to build the view, and there are latencies depending on how close you are to the Roon servers in the Bay Area. Information that does not change overnight, and can be cached locally, like how often does an Artist bio or an Album review changes?
Roon sees this as an optimized version. I see it as a performance depriving version, if my local Roon Server does not cache all this info and does not serve the Artist and Album views instanteneously. And it does not!!!
So Roon server now becomes not needed. Why don’t we jsut upload a structure of our local music online, so that the cloud service has a reference to the local storage, and be done with it. All that is left for Roon Server to do is manage end points and DSP.
So, to end this rant, everything based on what I purchased Roon, is now gone. Local library was my main point, and now this is in the cloud, bar the files.
Indeed it is a bug. Even Apple Music works offline, not only with your own content, but with DRM content that you have downloaded locally for offline listening.
I don’t agree. Even if you take a look at the front page:
“Everything about music – browsing, discovery, collecting, and listening – is 10x more engaging with Roon.”
“Roon brings all your music together…”
“Roon identifies your music files and streams, and then overlays a ton of rich metadata to add context to what you’re listening to. That information drives Roon’s unique experience of browsing, discovering, and organizing music.”
I see the ephasis is on “your music files”… and overlays a ton of metadata.
Question is - does this metadata change overnight? No. So why is internet required, when we have local Roon Server that can hold this data.
Or better yet - the overlayed rich metadata can be disbaled when offline.
It’s obviously not a bug. It’s a design choice that works as intended. The fact that some don’t agree with it doesn’t make it a bug. A bug is an unexpected problem with software or hardware
EDIT: Maybe Harman will require Roon reverse this?
Fine. Try explaining that to mass-market, when Roon becomes main stream, integrated in a Harman Streamer/Pre-Amp, and user attaches a local USB storage, and they can’t play it because Internet is down.
BluOS can play it offline.
Edit: design choice or not, playback is core functionality of anything music related. Providing rich metadata is optional and limited to internet availability. Why is that even a question.
Another Edit: sorry, not trying to pick a fight… really. It is just obvious it was a bad desing choice. Just stating my opinion.
There is a feature suggestion section with vote buttons. It’s not as if users get to decide, and obviously it has to fit Roon’s plans, but this is the feature suggestion and to the best of my knowledge it was the one with the most votes at the time:
People complain if Roon does not implement stuff that users vote for, and they complain if they do.
You can see site statistics here. The forum users are a small minority of Roon users:
While yes, not every Roon user voted or knew that they can, there are other ways to get customer feedback. Do we know if they used some of these and got the same answer? We don’t.
But if we believe that forum votes are not representative, then at the same time the forum opinions might not be either. Or both are.
And now ARC is deliverd and there is online requirement for 2.0. The #1 feature most voted now is bring back off-line mode for Roon. And it was said that it will not happen. So I am not convinced that voting has anything to do with what features are developed. Simply whatever Roon deems on their roadmap.
No, it was a perfect match (because I don’t like DLNA and don’t use AirPlay). That’s why I purchased a lifetime subscription in the very early days of Roon. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect RAAT is the main reason Harmon acquired Roon rather than deep metadata integration. And I’ve always had a complete parallel system with LMS and the squeeze universe.
Yes, we all know and we just went over this, above. I posted this on the second day of the offline-request thread, September 22, 2022 :
And again in November 2022:
(Of course I didn’t know then how troublesome ARC would prove to be).
However, this doesn’t change the fact that mobile playback WAS the most requested feature until the release of 2.0 and it is just not true to say that nobody needed or wanted it.
2 Likes
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
487
Hmmm. Well, not for me. Chromecast devices don’t even show up in the Web interface to AudioStation, and though DS Audio does let me select them as output devices, nothing plays to them, FLAC or MP3.
I agree from a coding point of view it’s not technically a “bug”. Please excuse my technical license taken here.
However the “design intention” to require always on Internet access is so far removed from what many users signed up for it appears from their perspective to be indistinguishable from a “bug”.
Still not a bug. It’s an intentional feature you don’t like. If it was a bug, Roon would be compelled to fix it. They aren’t going to fix this unless something changes with the sale to Harman.
As I said, I agree it’s not technically a bug, it is something worse.
Clearly a sizeable amount of the user base agrees as removing this self imposed limitation is now the most supported feature request by some margin, so yes hopefully Harman gives us care and resources to give everyone what they want here.
Exactly. As I have noticed multiple times, Roon becomes slow during peak usage hours (eg 7pm-10pm). It is quite noticeable. It still works ok, but you can see that it slows down substantially.