Please can we have a manual. This Q&Q support is confusing and not as helpful as it could be. I’m on a trial at the moment and am finding it a lot more difficult to get information than I should. A manual which I could follow from start to finish with a troubleshooting section at the end would be an enormous advantage.
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The Knowledge Base and FAQ section are intended to operate as an online searchable manual. Have a look through them and please post your feedback about whether they are working as intended.
I find that the walls of text in the FAQ are somewhat problematic for me. I like pictures, and screenshots wouldn’t go amiss. There are some, but then the structure of the FAQ starts getting in the way, and I’m jumping from page to page losing my train of thought as I go.
Coincidentally, I’m currently writing a manual on how to use Roon for my better half, and it’s full of screenshots. It’s ten pages so far, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.
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Hi .
I’m afraid they’re not working terribly well for me. I clicked the link “User Guide” expecting that it might help to find that it hadn’t been written yet. I know Roon isn’t established fully but it’s coming up for a year and I’d have thought it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect a user guide as an essential element.
What I want is a step by step guide with clear instructions with illustrations and a troubleshooting guide at the end and written by someone who is an expert on the product and is good at communication. I can’t see how any amount of FAQ or forums could meet this requirement. It doesn’t need to be long or whatever. I know of one competitor’s manual which is fairly brief and to the point but very useful indeed and that’s AFAIK a one - man show. One of the biggest complaints about another well known product is the lack of adequate documentation and the less helpful nature of it’s support forums.
Possibly it’s just a few people who would agree, but it just doesn’t work for me. Maybe I’m getting old. I can’t understand why some software companies think FAQs somehow are an adequate replacement for a coherent step-by-step guide to using their product. If you don’t have one, it leaves people like Geoff above having to write manuals for friends, presumably after having to root out the facts for themselves. Why is Geoff doing that? Because it’s needed. I agree with his points by the way.
I don’t want to come across as being negative about what I consider to be an exciting possibility for audio playback and the lack of a manual probably isn’t a total deal-breaker but it’s something I’d really value
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Part of the challenge is that the UI of Roon is deceptively simple, and yet there are layers of functionality available - not all of which are probably relevant for many people. I’ve already got another thread in asking for a simplified UI for the ordinary user.
There’s also the fact that some people like the challenge of discovering the nooks and crannies of the UI, whilst other people positively hate having to hunt and peck. So while a manual probably has to have everything including the kitchen sink covered, what I need to cover is what my better half really needs to know.
Thus, here’s a screenshot of the main Album screen. It only covers a subset of the functions. And the accompanying text has to highlight the fact that some of the UI is not immediately apparent. For example, the track list may not be fully shown on the screen. Arrow keys, mouse wheels and/or swiping may need to be employed to further aid discovery of the album contents. These sorts of things are not immediately apparent to everyone…
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I agree that a single go-to source of information (online and hyperlinked, of course) would be much appreciated. The current tendency of software to rely on FAQ’s, forums and blogs that may or may not be relevant or updated is distressing IMO. Google is not always your friend. One of the reasons I gave up on Kodi. I appreciate that writing a proper manual is time consuming, but someone should be doing it. How can you tell people to “RTFM” when you don’t have one?
I think this would be really good to have. Even though I’ve been using Roon since early days and the UI is, by and large, quite intuitive, there are lots of nooks and crannies where useful features reside. I don’t use some of these very often, and frankly, I sometimes forget how to get to them. For example, just this morning, I was trying to figure out how to delete a Tidal album from my library, and it took me a while to zero in on how to do this.
Edit: Jeez, either it was an incredible coincidence or I plagiarized some of @Geoff_Coupe 's bon mots. Sorry, it wasn’t intentional.
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Totally agree with Geoff and William. The Roon Knowledge Base has a blank section for “Roon User Quide”.
Yes, Roon is easy enough to get some music playing but the UI has rich functionality that is not easily discoverable. Nice screen shot of a “Album View”. The manual would need another to cover the case when a track has been selected. Also, the tablet long press to make a selection was not at all obvious to me when I first used Roon.
Jeff
I too agree with the above. In addition, as a suggestion:
A few YouTube guides with screen shots might do the trick, with different clips covering the main topics. There are some Roon reviews that cover some of this, but only if you are happy to sit through 30 minutes of dross with some guy who says ‘awesome’ far more often that I care for!
Edit: Just seen the computer audiophile YouTube clip, no ‘awesomes’ at all, but may cools, really cools and really really cools. Useful, but time consuming!
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A manual is very sorely needed! It’s such a great product but many of us cannot take the time to do the
“random walk” approach to learning all its capabilities! I, Too, acknowledge it’s a big project–but a critical
one for you guys.
Thank You,
Geoff Cole
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@Brian69 - try the videos that Hans Beekhuyzen has done.
He’s a phlegmatic Dutchman, so no “cools” or “awesomes” were harmed during the making of them.
At risk of drifting into national stereo (pun intended) types, I always get on well with the Dutch, it’s the straight talking no nonsense approach that does it for me.
Thanks for the pointer, it’s much appreciated!
Strangely I came across this video last night. Even having watched part 1 briefly while being half-asleep, I found lots of things I didn’t know existed in Roon. It’s difficult to imagine him on his skateboard but I like his delivery. Very helpful. I’m wondering if I should take up his extended trial voucher now 
My two cents 
Do not make the same mistake as Jriver. They have a great product and a great support forum , but no manual.
The result is that the learning curve with each release becomes steeper for new users. They have to find out which FAQ, post etc. applies to which version of the soft.
Newbie questions are brushed off by the old gang and that is commercially not smart.
When you look at support sites from IT-companies as Oracle, MS, Cisco etc they always make a clear distinction between community support which is less formal and the very formal sections with manuals and questions and answers.
Both manuals and questions and answers are always tied to release numbers. If a company has that discipline from start, it is fairly easy to review questions and answers for their validity with each release.
I do realise that their is a cost issue
The Knowledge Base is going to be the formal online manual and it will be updated as new versions are released. The work to fill it out with a lot of the material in the existing FAQs or on the forum is proceeding apace.
Ideas or comments about how the KB is looking, changes that should be made, why Roon should be doing something else etc., are all welcome.
Getting every last aspect of the app documented is a big task, and keeping it all up to date is work too, but we’re working on it!
We are putting the information in our knowledge base. This is where structured information about Roon will live. We scrubbed virtually every page for out-of-date information prior to the release of 1.2. It is a lot of work, but we agree, this is important.
Our documentation on audio-related topics is a lot fuller than it was a short time ago, with coverage of topics like sound quality, understanding our settings screens, each of our supported output technologies and platforms, and a deeper explanation of the signal path.
We released documentation for Internet Radio, Linux Installation, and RoonBridge along with those features when 1.2 went live last night, too.
The lowest-friction time to write documentation for something is right when that thing is being worked on. As we give love to the various functional areas of Roon over the coming months, expect their documentation to get stronger along with them.
Great to hear that the knowledge base will evolve.
Compared to ‘other companies’, you have the advantage that there should be only two releases at one time active and supported.
It’s being done. The Knowledge Base is growing all the time. Suggestions about things that are missing which should be included are most welcome.
It’s coming soon…but not soon enough…
I couldn’t agree with you more. Little pop-ups and FAQs do not come close to replacing a proper user manual. Contrary to popular belief not everything in this software is intuitive. Roon is not the only audio program guilty of this. I use JRiver as well and their documentation is just as shoddy. I find this to be really lazy. We’re paying for this software and paying customers deserve a proper user manual.
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