Subject line says is all… really, I’ve now paid $200 to Roon for 1+ years of service.
Stop acting like this is open source software and start telling us what’s coming next.
Sincerely,
Paying customers.
You could always stop paying and use something else. 
I for one do not want to be told what and especially when stuff is expected as the infighting caused when inevitably it is more than 30 seconds late can cause such huge forum tantrums.
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I’m a paying customer, and you are certainly not speaking for me in this request.
And in fact Roon Labs has been telling us in broad terms (in the forums) what’s next:
- we were told that version 1.2 would bring grouping of zones and more endpoint functionality
- we’ve been told that the coming version 1.3 will address improvements to metadata.
I, for one, appreciate the time taken by Roon Labs in the forums to explain some of the design decisions that have, and are, being made in Roon to deliver the best product that they can.
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Not speaking for me either…
Satisfied Paying Customer.
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I thought ahead, I can see where Roon is going, I know it will take time to evolve, I trust this (rightly or wrongly, my gambol) so thinking long term (The only way to think in my opinion) purchased a lifetime subscription for the complete bargain that it is.
Just saying…
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Lots of us have paid for lifetime memberships and are more than happy to wait and see. Ok, sometimes it’s frustrating, but that’s life - I don’t know what’s coming in the next version of some professional software I use. There’s lots of reasons why, and I would have thought open source would be about the only place you would know what’s coming.
If the software and its development bothers someone so much, I guess I’d wonder why they continue using it and paying for it.
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Lifetime subscriber here. I didn’t subscribe in order to be kept informed about what’s coming next or see development resources spent adjusting expectations about content. I subscribed to use the software, which I very happily do every day.
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Not speaking for this lifer here either. Strange, aggressive stance to take tbh. Maybe just got out of bed on the wrong side this morning?
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Hi @krutsch,
I can understand some of your frustration, and I like to think we’re as open as we can be about what’s coming. Our goal as a company is to be as transparent and responsive to feedback as possible, and I’m proud of our record in this area. You can sort our Feature Requests by view count and see how often feedback from this community has spurred us to undertake major projects.
Right now, we are hard at work on our 1.3 release, and there are at least 8 major projects and a few dozen minor items that we’re hoping to include. At the moment, maybe a third of those projects have completed backend and provisional UI, with roughly another third nearly complete, and the remaining third just starting. How many of these projects will actually make it into 1.3? I don’t know yet. When will the release go live? That depends on how fast the viability of each project becomes clear.
The point is release planning is always fluid. As transparent as we strive to be, attempting to tell everyone exactly what’s coming is a recipe for disappointment, or delayed releases, and it encourages the conversations and buzz around our major releases to turn into a list of promises kept and broken, which is not good for business. When people have questions we answer to the best of our ability, but we make a point not to commit to shipping anything before the work is basically a “sure thing”.
Roon is not open source. If we’re going to continue improving the product, we need to keep growing the business, and feedback here on community is one of the major factors that drives decisions about what we ship, along with considerations like strategic partnerships and cancellation reasons, and of course our long-term visions for the product.
If we repeatedly hear a specific complaint when trials are cancelled, we absolutely notice and take that feedback into consideration, the same way we do for feedback on community. Conversely, if we rarely get feedback about an aspect of the product, that’s a consideration too, especially for changes that involve significant effort.
I want to briefly address the requests for queue changes we’ve heard from @krutsch and others. The reason you haven’t heard a lot of feedback on these requests isn’t because we refuse to listen or because we’re ignoring the request, but because we ARE listening, we DO desire to do something about it, but we haven’t made a decision as to what and when, so there’s nothing for us to say about it.
We understand this is something that some people care passionately about. Changing how the queue works is a big deal. Whether you agree with the design or think it needs improvement, it is one of the most intensively designed and contentious parts of the system, and broaching the subject means dozens of man-hours spent battling out the design details before a line of code gets written, then a relatively limited amount of development work, followed by a drawn-out QA/alpha testing process–since getting things wrong in the playback system is serious business.
We believe that working on the queue returns less value–both to our users and to our business–per hour invested than many other things we could be working on. We’ve grown the team more than 30% in the last several months, but man hours are still an incredibly precious commodity for a company as small as ours.
Back to the generalized issue:
When we say we’re working on a change, it means “yes, we intend to deliver this as soon as possible”. When we say “It’s coming in the next release”, we mean that code is done and being tested, and we’re 99% sure it’s “in the bag”. When we say no, it means “probably never”. And when we say nothing, it generally means that it’s something we’re hoping to prioritize in the future, but that we’re not ready to make (and defend) a commitment to scope or timescale yet.
Point being, I don’t know specifically what’s frustrating you, but I want to know. If this is about the queue, I would again point out that, to my knowledge, we haven’t publicly said yes or no to any changes. If this is about something else, obviously some more information would help. If you have a specific proposal for how you think we might change our approach to feedback, we’d be glad to hear it.
@krutsch you’ve personally given us a lot of great feedback over the last 18 months that has demonstrably improved Roon in a number of ways. I sincerely hope you’ll keep it coming.
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Personally, I am very happy with the program, and paid $500 along with many others for the lifetime membership. Roon has requested feature input from members on future revisions, which is refreshing. Specific requests for information are time consuming for staff, and even so, they have been pretty forthcoming when direct questions are posed to them. I don’t need a Roon news bulletin, but people have different needs for information I suppose.
Maybe a better tact for this thread would have been: I am a year plus annual subscriber, what features are forthcoming to entice me to enroll as a lifetime member?
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Being in Australia and the dollar is what it’s at. I am a paying customer and extremely happy with Roon. I paid fr 1 year to make sure it was right for me, but I’ll be a lifetime member soon enough.
Jump on some kickstarters and see how long those can take. Makes you appreciate it all the more
Keep up the AWESOME work team Roon
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[quote=“Geoff_Coupe, post:3, topic:15154”]
I’m a paying customer, and you are certainly not speaking for me in this request.
[/quote]that about captures it for me too. Lifer enjoying Roon everyday and truly appreciative of the opportunity to make and meaningfully engage re feature requests.
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I’m paying not to have the experience of open source software, and I am satisfied. If I wanted the open source experience, I would be using JRiver, which is a never-ending beta at around $20/year.
From my point of view, the Roon road map is there. I know roughly what v1.3 will be about, and where Roon is generally headed. Each update is usable, and each update is a significant step forward. Seems fine to me. Also, I paid for Roon because I liked it at the time I paid for it and not because of what it might be at some undefined date in the future. I use it daily and it does not owe me anything.
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$100 per year? That’s a sweet deal compared to the &120 I’ve been paying for Roon.
Unless you guys have been charging the OP for using the Roon Community Forum which, for me so far, has been free. Not a bad idea though: charge a nominal fee to submit software improvement suggestions. Problem fixes and troubleshooting can be free but if the poster feels that an idea has merit, why not charge for making the suggestion? (Half-kidding)
Seriously though, the OP has submitted some reasoned and thoughtful posts and is obviously an intelligent and reasonable person. My past experience in dealing with software purchases (and now, software subscriptions) has been a somewhat painful process of learning to manage my expectations. I can empathize with him.
Roon’s support team and software developers have demonstrated a degree of accountability and transparency that is peerless, in my admittedly limited experience.
Roon did everything it promised it would do when I signed up. I am amazed and pleased when I survey all the additional features that have been added since then.
No complaints about the cost here - as long as the transparency and accountability continue. Roon has always kept its promises. Remember, some promises take longer than others to fulfill.
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@mike I appreciate your feedback. Let me tell you where that post came from. I am using Roon less-and-less. I signed up for the first year, because I was excited about the vision of combining Tidal with a local library in a seamless manner, as you’ve done very successfully.
But, I canceled my subscription and was going to just let it run out and move on. However, Bryston added RoonReady support to their players and I have a BDP-1, of which I am very fond. So, I re-upped to see where this would go.
Two things happened:
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I noticed a dip in sound quality between MPD and Roon playback with this particular player. Other Bryston users have noticed the same, while still others had the opposite experience (i.e. they felt Roon offered superior playback over MPD). YMMV.
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I found myself using Roon less-and-less over the playback queue experience and then realized that I’ve payed for 2 years of subscriptions and I was more pissed at myself than anything else. So, I went back in and searched the community forums for commentary on playback methodology. I was surprised at how many others have expressed the same frustration over the non-consuming queue.
The sheer number of clicks/taps and, worse, the distance of mouse/finger travel between these taps, to emulate CD-like playback of simply skipping around an album or a playlist is mind-boggling.
Obviously, Roon does listen to its customers and, as you’ve mentioned, I’ve been proactive in helping Roon track down some defects in the system. Your customer service is exemplary.
I’m letting go and moving on. Sorry if my tone was inappropriate.
Ken
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It would be cool to have a monthly subscription option from where I sit.
Roon is advertised as bit perfect. You may well have discerned a difference between Roon and other products over tome, but I doubt Roon has changed.
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