This has probably been asked of Roon a million times but clearly providing a quality user experience by making a few tweaks continues to go ignored. It’s probably even less of a priority for its giant, like its corporate master Samsung. I am at an absolute loss as to why streaming, music management platforms and digital audio players cannot seem to offer the full package user experience to its subscribers—that is superior sound quality with a superior UI experience. Roon certainly provides me with the first, but its UI is frustratingly poor in speed, memory, and navigation. I have been curating seven new music playlists since 2018, having had a music blog for a decade before that. To achieve a tolerable workflow during the curation phase, I am forced to use Spotify and can only use Roon and/or Tidal once the selections are complete.
Spotify’s super scrolling speed, fast search, and selection capabilities are assisted by its superior drag-and-drop technology, while its ability to memorise state and position when returning from other pages is an absolute godsend. Tidal, in comparison—and to a lesser extent, Roon too—both fail miserably with every aspect of their UI in comparison. ; While introducing Lossless and more recently its phantom “Exclusive Mode”, Spotify continues to fails miserably in the sound quality stakes. Its failure to support ASIO renders those upgrades useless and utterly second-rate when compared with Tidal and, of course, Roon. However, Roon’s inability to match Spotify’s speed and memory capabilities is painfully obvious. The UI capabilities might as well be galaxies apart. I cannot even have them playlisted side by side because Roon will not allow me to navigate away from a playlist page without forcing me to re-find my place upon return. While Tidal is worse, input lags and friction filled navigation continue to be an issue on Roon even when only using streaming.
I can appreciate that Roon’s priorities may not be fully focused on improving its user interface to assist the workflows of playlist curators, but given Roon’s superior sound quality, I would love to use it for my entire process and I would imagine given Roon’s predliction with play options and the queue, many Roon user’s would too..
To make this possible, I am requesting that Roon implements scroll position retention and fixes its drag-and-drop latency when reordering tracks. Currently, if I am halfway down a long playlist, click an artist or album to explore their music, and then click ‘Back’ to return to my playlist, the UI completely resets and jumps to the top of the list. This lack of “view state preservation” completely breaks the workflow for playlist curation. Competitors like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Deezer, Qbuzz and even Tidal all support this feature so users don’t lose their place. Additionally, the noticeable “input lag” when moving songs around lacks the smooth, frictionless reordering found elsewhere. Curation requires both visual persistence and a snappy UI—features that would finally allow Roon to offer the complete, compromise-free package.