Just chiming in that I’ve tried the streaming services, it’s good and fun and especially nice for discovering new content. However, I don’t subscribe to them - the cost is quite high and I have an extensive collection locally that keeps me and my family quite happy on it’s own.
Besides that, ROON SOLD IT"S PRODUCT TO ME QUITE ELABORATELY SAYING THAT IT WILL TURN MY LOCAL LIBRARY FROM MEH TO WOW.
If you take a look at the main home page even now it says many things along this vein including this:
“Music lovers have content from many sources, often acquired over years of collecting. Roon identifies your music, then enhances it with the latest metadata. And this isn’t just for your local files, it works for content from TIDAL too!”
If Roon continues to prioritise streaming and remove features that it sold me at the beginning I will be left feeling like Roon has broken it’s promises to me after convincing me to purchase a lifetime pass (which I must say was quite an unusually high cost for a product like this).
Further adding to the problem - you can’t always get as high a quality from streaming services and can’t always find all of the content you have locally.
Can you imagine what the home page would say if they took this away, "We charge you a truck load of money to make online sources look prettier and send bit perfect quality in the last 10m ’ - doesn’t have the same ring does it.
Which brings me to another concern which is likely driving all this. Modern software delivery methodology as of quite a few decades now is meant to take feedback from it’s customers and deploy small updates in short iterations in an absolute maximum of one month intervals (in the case of scrum).
Companies employing this methodology (and Spotify is a big example of one that does) are able to keep customers happy by keeping well aligned to their expectations and having agility to make changes quickly.
Unfortunately I don’t see customer feedback loops here, nor the typical customer roadmaps, backlogs of community driven feature requests. What I do see is long archaic waterfall driven update cycles and features customers didn’t know they wanted while big features being requested for multiple years are being ignored. This is one way to alienate your customers, which is a shame cause Roon is really a good product.