This post isn’t a reasoned or constructive critique of the UI; it’s a slobbery kiss for its makers.
I’ve had Roon for a year, and I’ve kind of stopped thinking about it. I’m no techie - I bought Roon (lifetime) to solve the problems introduced by other music players’ bloat. My family went from iTunes to MOG to Beats, and then iTunes came back a like a bad penny (if a penny could have a really bad interface). All we want to do is listen to our music collections, and make them accessible to all the humans in the house, without taking a seminar in how to do it.
Success! My wife and my 9-year-old find and play the music they love. There’s room to get better, but the basic Roon experience is solid and well-considered. I know because we never have to talk about the music app anymore. We talk about the music.
Our basic needs are anticipated in the UI. We find the music we want on our NAS or Tidal. We browse through album art. We easily queue up tunes without interrupting what’s playing. We mess around with the queue order during parties. We have self-explanatory options for how the “Play” button functions. We switch between any of our various system makes & models, on all the floors of a townhouse built before electricity. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote (probably), It just works.
OK now I’ve gotten that off my chest, I’ll try add my constructive 2¢ to the appropriate threads. There’s still a lot more I want future builds to do, but it’s worth saying how very far the current version has brought us. Roon has been a bright ray of light in that pestilence known as 2017.