Oh, how my heart leapt! “Find your favourite music more easily with the latest version of Roon” said the email! I got myself up to date, could this be answer to my prayers? Could I indeed find my favourite music more easily?! First I tried “Beethoven Piano Concerto 3”. Oh dear, my heart leapt a little less, a tear began to well in my eye, for Roon still offered Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and Mozart’s Piano Concerto and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto 2 as 3 of the first eight results [sic]. But did I let disappointment beat me? No! I went to the composition hoping, hoping, that Roon would actually give me instances of the composition, rather than odd movements. But alas, the 1512 results from Qobuz were still polluted by recordings containing just a single movement. I tried hard not to be disappointed, I tried hard not to be upset, I tried hard not to feel someone was taking the mickey, I tried hard to believe that Roon had a clue, so I went to the new “Recent Activity” page, hoping that would indeed help me find my favourite music more easily. But all it seems to do is tell me what I have played recently, which I could already do by scrolling back through the queue, or what I have added recently which I could already do by sorting albums by Date Added. At this point I was truly disappointed.
Can I ask anyone at Roon exactly what you think you have done to help me find my favourite music more easily?
Very valid question. Improving the „search“ functionality would do much more to find my favourite music than yet another screen with yet another layout that does not observe one‘s settings. Not even to mention the desperate need for filtering SPAM!
There must be a better use of scarce resouces, surely?
But their marketing phrases continue to be quite good. If I read these hymnic phrases I know to put my expections down.
Revisiting search, I actually see quite a few thinks now working notably better than a few weeks back. Simple typos now bring up the most likely candidates rather than zilch. I understand work has been done on this. kudos to @mike and whoever else was involved in this at Roon. Not all perfect, but much better! (NB: Why’s that not listed in the release notes?)
Next up please: Spam filter for all those 1000’s of spam entries in the Qobuz composition listing for “popular” compositions.
I guess it can work for example if I was listening to the ‘radio’ feature and at some point I wanted to go back to check one of the sonsg which I found interesting during the session but did not have time or I was not bothered to check it at the time of listening. In this situation it could be useful actually. Would be even greater if it could pick up songs from internet radio (i.e. Radio Paradise). It happens to me often when I listen to RP and I want to know the artist name or song title. Yes if this would work for internet radio it would make the feature really useful.
At least this new ‘Recent Activity’ feature is above the ‘New Releases for you’ ‘Tidal Top Albums’ ‘Tidal Top Artitst’ etc - all these I hate and I wish I could switch off completely. It really gets on my nerve when I see ‘Recommended Playlists’ - I would pay to get these switched off - none of the stuff is even related to what I listen to normally. The other thing is that sometimes I play songs for my little daughter and the I get children music as recommendations. I do not want this.
What I’m trying to get at is that the claim in the email is that the new release helps you “find your favourite music more easily”. What you played recently doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with your favourite music, and Qobuz new releases are unlikely to be favourites since you likely haven’t heard most of them.
So what is it about this release that lets you “find your favourite music more easily”?
Don’t take it to literally, it’s just marketing talk. It’s just a tiny new feature that has to be sold as game changing. That’s how marketing works, just take it with a pinch of salt.
Moreover, it’s a new feature thrown in to a bunch of bug fixes to divert attention from bug fixes. Like, here’s this great new feature, and oh by the way, we fixed all these nagging bugs from the last release. And also, here’s a new batch of bugs. (Judging from support chatter.)
JRiver puts these types of releases out more frequently like weekly and in some cases daily. And they are more stable releases. Maybe they have a more stable code base or a better development stack or maybe they are just better coders. Who knows. (Their 25 year old UI and refusal to embrace streaming notwithstanding.)
Regardless, I’m sticking with roon until something better comes along. I have to wonder, though, is this it? Is this all it is and all it will ever be? Something weird seems to be going on. We’ll see.
