I write:
You write:
How can you say that when you say:
You words reveal what you think and show “that streaming is what you really care about”.
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I showed that we continue to release features exclusively for non-streamers and well as features that non-streamers can enjoy right alongside streamers. Prove me wrong instead of trumpeting the same lies over and over with zero evidence. I’m telling you we care about local libraries and we support these use cases, but there are limits to where we can go here. Even in our last release, the majority of features were applicable to users with local content. You refuse to hear it.
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Pertinent question…
What uncharted waters does Roon have yet to cross regarding local ripped or downloaded file libraries?
I have a 5000+ album local library. Beyond live playback HDCD decoding and digital de-emphasis – both of which I can apply more deftly via my own ripping and post-processing tools – no other absent use cases for my local library immediately spring to mind.
Maybe the piracy filled Pandora’s box that is SACD ISO playback? I suppose that could be one.
AJ
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Yeah, I’m wondering, too. What are these “really cool local-library only” features that @Speed_Racer is thinking about?
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Although I’m inclined to think local libraries are the future only for dinosaurs, hermits and those unfortunate enough to have really bad internet, I have one that I use from time to time. When not enjoying Tidal or Qobuz streaming I find nothing particularly lacking when I use Roon to listen to my local library.
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Hi, @danny.
I too was insulted when I first read your “lazy” and “not open-minded” categorization of us non-streamers. Your reasons aren’t clear to me from what you wrote, yet you called me lazy and closed minded! I suppose you can get away with that when you have prepaid lifetime customers…
Here’s what you wrote:
This statement [that speed_racer doesn’t care for pop music and streams to fill gaps] is the absolute antithesis of what the Roon Team believes and puts into every Roon release. It demonstrates laziness and a lack of open-mindedness.
Every new artist today builds on the shoulders of giants of the past. The tools are better, the inspiration is better, and the history is better. If you haven’t found better music that’s new, it’s on you. Every generation says the same thing about “today’s music”, and they all end up wrong.
While I too do not care much for today’s pop music, crap music has existed forever. It’s just that history has helped filter it out for you. That’s the laziness I speak of. But it’s the lack of trying is the most offensive to me – that’s the closed-mindedness.
Surely you’re not saying it’s lazy to not care much for today’s pop music – that’s a matter of taste. And surely you’re not saying it’s lazy or closed-minded to stream just what you feel you’re missing and would like to hear – much work could have been spent identifying a new work to listen to. Are you perhaps saying it’s lazy to let “history” filter out bad music? By that I presume you mean music that is no longer available to listen to has been filtered because it is crap. Or are you ultimately saying it’s lazy not to listen to a lot of new music and do the filtering yourself, when no group filtering via the marketplace has winnowed out the crap yet?
And it’s not clear precisely what it is that non-streamers don’t try (the “lack of trying” bit) that you find offensive and close-minded. Is it that we aren’t trying to listen to and filter all of the new music, so that’s not only lazy, but also offensive to you for being close-minded?
Perhaps you’re really just offended by some stereotype that has old folks dissing young folks’ music and find that closed-minded? Did your mom yell at you when you were a kid to “Turn that crap down!” Mine did…
I’m not going to defend how much better old music is than what you durn youngin’s call music (especially since a lot of it is old-timey music anyways 
). But I will observe this: Music that is no longer available (i.e., filtered by history) may be gone because there isn’t a market for it due to audience ignorance of it, or fashion, or licensing, or loss of source materials, or other commercial reasons.
I’d rather focus on listening to what inspired the artists I already like, and not spend my time in a crap shoot filtering out the crap in new music. This means digging into the past, past the filters of the streaming services. You should see the value in this, as you observed:
Every new artist today builds on the shoulders of giants of the past.
While acknowledging this, you still disappointed by writing:
If you haven’t found better music that’s new, it’s on you.
Why is new music necessarily better? Is Ken Vandermark better than Coltrane? Wynton Marsalis better than Cootie Williams? How about finding better old music? Or even just great old music that I haven’t heard? Some day I’d like to hear all the music that influenced The Band. I won’t find that in “better music that’s new”.
So I’m very happy being left to my own devices, exploring the vast legacy and history of past music, using liner notes, and books, and metadata about artist history in roon as clues to follow. It’s okay to get the occasional glimpse of something outside of my box through a friend or serendipity, but the box is already so big that I’ll never complete my own explorations in my lifetime. This is not laziness. This it not closed-mindedness.
To take a really contrary view, is it not lazy (and folly) to rely on recommender systems to lead us to the next best thing, hoping it will float our boats, instead of searching along our own paths? It’s also a bit unwise because the streamers have financial incentives to push you in certain directions. Following the crowd is often just a fashion trap anyways, not necessarily leading away from crap. Isn’t this really just another hollow promise of instant gratification via technology?
- Eric
PS - That was a fun write. Thanks for reading. I hope this thread isn’t in the feature request forum.
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I think the last quote “If you haven’t found better music that’s new, it’s on you” was meant to imply that there is good new music as well as dross in all categories and some work may be needed to find it.
So new Jazz, new classical, new rock etc.
Before the social bans, though not a classical music expert, I went to the premier of new classical pieces and I thought they were great.
You can indeed go mine the roots of music but it is also interesting to see what the new shoots look like too.
If no one ever listened to old music when it was new then we wouldn’t have any old music.
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We all know music collectors/hobbyists (as opposed to audiophiles) who listen to the same 50 to 100 albums almost exclusively. Classic rock is the universal commonality. I get it. It’s the music we grew up with. The problem is, most of this music was mastered to be played on an AM radio in your car. When I listen to most classic rock, it sounds like it was recorded in a closet. There’s no bass, the vocals are muffled, and the highs are nothing but high hat hits. I love the music, but I’ve heard it a thousand times and it’s not pleasant on my system. Compare the recording quality of Led Zeppelin to Greta Van Fleet. Think what you will about the quality of the songs, but I’d much rather listen to Greta because the quality of the recording is so much better. And I haven’t heard the songs every day for the last 40 years. All Danny is saying is expand your horizons. Try Go Go Penguin or Snarky Puppy. Try Of Montreal. Try Big Big Train or Steven Wilson. There is so much good quality, well recorded music being made every day that it’s a shame to limit yourself to nothing after 1975.
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There is a phrase I hear a lot and have heard a lot over the last 16 years we’ve been doing this (since the early Sooloos days)… it comes in a few flavors:
- “they don’t make music like they used to”
- “new music sucks”
- “new music is all bad-pop/hip-hop/rap”
I and the rest of the Roon team has found this line of thinking lazy and closed-minded. It’s just a rut many get stuck in post-career/family/kids/etc. These words do not imply blame, they just point out the reality of the situation. Some don’t actually care about the music, and so be it… but many do, and Sooloos, then Roon, were made to fix this unfortunate situation.
Finding music that resonates with you takes effort… you must listen to music to determine if you like it. That listening takes a time commitment and will absolutely have failure cases. Avoiding expending this effort is “lazy” and will result in deepening the rut.
To classify all “new music” as “pop” or “hip-hop/rap” is what is offensive. It’s lazy because clearly time was not spent exploring new music to make a reasonable determination. It’s not openminded, because this line of thinking is based on a false premise, and believing is either ignorance or just being unopen to ideas that do not fit your mental model of the world. My guess is that ignorance is not the issue since it’s hard to believe that people actually believe that genres such as jazz and classical are no longer being made. That leaves “unopen”.
It has nothing to do with streaming, nor does it have to do with discovery techniques. It’s the labeling of “new music” as being somehow inferior to “old music”.
It’s not necessarily better, but it’s lazy and closed-minded to think that it can’t be better. Also, there are many technological and cultural advances that give “new” the advantage. If you all you listen to is Coltrane, that’s pretty boring in my opinion… there is a ton of great jazz being made today. For example, if I deemed “new music” as hip/hop/rap/crap-pop, I would have never discovered Avishai Cohen. Is he better than Coltrane? Don’t know… but he brought me more joy in the last month than Coltrane did.
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I don’t think what he wrote is so clear. In the second paragraph I quoted, he wrote that every new artist has all these better things (giants’ shoulders, tools, inspiration, history) And it’s your problem if you can’t find the better new music which is presumably what all these advantages let every artist create. Does that mean every artist is creating better work than what came before? Or almost everything they create is better? Or only just a little bit of new music is better than before? I’m not clear what he’s thinking about the amount, so I don’t know if he thinks there’s no crap/dross in new music or not. But he offers this to support that if you’re not looking for it, you’re lazy and close-minded.
I think the (older) generation that said disco – which was today’s music back then – is worse than big band had it right!
And of course, every (younger) generation says that what’s new today is better that what their parents listened to, and they all end up being wrong too. I rediscovered my parents’ music long after I rejected it as a teen.
- Eric
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The one I use is, “Nothing worth listening to after 1970!” 
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Another example in the classic rock genre, if you stopped listening to King Crimson after In the Court of the Crimson King what will you be missing? Decades of amazing music.
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Really! So no music since when has been ‘better’? The Mesolithic?
I’m 60 but love being introduced to new music by my adult children. They were brought up on my antediluvian tastes so can sing along to the Beatles and ELO but we go to gigs together to enjoy new works as well.
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They have the tools, but that doesn’t imply that they are better… only that they have the advantage to more easily become better.
Only if you dismiss new music as crap-pop/hip-hop/rap and not interesting.
It’s very disingenuous to combine the opinion of inexperienced teenagers to discount all advancement in musical arts. Remember, Coltrane’s parents probably thought his music made their ears bleed. Were they right or just not openminded? I’d argue they were flat out wrong.
… and they said the same of all rock and roll, and all jazz too.
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Good example. Avishai Cohen is an amazing composer and bassist and leader and we absolutely adore several of his middle albums. But since being brought into Chick Corea’s band catapulted his career, wouldn’t you want to explore the music Chick’s been making for 50 years instead of something hot and new that you didn’t care for?
This conversation has everything to do with streaming (the topic) and discovery techniques (recommended or sought out).
@danny, you’re still generalizing and being insulting.
This is more fun than looking at coronavirus infection counts. Thanks for participating.
- Eric
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@danny May be its lazy and closed-minded to only have formed one view point.
Maybe the non streamers are actually music collectors and streamers are consumers.
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Of course I would… but why would you want to miss out on Avishai because he’s rap/hip-hop/crap-pop.
I’m not saying old music is bad. I’m not saying you shouldn’t discover it. I’m saying its lazy and unopenminded to label all new music as uninteresting or crap-pop/hip-hop/rap.
no… this conversation is 2 things…
-
As the title states, does Roon care about non-streamers. I believe I’ve put out an argument here that demonstrates that yes, we do. No one has countered that in any way yet.
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A comment that @Speed_Racer made that I find lazy/closed-minded. It has nothing to do with streaming.
So you are in complete agreement with me. Not-streaming is not lazy and closed-minded. Labeling new music as uninteresting crap-pop/hip-hop/rap is.
I have to admit that I’m definitely adding some fuel to the fire here… going a bit stir crazy sitting at home with the kids. At some point i’ll split this thread into the 2 topics I mentioned above… they are quite different.
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Then how about reading through some feature requests, and adding dark mode to the forum?
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I stopped listening to King Crimson because Lark’s Tongue was such a let down for me after the masterpiece that was Islands. These first four albums were new then and I was but a teen. But then THRAK got on my radar after I dabbled a bit in the blast of energy that’s Nine Inch Nails 20 years later, and I’ve been meaning to work backwards through the KC discography but haven’t had the time. Now, of course, it is all very old music and I should look for something newer. (That last sentence is a gentle taunt, @danny)
look for whatever you want… just don’t discount the new stuff as uninteresting. That’s lazy and not open-minded It ALL contains good stuff and bad.