Hang on a minute. I can’t for the life of me imagine what makes you think I am asking too much, nor how me asking Roon to fix stuff or finish off stuff which has been implemented already is such a big deal.
I am merely highlighting for the most part stuff which either doesn’t work or which has been so poorly implemented as to be useless. That’s not my doing, not me wanting more stuff but either seeking to get repairs to broken existing stuff or useless existing stuff. Features which Roon themselves felt strongly enough to implement originally into the “music player”.
Also some of the fixes I’m asking for or others are asking for are very simple to fix (like changing the embedded album art file name from “album art 1” or whatever it is to an industry standard “Front Album Cover” - as trivial as it seems, it’s quite important if you’re exporting regularly for portable use and the apps on the device won’t display the artwork as a result.
Exactly what I want is for stuff which is broken or very hard to use to be fixed and for Roon to evolve better customer service consistency. That’s not asking too much imho.
No, it isn’t asking too much by itself.
But you need to recognize the several communities with diverse interests, and acknowledge the challenge of addressing them all, and to what degree, and choosing.
The “curators”, active in these recent posts
The sound quality extremists, who demand the ultimate tweaks (with or without evidence) to equal or better every other product in every configuration
The tinkerers who want to tweak filters and up/downsampling and integration with HQPlayer and Dirac and plugins and…
The lifestyle people who want a mobile solution
The streaming service people who want integration with everybody and his dog
The local library people who want built-in ripping and better identification, and export with better art
The multi-app people who want better integration with iTunes, and “virtual soundcard” integration with everything
The commercial-product people who want to buy a product that just works including fully automatic identification and support for all audio devices, including old and leading-edge and oddball ones, and including adaptation and resilience to network foibles and simple backup (and restore!) in every circumstance
The people who want support for all manner of hardware (NAS!), and minimized power consumption (WOL!)
The Roon leadership who want a business proposition that works for every sales channel
The relaxed users who are happy but just want things to work reliably and fast
I could go on. Each of these is a reasonable expectation.
What I think is not reasonable is to demand support for your particular area without recognition of the diversity. And shouting about ME and MINE.
If you’re asking ‘Do I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder’, then the answer is ‘No’.
I have a sizeable local collection, and also enjoy streaming.
And I couldn’t give a ‘rats arse’ that it’s impossible to use editing of albums tracks and such, etc, etc, etc. Ad-infinitum. I mean, is it really that important? Ummm…? No.
As I’ve said, I haven’t got OCD. I just enjoy using Roon to listen to music.
Doing any of the missing things or the ones that exist is hard, doing some of them as a group is harder and trying to do all is very hard…otherwise there would be 100’s or more solutions to choose from that do as much. Development takes time and often some things have to have higher priorities than others. And then you want it to look pretty and be able to be used by your 5year old and his great grandmother…
Of course you can develop your own too…if you can’t live with what’s out there
Roon approaches music playing in a different way so you can never really compare products overall
To me there are 3 levels
1 - Absolute base level Navigation , UI look and feel etc, superlative playback and SQ etc
These make product “just work” as advertised and should be the basis to work from to improve things
2 - Refinements and “neat tricks” that complement the Base level
3 - Niche improvements, eg Apple Watch support recently
How each user reacts on these views these 3 will vary enormously depending on each use case.
My take is that the niche improvements are getting done while the Absolute stuff is still not finished and working 101%
It’s embarrassing that to properly navigate my classical collection of box sets I have to resort to a legacy system because Roon simply cannot give me a navigable route to a disc in a set other than disc 1, disc 2 etc. there are loads of examples
I don’t believe we should stop raising the various shortfalls. My view on purchasing a license is that you can’t expect changes in advance, you can’t moan from outside the community
I maintain 2 systems which is laboursome just to allow me a better experience than Roon is currently supplying,
If you don’t tell em how can they know the friction points ?
Absolutely. If they want me to keep paying they can expect me to keep complaining until obvious issues like the poor search are fixed. Cute enhancements like Apple Watch support are a long way down the list compared to just being able to find stuff.
4 Likes
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
266
Maybe someday you’ll see how much you’ve embarrassed yourself with this response. My intent was to understand how you relate to music to see where we differ, maybe point out that people enjoy music in different ways, and that with larger, especially local, collections, these types of functional needs relate to quick sorting and identification of music TO LISTEN TO, not just to stare at like a well organized shelf of books.
There’s a pretty blurred line between OCD and being intense about a hobby, and you can just live and let live. But of course, the audience has to be self-aware enough to be open to these ideas.
I have a lifetime subscription to Roon and am overall very pleased with the service. The perceived metadata problem will never cause me to leave Roon as the product has gone through several iterations and I’m sure constructive suggestions regarding metadata gathering improvement will be taken on board for future editions.
I bought a QNAP NAS with 6TB on board, a Meridian 218 endpoint and a lifetime Roon subscription for about half what that WaxBox sells for and I can’t see the WaxBox doing a better job. These guys are extracting the kidney juice.
@Sallah_48
Also some of the fixes I’m asking for or others are asking for are very simple to fix (like changing the embedded album art file name from “album art 1” or whatever it is to an industry standard “Front Album Cover” - as trivial as it seems, it’s quite important if you’re exporting regularly for portable use and the apps on the device won’t display the artwork as a result.
Why worry if Roon doesn’t label the artwork correctly and why live with something that clearly drives you nuts when you can go into the folder where the artwork lives and rename it yourself? It’s not difficult, and if the metadata isn’t to your liking, download MP3Tag for free and change it instead of fretting about how long you’ll have to wait for Roon to do it exactly the way you want it done. Metadata is a VERY inexact science and is largely down to who typed it up: inconsistent formatting, spelling mistakes and just downright wrong entries are common in my experience. However if you do it yourself where you need to or want to your blood pressure will most likely benefit and you’ll have the information you want without having to rely on anyone else to do it for you…and not getting it quite right which starts the whole cycle of complaints all over again.
http://3beez.com/ Looks like there is a comparison with Roon. You can go read for yourself…personally I’m happy with my roon experience thus far and don’t have much classical to make a meaningful comparison in that regard.
I have no idea when they are dated, but both seem to be in predominantly classical environments. Perhaps it’s capabilities stop there, which for some might be perfect…but it’s not cheap. As I I noted I have only heard it’s supposed to be good for classical, I have no experience with it.
I am curating my Roon library with extensive tagging to highlight correct genres and also favourites of albums, so I can easily create and export a playlist of , say, favourited BLUES ROCK albums and then only the favourite tracks contained with those albums. Then the exported curated tracks/albums can be popped into a music player and thus I have a great selection of music for many occasions (eg mates booze up who love blues and rock, or my sons who love hard rock and metal, or if I want some classic rock to please a family gathering).
That’s the scenario… now perhaps I am exporting 100 albums or 200 albums worth of music, 1000 tracks perhaps? What should i do? for each “on the fly” selection, I’m supposed to correct the album art manually for each album/track??? I’ve tried to do it globally each time I create a play selection using MP3TAG but it’s just not reallocating the correct names/files to the tracks somehow. So i end up with spotted album art in tile views when I see albums on my player. Even then, why should I have to? when a quick fix from Roon would solve it? And i use a number system to prefix my albums, so albums appear with a 5 digit number prefix which takes up most of the truncated view of any album name as it appears on a player. Eg i get “00453 Steel…” which makes the use of a portable player without album art pretty crappy
Hope this clarifies.
PS…
ref this… it’s not relevant at all to my request. Roon is in charge of what it calls the album art embedded into the files on export. They could call it “Monkey poo image 1234” if they wanted, but they use “Artwork 1” which many players indeed don’t acknowledge. No, Front Album Cover is industry standard. Unless that’s some mac thing i don’t know about?
- thats a fair point.