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.