Unique compared to what? I can’t recall a single forum I’m in that does not see active participation from devs or their equivalent.
Well, actually, you do need a streaming service, but (technically) you don’t need to be able to listen to them. Altough I canot estimate the quality of the recommendations.
To the point:
Up till today, you can create an account at Qobuz without subscribing any streaming plan. This account will enable you to purchase downloads at normal (non-discounted) price.
If you now use this account to log in at Qobuz in Roon, you will start receiving ‘New Releases For You’.
I have tested it, and it works.
However, as said above, I do not know if the recommendations make any sense, meaning take into account your listening history or not. (First albums recommended during my test did not look promising for that matter, but I did not test long enough to have a validated opinion).
Dirk
P.S. It is obvious that you will not be able to play recommended New Releases, as you do not have a streaming plan active.
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That is very clever!
Very nice - I’m going to try it - last time I looked at it Qobuz was not available in NZ unfortunately - let’s hope that’s changed!
At this point I’m of two minds if we should continue this track of thought as it was just an observation. However I am now genuinely trying to be helpful to explain my understanding and maybe we can get some mutual agreement. Maybe someone else will find this educational too.
So let me just say that you are certainly right about a couple of things - because the basis of the change that came with modern software development methods, is at it’s core, about getting closer to the customer. So you’re right that the forums shouldn’t be the only place to gain customer representation. You’re also right that closed consumer groups are a good group to include and you’re right that there are occasionally hints in the forums back to one customer engagement point.
However while the new development methods have a ton of flexibility in them for each organisation, there are a small number of fairly explicit rules. These rules are placed there because without them both the customer and the organisation can’t achieve the value that comes from the methodology.
More than one of these rules are centered around customer feedback loops within the development phase. In fact even putting aside the rules, in the case of scrum it’s so built in, there’s a whole meeting for it in the scrum framework called the Sprint Review. The sprint review is not the only meeting where customers are encouraged to attend and actually they’re encouraged to be part of the team with the developers as well.
Bear in mind that in the above example, the least this meeting can happen is once per month. Most people seem to do once per fortnight.
So my thought was that if Roon were doing any of this - some of us would have received an invite to something to provide input at very least. And that would have been a relatively public exercise so it wouldn’t be particularly secret - why would you make it secret, those people would hold the voice of the customer for Roon and be valuable within the community.
Well this turned out to be longer than expected didn’t it. 
Perhaps some of us have. 
Thanks for your thoughtful post. At the risk of going further OT–perhaps the mods can move this conversation elsewhere?–I’ll reply. 
I think the term customer is too broad to be useful here. Whilst a customer centric approach is laudable it is imperfect without understanding who customers are and what they truly value. How do we define value when it varies across stakeholder groups? What happens when one group doesn’t completely understand the product vision?
This is why I disagree that Roon should invite the forum to participate in sprint reviews. I doubt that this would work …actually I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t work. For instance, when Roon makes it abundantly clear that no means no, not no for now the topic won’t go away. So maybe Roon does engage with their customers in other ways. That said, they do listen to the forum and we do influence outcomes.
Finally, I would say that rigidly following any methodology is flawed. It is the map not the territory and adjustment on the ground is usually needed.
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It does indeed. Thanks for that 
Nope. Absolutely do not want. Roon isn’t Spotify, it’s infrastructure. I don’t want what is in effect my cd player updating every month, I want to listen to music uninterrupted.
Plus I have seen first hand what these short iterations have done to software quality at Google, Apple and Microsoft. It might mean new features for those who think everything should be free and who need it yesterday, but it’s largely a mess.
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I love your passion. I’ve seen that too, mostly because they’re not doing it right - don’t have the right support in leadership or haven’t figured out the mindset. Nevertheless, it isn’t for everyone. Meanwhile those whom embrace it and are doing it right ARE typically beating out their competitors. Customers do love it and those of us coming from more traditional places struggle to understand it which results in this exact conversation over and over. It’s only when you start actually doing it and learning that it gets figured out. There are just so many incorrect ideas about what you do, what it is or isn’t out there that really the only way is to do it. Pretty pointless debating it in here also.
I wouldn’t want it even if it was done right. I can go a whole year without clicking the Update Now button😉
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Said like a true luddite.
Not at all, I’m a software dev myself; just hands off Roon with your needy updates 
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Me too. I didn’t update my iPad OS version for over 2.5 years. It worked, so why change? I don’t want to be on a constant learning curve of new features. It wears me out and causes needless stress.
I think some people just have a mindset where they’re obsessed with newness and change almost for its own sake and it’s all they care about. It’s as if updates and learning about them is a hobby in itself
Try working in a public sector, secret or regulated industry and see how much customers “love it”.
One customer if mine we reckoned was on an 11 year cycle for an OS change never mind apps.
And yes I have experience of proper agile.
Like all of IT there are no silver bullets just techniques that can be appropriate or not.
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That’s fine. While your comment may enlighten, I realize I have not used TAG to an obvious useful method for locating certain artists with specific metadata/genre/etc that other searches, i.e., French Female Vocalists resulted in none of the albums I have in my library which surprised me. Hence, my realization that I have ignored a highly useful method for finding those artists quickly and easily.
Best, Richard
Pretty sure I know better but I’m going to offer a slightly different perspective to the OP’s. I think the title / question might be better framed as “What can Vālence offer to non-streaming users?”.
I’m assuming that most non-streaming users would be interested in features like “new releases for you” and “suggested for you” provided by Vālence. Those features are made possible by the “big data” Roon collects and maintains. While some of it comes from user activity ( “Vālence learns from the musical tastes of over 100,000 expert listeners who use Roon.” ) I’m assuming that Roon pays to use a lot of data or piggybacks on individual users subscriptions for access. I’m also assuming that Roon is limited in its ability to provide all the data it has access to by its vendor agreements.
My assumption is that while Roon may have a lot of data that would be interesting / useful to a non-streaming user it can’t legally share that information with them like it can with a streaming user. I guess it might be possible for Roon to pay to provide access to the data but that does not seem like a smart business decision.
I’ve also seen the posts that point out that signing up for trials and then cancelling leaves one with a working login that can’t stream content but can be used with Roon to get access to Vālence’s features. I don’t know if the streaming services don’t care about this assuming it might lead to subscriptions being renewed of if it’s just an edge case they have not yet identified and shut down. Either way, it appears to offer some non-streaming users a way to benefit more from Vālence at the moment.
Bottom line for me, data ( information ) is king and makes many interesting / useful things possible but in today’s world data is not necessarily free. When companies like Roon pay to use data they have to honor the terms of use.
So for me the answer to the question “What can Vālence offer to non-streaming users?” is that it may provide better data for the content in a non-streaming library but it can’t provide a non-streaming user access to data they are not legally entitled to.
This inevitably leads to the question “Should Vālence have been developed if its benefit to non-streaming users is limited?” and I believe the answer to that question is “Yes”. Streaming would appear to be here to stay and the integration of streaming services into Roon appears to be very popular with Roon’s users.
Tim
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I’ve been part of a big transformation in public sector - you’re right that it’s a challenging space. Bigger orgs have more technical debt and embedded archaic processes - honestly half the time it’s better to just start something new on the side than deal with all of that. And yes - you see some failures, but those are temporary - people just gotta realise it takes time - and there’s a whole discussion on why. But anyway, the intent of this comment was about Roonlabs, which is certainly not a large org and certainly not comparable to public sector!
Przy okazji. Pozyskiwanie danych bez wiedzy i zgody klientów jest przestępstwem. (doświadczenie 30 + lat pracy ) Czy Roon wie że każdy może go prawnie pozwać ?