This happens all the time no matter what the product. A person tries something different than what he/she has and then is immediately ticked off that it’s too different from what they have. My wife gets angry at every new car, phone, kitchen appliance, whatever for a few weeks until she learns how to use it. If you’re an Itunes user and you wanted Itunes + I guess Roon isn’t it. I went from Jriver to Roon and I think it’s well worth the additional cost, but no product is for everyone.
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A good point which reminds me that I’m due a new mobile phone. Usually the cue for a week or two of petulant complaints as I sing the praises of a phone I’d been abusing as an “over the hill piece of junk” just a few days before.
I recently upgraded from an iPhone 6S Plus to iPhone 11 Pro Max. I don’t upgrade often, but I’m liking this new phone.
In the 60s I was the first guy in school to get a digital watch.
My friend was dubious, said it must be inconvenient because after looking at the digits I would have to translate them mentally to the position of two hands, because that is what time really is.
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Things move so quickly due to commercial pressures that waiting until the model number nearly doubles seems a good policy 
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Mini-thread deleted as per Jim’s wishes.
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You are missing the point of Roon. It’s not for organizing your music - I use iTunes still for that. Roon is what airplay should have been. It is visually beautiful and easy to use. You can stream your library of content including your library and services to any Roon device in your home. You can stream to multiple devices or stream different songs to different devices. You only need to maintain one library of music. I have personally have 7 Roon endpoints and it’s wonderful that the streaming just works.
It is really frustrating to come across a piece of software that doesn’t seem to be able to manage the most simplest and basic of tasks. However, as a Mac user myself the software really does work just fine. The Roon core is on my iMac and when I press play on a track on an album the track will play, then the track after will play automatically and so on to the end of the album, and will then pick random choices of its own based on the last track (Roon radio as its called). Clearly there is something not right in your installation that is preventing Roon doing its job. I would advise you appeal to the engineers to suggest a course of action as it really does work as it should. It does make the odd mistake with artist information of certain albums but on the whole they are few and far between and when they do show up they can easily be edited to how you like. It is a big improvement on iTunes (or Music as it’s now known) and for me I’m really glad I bought it.
Hi Ricardo,
I think the issue here is not necessarily Roon itself but your expectation that Roon would work the same way as other software you’ve used before. Tracks is not a track list as it is in iTunes, it is literally just an overview of all your tracks individually. Similarly, albums is not one long playlist of all your albums, but just an overview of all your albums. If you play an album, you wouldn’t expect it to start playing all following ones automatically either.
If you want to play all your tracks in that order, just add them all to a single playlist. As others have said, you can do ‘Play from here’ both within playlists and within albums.
Also, Roon does not shuffle automatically, but I think I know where your confusion is coming from. When you play a single track, or a single album, you can determine somewhere in the settings what you want to happen when it finishes: either playback stops, or Roon radio takes over and will play songs that in some way or another fit. Sometimes it’s spot on, sometimes not at all, but it can be turned off if you don’t like it.
The album mash-up: it’s rare, but it happens, usually when importing songs that weren’t properly catalogued in the first place. For example if both of the collection albums come from iTunes and if they were catalogued as ‘various artists’. It’s an annoyance but it’s easy enough to fix in Roon. Honestly any major change in music software will have you spend some time to set everything up the way you want it. Back in the day when I moved to iTunes, it took me countless hours over many years to get it all set up the way I liked it. The switch to Roon was kinder but it may still take some time.
Lastly, don’t judge its performance in the first days. Depending on the size of your collection and the hardware you’re using for your roon core, it can take hours or even days to analyse everything. After that, it should be a lot smoother, assuming that your network and internet connection are good and the hardware sufficient.
Hope this helps. Roon isn’t for everyone but it can be really great once you figure out how to make it work for you.
Kind regards,
Stijn
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Hi Stijn,
Thanks a lot for your thoughtful reply. In fact, Kevin (from Roon Labs) was gracious enough to re-open my trial for a few more days so I can have a second look at Roon following the feedback from this thread (I had mistakenly thought that the trial would continue to run until the last day regardless of my notification to cancel).
In any case, your considerations make sense, and I have already fixed the album mix-up between Ace of Base and Dio (I selected all Dio tracks and edited them in order to remove the incorrect reference to Ace of Base - now it looks fine).
I am still wondering about Roon’s overall usefulness, given that virtually my whole library comes from iTunes. So contrary to Gregory’s views above, I do think that Roon would play an important part in organizing/presenting my music. Otherwise, I would have to keep iTunes or Audirvana open all the time, when all I want is to have a SINGLE music management solution to deal with (bearing in mind my limited availability between professional and family duties).
Perhaps Roon will become more relevant if/when I buy a new amp (I am currently about to get a Technics GU-S30) and speakers (Wharfedale’s EVO 4.3), as well as a hi-res streaming service like Qobuz or Tidal (still deciding between them). Because in this scenario, I will be going from an iTunes-only library to something more fragmented.
“Shuffle” continues to be unclear to me, particularly since that big blue button on top cannot be removed; I also despise the vast amount of screen real estate that cannot be minimized when it comes to artist ads/pictures.
And performance-wise, I have no qualms for now: my late-15 iMac is powerful enough, and my 500 Mbps+ Internet connection plus Orbi make it all fine in terms of network speeds.
So I continue to assess, and will keep this thread informed as needed.
Tks,
Ricardo
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By the way, another simple question: don’t media keys work with Roon on Macs? Can one at least configure BeardedSpice to work with Roon?
How can I skip/pause tracks when working with a different app?
Hi Ricardo,
You’re very welcome. For me, the difference overall between iTunes and Roon comes down to this:
iTunes is great for micromanaging your music collection (which I was certainly guilty of) and is perfect for the music you know. The feature that I miss are the smart playlists.
Roon is better for enjoying your music, for metadata, discovering links between your music, for rediscovering parts of your collection you barely listen to because they don’t come to mind and for discovering new music when you also use Tidal or Qobuz. If you were to fully switch to Roon, your collection would likely be less tightly managed, but you’d hopefully enjoy more of it, if that makes sense.
My last suggestion would be to also start a trial of Tidal or Qobuz during your Roon trial so that you can see the full package. Roon is nice on its own but really shines when you add streaming to it.
In spite of the occasional frustrations, I hope your Roon trial is also fun. After all, music is there to be enjoyed…
Kind regards,
Stijn
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As a fairly new guy to Roon, I also am hedging my bets by keeping my lossless iTunes library up to date. When I add new music to my local Roon library, I always also add it to my iTunes library. My iTunes library also gets fully backed up, as does my Roon library and database.
So if you do decide to stay, it doesn’t mean you have to abandon your other streaming methods. I consider Roon an open relationship; but I’m discrete enough to not talk about the other one when in the presence of the first one.
Sheldon
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I’m interested in how other users work with their iOS devices. I have been maintaining my iTunes library using Apple lossless files because of my need to download to my Apple devices. Is there another way? It’s kind of a pain, in that I primarily store my music files as either FLAC or Wav. If I want to transfer music to my iOS devices then I convert them to Apple lossless and add that file to iTunes. It’s more steps then I would like but I don’t know another way. After I create the ALAC/mp4 file an store it in my iTunes library, Roon sees the file and I can access it as another version.
Audirvana+/iTunes could not hold Roon’s Jock strap!
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It’s a damn mess, that’s how I do it. Sadly it has nothing to do with Roon. So keep in mind that my method has a LOT of history; as I had an iPod since the third generation, and an iPhone since the iPhone 1in 2007.
I ripped all my CD’s to FLAC in a giant and soul crushing exercise around 2004. But my mac at that time couldn’t handle the size of the resulting files and I wasn’t excited enough about playing lossless files back then as my stereo was still based on a CD player etc. In fact I’m not sure if iTunes could even handle ALAC back then. So I took my pile of FLAC files and transcoded them to VBR (as light a compression as possible) MP3’s using LAME.
I then started the task of cleaning up all the metadata.
But my iPod and certainly my early iPhone couldn’t hold my entire library. So in iTunes I made playlists that would get synced to the phone and to the iPod. I unimaginatively called those “iPhone” and “iPod” and dropped in just the music I wanted to have on them or had space for. This worked well for a number of years as iTunes lets you sync just playlists and not the entire library.
Then I started streaming more and not touching my CD’s as much. So I transitioned my iTunes library to the FLAC files which I repacked into Apple Lossless files using XLD. I then had to tidy up all the metadata AGAIN, and make sure all the tracks had album art, lyrics, genres etc.
But that meant that I’m now stuck with how I put music on my iPhone and iPod (yes I still use my 5th gen iPod at work). My solution is to have two libraries for iTunes. I have my lossless library that is my primary one, and I have an MP3 one just for syncing with other iOS devices or putting on a SD card for the car (my car lets me have a library on an SD card, as well as doing the carplay thing). But that means that from time to time I take my ALAC files in the lossless library and update the MP3 library with new additions using “To Audio Converter” You’ll notice that I consider my iPod, iPhone, and Car as second class citizens undeserving of lossless files.
I have a lossless library that is about 650gig and the corresponding MP3 library is about 250gig. It seems silly to keep them on my various computers in the house, so I keep the libraries on two iMacs in external drives sitting on a 12 south shelf on the iMac support. The laptops have a subset of music on them from the MP3 library. I also keep everything backed up in three places at least with one offsite. I also like to hand out drives of all my music to friends as a sneakernet napster sort of method and also another potential backup vector.
Apple music has helped out a lot for casual stuff, but it’s still a huge pain in the ass. I now had to do a bit of metadata cleanup in Roon as well. I generally use Roon for playback to my systems and speakers in the house, but iTunes will still be with me as long as I have an iPhone.
BTW, I don’t let Roon see my iTunes library, I keep the two separate. That way they can’t see when I’m cheating on them.
Sheldon
That’s what I did too. Roon has its idiosyncrasies.
The other benefit of Roon is allowing you to use streaming endpoints that are much higher quality than a computer. Computers have a ton of noise and aren’t designed to be transport powerhouses. A dedicated streamer (such as a used Aries Femto for like $600 or something from the Sonore line) is going to be much better. Airplay is not lossless like Roon with better than cd quality music and even cd quality music sounds better through Roon than Airplay… not to mention no lag at all.
I’m not trying to sell you on Roon but simply pointing out what it does well and what the purpose of it is. If you aren’t going to use these features then I agree Roon isn’t worth it.
I use old iPhones as endpoints in systems that are for background music (like iHomes in my bathrooms). Craigslist deals for iPhone 6 and 6S make it a very cheap Roon endpoint when I’m not critically listening, especially compared with something like the Sonos port. Although the app won’t stay “on” 24/7. It never crashes when I’m listening to music but if I don’t use it for awhile then the app closes - probably more of an iPhone thing than a Roon thing and not a huge deal
This is classic.
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