Interesting, and thanks for a detailed and well thought out opinion.
I did the opposite. Despite a couple of issues that I’m trying to find a workaround for I did buy a lifetime membership. And why, you may ask?
One reason - the sound. The sound quality from Roon through Devialet is with subtle nuances and background sounds that I’ve never heard before on albums I’ve had for over thirty years.
You do what works for you, and, more importantly, enjoy the music.
Ha - I see I’m replying to a dated post. Oh well, can’t delete it so here it will stay for eternity.
Music playing right now - Joe Walsh from So What? The All Night Laundrymat Blues.
I’m only a few months into my first year of Roon, but it took less than a month to decide to go “lifetime.” Roon is great for my use case with 100 percent streaming from Tidal and Qobuz. And, since I purchased a Roon Nucleus and got everything wired with ethernet, it simply works all the time with zero issues. I’m all about the music, not so much the metadata.
Same here. I really didn’t want to like it but thought I’d give it a go. I am very impressed with it and the ability to control all my streaming devices from a single os agnostic app and search across Tidal, Qobuz and my local rips is what I was looking for.
So much so that it solved the birthday present from the wife given her limited shopping opportunities at the moment and convinced me to splash out on a nice efficient mini pc to run the show.
It also makes a much better stab at suggesting new material to me than Qobuz or Tidal did. I’ve discovered more new music in a week of owning Roon than via any other method.
I see the extra metadata, where available, as a bonus but appreciate why others may expect more from it.
(Just quietly), I think you can do that with UPnP/DLNA apps for just a few dollars. Of course, you would then need to have your files tagged appropriately, folders organised & so on for that to work efficiently.
Suggestions/discoveries & extra metadata are different matters, which in my short time as a user, I view as critical for Roon to differentiate itself & lift itself above other competing platforms.
I like roon the most for this lack of having to worry about where I have put things over many years. 4 years into lifetime and roon is not leaving the setup anytime soon thats for sure.
Maybe I’m not understanding the issue here, but I sort my albums by artist. If I want to listen to Led Zeppelin, I go to “L” and scroll a little until I see the album I want. I guess if I didn’t know the artist, that could be a problem, but I don’t have any music that I don’t know who the artist or group is. That’s why I have it.
My music is all sorted by Roon. That’s because all my music is streamed from Tidal and Qobuz. My point is, I do not want or need a bunch of folders within Roon for sorting by categories. A simple alphabetical sorting by artist works for me.
Oh absolutely however I’ve yet to find something that will search local libraries and the streaming services as one library so elegantly and the more freeware/open source options all require degrees of faffing to get them working with everything.
LMS for example is an option but isn’t just fit and forget like Roon is.
Everyone has to set a price point for what they value. M$ Office 365 or Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop…there are many subscription plans. Pandora for $50/year is great for the office where music is used to create an atmosphere. Similarly a second sub. at home is perfect for filling an otherwise silent home.
I learned of Roon by seeing a YouTube of a fellow stating that he did not like it. Not being a fan of his reviews, this was an invitation to investigate it myself. Concurrently, I learned that Qobuz was available in the U.S. So unless I had been painfully disappointed, I signed for both without thinking that the trial would mark the end of either.
The combination of Roon+Qobuz seems (subjectively) to be highly cost contained. I use the combination daily but only for ~2+ hours.
The problem with relying on folders for this purpose is that the folder structure is a tree, I.e. each album must be listed under one artist.
This is limiting in many cases:
The Well-Tempered, should I list that under Bach or András Schiff?
Another version, under Bach or Keith Jarrett?
If I am exploring Jarrett’s work with a friend, I would not cone across that if it was listed under Bach…
Bags and Trane, do you list that under John Coltrane or Milt Jackson (Bags’s real name)?
Don’t Explain, do you list that under Beth Hart or Joe Bonamassa?
Sone people confidently say, easy, Coltrane is the main artist, but these things change as we learn. I got The Triangle by Arild Andersen, never even heard of Vassilis Tsabrapoulos, but now 15 years later Tsabrapoulos has become a favorite, I have lots of albums listed under his name.
Etc. etc. Single parent is an over-simplified and restrictive structure.
I just stated what works for me. I don’t want a bunch of folders with different music in different folders. I want it all in one place sorted by artist. Others have different wants/needs.
It’s funny that people who refer to folder organisation always come up with music stored by artist. That’s what ID tags are for. I have never ever stored music in a folder tree like artist / albums etc That just never made any sense to me because that information was allready in the ID-tags and any software player could organize this in the way you describe folder structures. And the biggest downside is just what you describe, sooner or later you run into problems on where to store your albums if you are using a strict structure. I have allways had my own set of criteria that made far more sense to me in finding my music. I really don’t care if other don’t understand anything about this system because I don’t have to share it with anyone else, so I don’t have to confirm to any standard whatsoever. I have allways stored the music in folders that refer to either where I got it from, who’m I got it from, why I got it or when I got it. That’s how my own memory works and that is by far the fastest way to find my music without remembering the artist name or album title. I memorize pretty much everything on where I have put it. If I want to find an album by artist name or album title I can rely on any software with a decent search engine or alphabetical orderering, but if I just want to explore my collection without knowing the exact artist or album names my own system has never let me down. In Roon pretty much all of the music I can’t remember the artist name or album title from is pretty much lost in the big pile so I constantly fall back on my old player when looking for something specific, just because I now where I kept it. I pretty much agree folder browsing is outdated but we need better ways than we have now, we are not there yet. My mind simply doesn’t work as a database.
Yes, indeed. David Gelernter wrote in the mid-90s that the hierarchical folder structure was bad for computer users in all cases. He argued for a simple time order because most of the time that aligns with what we care about. And indeed, that’s my default sort order in Roon, for my emails, etc.
The problem for Microsoft and others is that the hierarchical file system is designed for programmers, that’s how all programs work, which makes it difficult to change. (See the WinFS reference above.) But that doesn’t mean it’s a good model for humans.
And in fact, Apple owns the world with iOS which does not expose to users the file system that lies underneath. Photos are not files. Songs are not files. Emails are not files. Games are not files. Books are not files. (Now they are trying to add a file system because they want to make the iPad into a laptop, and understandable business strategy but not good user interface thinking.)
I’m close to the end of a 30 day trial of Roon and, while I’ve not made a final decision, will probably be dropping it to go back to LMS, which I’ve used for about 15 years. Maybe I’m just not mentally wired for the current age, but I missed seeing my folder structure. For many years, browsing that was the primary way I found what I wanted to listen to – just running down a list of artists would inevitably ring a bell for me. Roon doesn’t have that option, it was almost like Roon was of the opinion that it knew better than me as respects selecting what I should listen to at the moment.
I liked Roon best when I just wanted continuous background music without having to think about it very much. However, when I was in the mood for serious listening, Roon just didn’t work as well for me. That said, there were a lot of things to like about Roon. I can see why many people like it as much as they do.