The nickname for the secret menu tier with folder browsing, Roon-on-The-Go, a room correction GUI, and AmazonHD and Spotify integration.
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[quote=âdanny, post:15, topic:144163â]
Weâve always designed the product we want, not the product we are asked for.[/quote]
Thereâs an uncomfortable level of arrogance in that response, particularly as we are funding your product. Would be nice to know that we are more than just financiers for your personal hobbyâŚ
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I read that as a matter of phrasing⌠and then interpreted it as building what they want as in the roots of roon and not building what they are asked for as in not building a bag of spanners.
Maybe I was generous in my reading. Who knows. But I didnât assume arrogance.
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I am curious. What is it about 1.8 specifically that you like. Or if that is going too far, what are the improvements on the dislikes you had about 1.7?
Sure⌠Iâll have to think back on it. I didnât use 1.7 for over a year. But some of the high level thingsâŚ
- Scrolling. I know it is a âsmallâ thing. And that was also my frustration⌠câmon itâs a âsmallâ thing. Which is also why I started a thread about the themes in 1.8 (never intended as âhey you can re-themeâ but more - if youâre going to ditch roon because you donât like the colourâŚdonât). The curious mix of horizontal and vertical scrolling did my head in. To me it was always a case of âwe built feature x. We built feature y. Theyâre the same thing, but we implemented them totally differentlyâ). There was a lot of that in 1.7 for me - things suddenly working differently depending on where you were in the product or other things not working at all.
- Distinctions between library and streaming. Similar to the above. It felt like the one was a bolt on to the other. The UI separated them. I didnât really care where my music was coming from and I didnât see why suggestions were restricted to one⌠I want to discover music.
- Cluttered UI. It was like going into a junk store. You suspect there is some treasure in there but youâre hemmed in with stuff. You get used to turning left⌠and then canât. So you have to back out and try again. I found the navigation experience to be pretty fragmented and disjointed.
- Relationships between things. I was finding that other streaming tools were making better suggestions and had a better understanding of influencers, followers etc. And yes I get that a lot of it is subjective⌠I donât really care what things are called, but suggest links. I can choose to ignore them, or try them, find I donât agree with them but then follow other links⌠I wasnât sitting down and thinking âI want to listen toâŚâ. I wanted to discover and I wasnât finding discovery particularly good.
- Focus. It had its merits. But it was restricted to certain aspects - where the source of the music was and only available in particular aspects of the UI.
1.8? I like the new UI. I like the space. I like that it reads like a magazine. Remember the pictures of album liners that were on the roon website? 1.8 lives up to it a lot more. I like the open spaces. I like the circles (sorry). Focus is a lot more useful, streaming and local library are tighter, the whole experience is more delightful and encourages exploration.
YMMV.
You canât really create any product by committee or by taking into account your customers demands across the board. There are too many differing views. You have to have a vision as an organisation.
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Interesting. I donât like 1.8. Iâm trying to understand why some do and some donât.
In hindsight I can see I have never really engaged with roon as a player interface. I use several chromecast âdisplaysâ around the house for that. For me, roon was more a bag of spanners to integrate my systems and content. As a toolbox, and maybe thatâs not your use case, I personally find 1.8 much more difficult to use. I guess that is at least one use case explaining some of the polarization we are seeing.
I donât disagree, as what you wrote is a mischaracterisation of my position.
Weâre not funding a product, weâre buying a product/service. If, as consumers, we donât like what we get then we can spend our money elsewhere.
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Ah the joys of it⌠I find your position (not liking 1.8 and I am guessing, wishing you had 1.7 again) interesting.
For me 1.7 was just massively jarring, and frustrating. But I can do it over there, but now not here? Why?
Iâm probably not the usual user though. I had a career in building companies and software around experiences - which are pretty evocative and will illicit strong opinions. The fact there is the strength of feeling here - negative too - is actually a good thing. When people stop caring then it suggests your software isnât resonating and isnât given any emotional response.
The last company I had a fortune 500 say âIf you just do this one thing, we will have every person in the company using itâ. We didnât build it. In the end they got what they needed - but not what they asked.
I think youâve articulated my feelings, and my vague sense of disappointment in Roon despite how awesome I truly think it is, better than I could. I want Roon to be more of a toolbox. Roon wants Roon to be a âmagazineâ - easy to use, streamlined, etc. But at the cost of actually having an array, a toolkit if you will, of features. Like the ability to put in your own album reviews (especially if itâs blank, as is the case with seemingly half the albums released after about 2005 or so), the ability to have different color schemes/skins, etc. And now things like track tags, playlist visibility etc. have been excised. But are coming back, weâre told.
I guess I want a bit more jRiver in my Roon. Features, options, customizability. Flexibility. Instead Roon seems to be steering everyone to use Roon in the same exact vanilla manner.
But jRiver itself is at the other extreme, with a dizzying array of features, a cluttered and bewildering interface. Itâs sometimes fun to user jRiver but I wouldnât call it relaxing, or easyâŚIâd need Jriver to be way more like Roon if I was to use it as my daily driver for actual music enjoyment.
If only there was a middle path between the two extremes.
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I think the observation was that we are funding a âprojectâ not a product. Owing to Danny saying they are building the product they wantâŚ
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I have no great nostalgia for 1.7. A UI refresh was long overdue and there is a long list of feature requests. I will be adjusting my roon 1.8 expectations though. There are likely going to be a few maintenance releases so I will keep an open mind whether it is viable as a Classical library manager. It still has a value to me for systems integration and some rudimentary local/streaming content integration. No longer the âmust haveâ part of my music listening infrastructure though.
Thatâs what many people have expressed as their feelings about the two products.
I decided jriver is a toolkit that canât decide what machine it is designed to maintain. Roon is the machine that starts each time I turn the key and so I donât need a toolkit.
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Iâve been through big rearchitecting projects with software and the best way seems to do it under the hood as much as possible. Usually these tasks donât end up as new features - and so donât excite the users. But they needed to be done. If you release versions with no ânew featuresâ you seem to get a bit of a kicking. We like new toys.
My perception - and it is purely perception - is that roon have been making changes that arenât âsexyâ under the hood. Changes that potentially enable some of the features youâve mentioned there that just werenât possible in the old architecture. Alongside these changes they have released a new UI. And some things are bust. But they have a platform to grow from that the older code just wouldnât have enabled at all.
I think we need to have a bit of patience with this one - see if roon start releasing new things (and fixes). It is pretty reassuring how quickly they put out a release that fixed the major concerns of 1.8 (things not working as opposed to âI wanât my UI to be all ma-roonâ
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I think the 1.8 UI is a lot more âpolishedâ and as a result is possibly more restrictive. Is that what youâre finding (and finding frustrating)?
I think the foundations it is on now are a lot more solid that what 1.7 was on - and that should mean it is able to grow in ways that it just could never do before.
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With the internet - and forums - as they are I think any mature behaviour should be called out!
That is something that comes up which I also find puzzling. Personally I find 1.8 looks a bit rough, especially for Classical. 1.8 uses an unusually low contrast grey on grey color scheme for Classical that many not interested in that genre may not have seen. It is a completely different aesthetic experience to the other genres. Not sure why it was singled out in that way. But no matter. I donât use roon in that way so Iâll just dial it out. It is important to others though I think.
Yes. There have probably been a lot of changes under the hood. Roon has to differentiate itself from the native streaming apps which are not standing still either. I really like the Qobuz app but one thing they donât do well is present their content manageably when their streaming search sets are now so large. 1.7 didnât do any better. Being presented with 3,000 Beethovenâs 5ths, for example, is not much use. It remains to be seen what roonâs solution is, a special case of googles problem as you point out.
There actually have already been attempts to restrict the size of search sets and make them more relevant and context aware in 1.8 if you look. Not entirely successful for the moment. A very long way to go there I think. I rather suspect the answer will come out left field from the research labs rather than roon. Lets see.
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Well perhaps, but then your position was based on selective quoting and was needlessly antagonistic imo.
I cannot argue with that.
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