Does Valence support non-streaming users?

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.

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Interesting comments and well thought out, nicely done.

I’m not a streaming fan for various reason debated ad nauseam. Artist pay is primary reason, provenance etc, but realize that streaming is the way going forward, but hope the streaming model changes and caters toward them. It’s a can O worms for me…

Am I wrong to think that Valence is the application of statistics to information in various cloud storage systems and / or websites as well as the [meta] tags associated with one’s own library as done in Roon Radio?

If so, my only concern in terms of harvesting music interesting to a given user would be the notion of sponsored links, where companies can pay Roon to feature their music above other music with equal statistical significance to a given user.

I hope that such sponsored links / choices are not part of the plan.

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I, too, appreciate all the replies including Danny’s perspectives for Valence. I was confused rightfully or wrongfully about the utility of Valence and its reach for those who stream or do not. My library is fast approaching 5K albums. I once streamed TIDAL HiFi, but after over a year decided to end the subscription. I appreciate the post that questioned how Valence would benefit those of us who don’t choose to stream. And as others have expressed, appreciate the reasons for subscribing to streaming. This may be the wrong thread for what I about to articulate; but, nevertheless, I choose to express my disappointment at how many times I ass new albums that roon does not identify, i.e., just added several albums by Robert Glasper. And was surprise that it is merely added without any background about the artist and those five + with nothing but empty space and wonder what Valence would do for me when that happens which for me amounts to a ton of albums by artist I would expect information about both the artist and the album. How will Valence serve me in this case. I am a life-time subscriber from the birth of roon; and love roon.
Any reason for such a lack of album/artist information? And how Valence serves me in this context? I do appreciate the intention behind the thread’s concern about what Valence does for those of us who don’t or no longer stream.
Enjoy the music,
Richard

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@REShaman That is odd. My Roon comes up with a whole lot of info about Robert Glasper - pics, bio, review of the album I have (“Canvas”)…

Ajl Anthony, you are correct. It must have been my oopsadaisical uninformed twin. My Robert Glasper collection: Mood, Black Radio, BR 2, In My Element, Canvas, Everything’s Beautiful, Covered The Robert Glasper Trio etc. Blue Note All-Stars, all have full notes. But there are a ton of other albums that do fit my description. Thank you for correcting the misinformation I posted about Robert Glasper. My apologies to those who read my post dealing with Valence, which, BTW, when I launched roon, just now installed 1.7 as I was interested in responding to you correction. I will now need to discover what 1.7 does bring to my roon experience of my library of close to 5K albums.
Enjoy the music,
Richard

Interesting that the Reccomended for you seems to show Tidal versions of albums that are in the local library

This is repeating…

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Good point!

You do realize that it’s only when you have “long archaic” release cycles you have time for customer feedback, right? It’s when you use spiffy modern (read lame) agile development that you don’t have time to release prototypes for consumer evaluation. If you don’t like Valence, turn it off. It’s as simple as that. Plus, Room’s promise has to do with a combination of convenience and sound quality, unlike Spotify, Pandora, etc., which have no sound quality at all.

The additional metadata could still be used to enhance Roon Radio and the Discover functionality.

You find a switch nobody else has, other than disconnecting your streaming service?

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The additional metadata is great, you can now finally surface just about everything an artist’s participated in, in your library and via streaming. You also get to surface (most) instances of a performance, even the ones Roon doesn’t know about as long as they’re properly tagged on your end.

It might be a bug, but more often it seems to be a situation where a recent re-release is issued. For example, you may have the 24-bit version and now Tidal releases MQA. In one sense, this is a duplicate, but the new release puts it in the NRfY section.
You can see if this is the ‘feature’ by looking at the release date, often it is newly released.

I don’t see that as a problem at all. Many audiophiles have multiple versions of albums in different masterings and resolution rates. Telling us tha a new version has just dropped is an excellent feature.

What do you know? Seems you’re guessing. And the evidence suggests something very different … 1.6 build 390 … 1.7 build 500. 22/01/2019 to 21/11/2019. Then there’s their cloud infrastructure.

I see changes in areas customers do want … improved search, better music discovery, metadata and so on. IMO these are big ticket items.

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I’ll dig deeper into a couple of examples

LOL, said like a true waterfall zealot. And totally incorrect, but to be very fair, I do appreciate this angle is the default stance of those coming from waterfall environments - it takes most quite a while to get it and quite frankly most don’t even want to get it in the first place. Anyway, lets not get into an argument about it here, it’s just an observation.

What I know is nobody ever came and asked me what I want, I’ve never seen any thread asking for input into a roadmap or prioritisation of features. I’ve never seen anyone profess themselves in any way to the community (whom are let’s face it their customers) in any way like a product owner / manager would. Without that, it aint agile.

But generally you’re right, I am guessing, or let’s call it an educated observation.

And as far as you say about seeing things deployed customers do want, that’s a guess too, since there has not been any of this published in any roadmaps etc.

Anyway as I said above, not really trying to have a debate about this - but you compare it to what plex does as an arbitrary example - it DOES have sessions with customers, and you can see the results in the number of features being continuously delivered.

But hey, far be it for I to be the golden oracle on it.

To be fair, and as a heavy Plex user myself, Plex is not a great example of listening to its customers - They frequently remove core features that loads of users actively use (plug-ins being an example, “TV mode” another, though eventually backtracked on because of a user backlash) and add features no-one ever asked for (tie-ins with content providers). The Plex forums are littered with examples of pissing off users for no explicable reaso.

Why would you expect this? Roon isn’t a DevOps team working for your business.

What’s more, a public forum is not the place to reach consensus and inform a product roadmap. It is highly likely that this forum does not represent the entire user community. I suspect–but am guessing here–that Roon works with consumers in closed focus groups.

Occasionally we get hints about was may (or is) on the roadmap. Again, why would anyone publish their roadmap in a public forum? Would you want to give the competition a head start?

Finally, since this is going a little OT, I’d say that this forum is pretty unique in that Roon actively participate here–maybe this is why people expect even more.

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