First, i apologize for using the term “you” in my previous post. It was intended as a generalization.
“If one has the skillz and equipment to rip one’s SACD, surely this person also have the tools and knowledge to make the rips usable in your preferred music playing software.”
For your information, i do rip SACD and prepare them for playback in several playback scenarios. The last one yesterday, as it happens.
And to elaborate why i think it’s a good idea to not delve into file management, which is the case here. The purpose of Roon is to probide the best experience playing back local media and streamed content from select streaming services. Also providing bit perfect playback on various hardware, ranging from a few dollars in cost up to five figure price tags. In adressing “left field” requests, Roon becomes more complex and demanding to maintain.
Please note, iso support is in my opinion “left field”, perhaps not yours, but i play back files in at least five different software/hardware combinations and only one of them support iso-files as far as i know, and that would be JRiver.
It’s all just my opinion, as stated. But i am equally entitled to voice up against a proposal that i feel would take up valuable developer time and resources, not to mention steering Roon off into another direction which is not what i signed up for.
Sure they do. But they don’t have to figure out a way to make the user experience the same in software as sophisticated as Roon. Roon does not want the user experience and feature set to be different based on the format of the music file(s). There are zillion things Roon does based on tracks that would either not work at all or be severely altered.
I am surprised that you are not at least a little bit aware of these issues and sensitive to why Roon would not want to tackle the problem for so few customers.
I am not really insisting in that devilish desire for Iso support. I just wake up when one of the few other lost sacd iso souls write about their uncontrollable desire to steer Roon away into that ISo abyss and suck all blood and time out the developer team.
I will work on my uncontrollable wishes.
I have my entire DVD-A/Sacd collection is ISO format, this was so that I can play them on my Oppo 205 in a gapless manor.
The way I use roon is that I have a rasperry PI (ropiee) connected to the oppo 205 usb input, this is in turn connected to my parasound P5, for stereo this gives me the best results, If I want to listen to multichannel files I use the ISO direct through my Oppo 205 from either usb drive or SMB. In this case the Oppo is connected to my marantz 8802A via HDMI or 7.1 analog input (depending on how I feel that day I cant decide which sounds better)
If Roon handled iso files and was able to send multichannel files to the oppo I would definitely have roon as my one interface (which I would preffer) The way i see it I would have to buy a exa E38 markii with a new halo p7 (7.1 pre pro) to levarage the oppo 205 dac as well as convert my entire collection back to seperate files.
I feel this is a lot of money to spend in order to use roon in my use case, If it wasnt for having to convert all the files I might think about it.
If roon saw my iso files I could atleast add them to the library and perhaps play the stereo only part of the ISO in this way my system would be less fragmented so yes I would vote for iso.
Trial user here, with JRiver, Foobar, MusicBee and BeaTunes experience and lots of SACD ISO’s.
For me a basic requirement for a music player with this kind of price tag is hassle-free playback of a non-niche high quality format like SACD.
Having to switch to another player to play my SACD ISO’s or spend weeks converting ISO-files doesn’t go well with the supposed appeal of roon as a comprehensive all-in solution and end game player.
From what I understand roon has a very well-thought-out architecture which aims to ensure a high-quality and seamless user experience, but paradoxically it achieves exactly the opposite in this case.
Having said that, I do appreciate the fact that it’s not trivial to implement. I just hope the devs can go a bit easy on themselves. There are other features where compromise in integration was deemed acceptable (squeezebox support for example).
But Sqeezbox support does not compromise the core feature set of the program. So much of what Roon does is track-based and it would be impractical to do with ISO tracks.
I know that there are ways to convert (iso2dsd, XRECODE), but SACD ISO support would be great! If Roon would like to be the most comfortable and the best (and not only the most expensive) for digital audio…
I know this has been spoken of before. But please oh Wizards of ROON add this feature.
ROON is an excellent software package. The best I’ve used. I’m a lifetime member and have helped you sell several packages to my friends.
I migrated from another software package that became somewhere obtuse and insisted there can be no difference in the sound of digital files. The owner is very head strong and arrogant. (I bet you know the package I’m describing.) The owner wouldn’t listen to the needs of his users. As a result many audiophiles left never to return.
ROON doesn’t have a competitor yet but it could surely happen. There is always a hungry, talented newcomer waiting in the wings ready to strike at the leader’s complacence.
Roon should be able to play any type of file seamlessly without any hesitation. I understand this might eat up a few programming hours but once it’s finished and integrated into ROON it’s there just like the ability to play AIF or DSD files. (And I’d be surprised that being the experts the ROON guys ate it wouldn’t be too much of a challenge.)
So come on oh mighty Wizards of ROON let’s not let a competitor into the ring and steal the show.
I wish Roon worked on a way for the player be able to read SACD .iso files.
This will save me to rip all my discs to .dsd files (stereo and surround… so many albuns takes more than twice the amount of disc needed to store)
Thinking about giving that a try. I have an OPPO 105 and have read the posts on doing it yourself but haven’t tried it yet. Most of my SACDs are multi-channel.
That would not solve my problem of playback. The only Roon zone I have that does DSD is the 2 channel only OPPO 205 USB connection.
