Does Roon care about non-streamers anymore?

New music can be old music you newly discover. Roon Radio is great for that.

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Unfortunately, successive UK governments have failed to deliver on their promise for universal broadband. However, there is a new scheme–the Universal Service Obligation–where you can request a minimum download speed of 10Mbs (launched earlier this month with caveats.)

However, the reason for my post was that no one is dismissing non-streamers. The reality is that this is the future and both physical media and digital downloads are in sharp decline.

William Gibson said, The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.
Sure, there are those who can’t use streaming or find it uneconomical or unreliable. Today.
And cloud computing, electrical cars…

Local data isn’t being abandoned, as @Danny has made very clear.
But “streaming ate the music industry,”

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In spirit of good-natured pedantry: In the late 1980s, the WELL, one of the very earliest online social networks was set up in Marin County, CA by a bunch of techie Deadheads who wanted to share and catalog their collections. I would point to that as one of the very first examples of music metadata cataloging, long before the suits showed up and commercialized the idea.

That data lives on at etree and the live music archive; I have no idea how readily it could be integrated. Thus, the question for Roon isn’t “How to collect the data”, the question is “Why aren’t you using such a deep existing resource”

That’s a new treasure trove for me :grinning: - thanks!

Dear danny,

As a matter of fact, most of us music lovers have a rather larger collection / library. It is often that large, it requires guidance to explore it and it offers new discoveries in itself.

Unleashing the power of one‘s collection was one major selling point for Roon.

So, when on Roon Radio I like to be surprised with the hidden gems in my collection, NOT with something that TIDAL deems relevant and that is terrible in 70% of the time.

The problem appears to be that for local music, Roon relies soley on the not too well curated AllMusic catalogue. To cover up this, you concentrate on the streaming providers and their algorithms. Which does not help.

If you care for your user base with a larger music collection, then

  1. Integrate other curators thanAllmusic, eg Discogs,
  2. Implement a switch to turn off streaming services in Roon Radio,
  3. Improve Roon Radios algorithms,

and Roon will become even more popular in the audiophile music lovers community. - Thank you!

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Roon radio doesn’t use tidal algorithms it looks at what others have played, en-mass, after/associated with that track and lines that up, influenced but not driven by your own favourites.
Number 2 is in the queue three dot menu, admittedly it reverts back to the old algorithm but is is just in your own library.

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Thank you!
I never noticed that setting. Very helpful.

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BTW: musicbrainz is able to handle events (like concerts), too - so you could add LRB concerts, if you wanted to. :slight_smile:

But that would not propagate easily into Roon, I’m afraid.

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Has Roon stopped working with your library? Mine works perfectly.

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Roon does integrate other curators’ metadata. If I find an album in my local collection not being identified on Roon I add it to MusicBrainz and typically it will be identifiable on Roon within just a few days.

Too many Roon users complain about missing albums but are too lazy (to use a popular term on this thread) to put in the small amount of effort needed to correct the problem. If we all did this can you imagine how much better Roon’s metadata for us dinosaurs would be?

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Understood, but i belive most us actually payed for Roon with the assumption that we would not have to curate our libraries ourselves. Thats sort of the USP of Roon? Great metadata, very limited work…

And most of the time it works fine, just sayin’. :slight_smile:

If each Roon user did just one per day just think how many changes we could get done between us over a year.

Some of us aren’t that bothered about all of our metadata.

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I find all my music (including digitized 12’’ and 7’’ vinyl) in Discogs, without ever having to edit anything.
Roon is obviously not looking there.

I don’t see the point in critiquing those who want to cultivate local libraries only. That was my intention when I purchased Roon. I have had a Tidal premium subscription for some months now but don’t envisage this will always be the case.

Obviously one of Roon’s strengths is exploring connections to new music, but some people are only into what they know. Tough being a developer… you can never be all things to all people, but pigeonholing your customers is not going to be a winner in everyone’s eyes.

Frankly I’m happy with Roon the way it is, and regard any new functionality as a bonus.

Stay well.

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Apologies to all for the long thread.

I would like to first share that technically, from a platform perspective, the Roon Community boards (this forum) is the best I know of. The folks at Room have done an amazing job building this site and including us of all. I also think it is awesome that executives at Roon like @danny read and engage on it. This has two major benefits: users feel heard, and the company gets direct feedback and ideas on how to build an even better product. This in turns benefits the company And it’s users. I personally love checking in (my girlfriend would say “geeking out”) on this forum and learning all I can from each of you! Thank you!

Where this post went astray, IMHO, was the company’s reaction to @Speed_Racer. In my experience, the larger one’s audience, the more careful and precise one needs to be in one’s words. My company has thousands of users too, and I would never dare direct words like “lazy” to a customer in a thread. Why risk insulting or disenfranchising a big supporter?!

I also feel that the company’s executives should try to “rise above” the threads if they go off the rails, as we know they often do. Customers and users – all of us – say and write stupid things sometimes. Sometimes in jest, sometimes because we had a bad day, sometimes because this is a hobby and we just want to write what we feel like! It should not be Roon’s role to “put someone in their place” by embarrassing or insulting them on this public forum. I agree with @Matt_Armstrong that it is not constructive for executives to personally attack users.

IMHO the original post, complaining about a lack of features in libraries should have been addressed by the company in two ways: (a) matter if factly: these are the features we have implemented (as @danny rightly did), and then (b) asking for input: “hey @Speed_Racer, I’m sorry you feel that way! What features would you like to see?” This could have yielded some very constructive product insights for Roon, the right way.

Anyway, I hope some apologies were shared by Roon over DM to those offended to clear the air.

Now… back to the music! ; )

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Well said, and I do agree with you for what its worth, but some of the “crap” I’ve seen directed at the Roon team would be hard for me to swallow without retaliation. My 2 cents, keep the change.

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I would add to the list of features which are NOT applicable to streamed music is your support for multi-channel surround, which I’m fairly certain is not yet available from any streaming service. I subscribe to both Tidal and Quobuz hi-def services, but I am so grateful that all my DSD audio files and Multi-channel files can co-exist in the same interface.

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10 posts were split to a new topic: Qobuz multi-channel albums