Feature Request: Roon Stability and Reliability

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

Sorry if that feels like a snarky title. But really it is straight to the point. And, actually (seriously) this feature request was recommended by Roon support.

I understand that the Roon developers are racing to add functions and capture market share, however I feel like Roon has pretty much lapped its competition relative to true features and design…and its biggest challenge is working consistently and reliably for subscribers. Especially those with larger and/or heavily curated collections.

Yes, I have my pet issues regarding stability: the metadata updates and attempts to identify unidentifiable albums brings my CPU usage to well over 100%, which creates system instability like dropping (wired) endpoints and slowing down page loading.

And after switching from my dedicated Ubuntu server to a dedicated Windows 11 Roon server just to see how it performs with the latest Roon releases on Windows, I was reminded of how Roon slows down until it crawls and pages load at a glacial pace until the Roon server is restarted and then everything is snappy for another day or two - this was a problem I saw 2-3 years ago that had me switching to Ubuntu and I wanted to see if it is still an issue. It is.

The Windows issue doesn’t show outsized resource usage like the Ubuntu server at over 100%, but there is clearly something going on. Please don’t say it’s the network. If it was, why does restarting the server software improve the situation and then it degrades again over time?

Also, please don’t chime in and say “Roon works great for me.” I am glad it does. But you don’t have my library, which isn’t ridiculously large (11K albums, 150K tracks), but which includes about 800 unidentifiable albums - DVD/SACD rips, Vinyl rips, bootlegs, and copies of my old mix tapes. Roon will NEVER identify these, so I want it to stop trying and grinding itself to a halt. Support’s suggestion was to remove these from the library, but of course, if that is the best recommendation, what is this software really for?

Thus, I suggest 2 “features” – (1) allow users to designate unidentifiable albums so that Roon stops trying to identify them and grinding itself to instability, and then, eventually, (2) revamp the Roon software so that the database is efficient enough not to be grinding gears when it does whatever it does.

As an added bonus, it would be great if Roon’s error messages were more informative: “a file is loading slowly,” when it is a local file that can’t possibly be loading slowly, should say “Roon is running slowly and cannot process this file. Restart recommended.”

I don’t expect a lot of “votes.” I can’t even find where my votes are to reclaim one to vote for my own feature. So let’s just load up this thread with responses!

Thanks for your consideration!

2

You got my vote. I feel Roon could definitely use a few rounds of stability and performance releases at this point.

3 Likes
3

Just removed a vote from something else I wanted as I feel this is more important than that.

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4

Added my vote even though I have stopped using it now due to these issues and others that don’t get fixed. Still got 6 months on my sub but it’s turned off and ARC removed.

3 Likes
5

You get my vote for two reasons:

#1 - The specific issues you describe are known to significantly impact some Roon users and your proposals are very reasonable

#2 - I’d like to see the Roon team focus primarily on stability and reliability across a broader set of features and issues than you described. I won’t hijack your proposal by listing them here but I wanted to say that I’m voting for the spirit of your post, not just the specifics

4 Likes
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Click here and you’ll find the list.

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I believe that many “old-time” problems are due to “structural” issues of DB or architecture. So yes, in the tenth year of life, Roon needs an strong update

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11

I think there is also a question of quality control in version releases. I too got hit with disappearing Qobuz and having my queue include every song I ever played. But that’s a different topic.

This slow down and instability…at least some of that has been around a really long time. Odd that a reputable business, which Roon surely is, would be comfortable where best practices include a daily restart.

12

The ability to blacklist release / material that will never be identified by public facing music metadata databases is a great idea.
+1

1 Like
13

lmao.
Obviously the solution is to hire more support people to tell customers that Roon does some very complex things under the hood and thus, it’s going to be slow.

:rofl:

2 Likes