LOL I’m with you here, but come on - I’ve had TONS of problems with Tidal too. For example, yesterday using Tidal’s desktop app, I wanted to listen to “Skyfall” by the Prague Symphony and Adele. I searched it, it was there, but when I clicked play, these pink boxes saying there was an issue with the server kept popping up over and over and over and I had to shut down the program. Other tracks did not have this issue. Other times Tidal is slow, or playback stops in the middle of a song, etc.
Point being, all services that rely on Internet infrastructure are going to have down time. In fact, in mission critical applications like SCADA for electrical or gas utilities, they purchase their own network which has guarantees for up time (its usually referred to as 9s (nines) as in 99.999999% reliable, with stated maximum statistical downtime expectations, etc.) or they lease a (virtual now - used to be T1, T3, etc. which in some cases was dedicated) circuit with the same types of guarantees from an ISP or telecom provider. Also of course server and routing hardware will have issues too so downtime is inevitable, including downtime for which no explanation is really necessary to customers presuming it was a one-time thing or based on routine maintenance.
But I agree with you that Roon could be more transparent. That’s why I asked what the actual issue was, since this was by NO MEANS the first time I’ve experienced the slowness, the inability to access individual albums (while Tidal worked fine), etc. I mean, If I’m going to take the plunge this May (I bought a one-year subscription) and pay $500 (or $400 if they’re giving me credit for the first year), then I want to know that the service is 1) reliable and 2) that they’re up front about the limitations and issues that they experience and anticipate.
At the end of the day, this IS just a music streaming/library application, not a connection from a megawatt nuclear reactor to the central substation of an electric grid. So it’s not life or death. BUT it is very annoying when the same issues happen over and over and no reasonable/decent/transparent explanation is provided.
Finally, you do have to give Roon credit for quickly responding to this kind of thing, and that (I know other users are in other countries, but here it’s important) they employ Americans in the United States (or is it also Britain based on the old Meridian days), rather than outsourcing their development to far away countries for pennies on the dollar (I hope I’m right about this!). I’m not implying by any means that developers or support staff from other countries are not as smart or smarter, I’m just saying that outsourcing has hit my industry (engineering) hard and that I DO look for companies that employ people from MY country if they’re based in the US and paying their corporate taxes. (again, hope I’m right here!). I know lots of foreign developers who are much better than many americans I’ve met, so this isn’t a statement about quality or anything like that - just personal economics and politics. If Roon had been a foreign company to BEGIN with, such as Tidal (Sweden?) I would still have purchased it based on its merits! But a lot of American firms have started here and then moved all their staff out of the country, but kept their rates/costs to customers the same, to save money and pay their shareholders, executives and C-suite people more. Sorry, that ended up being a rather long political rant. Again, no offense to my fellow Roon users who aren’t in the US (I hate our foreign policy, for what it’s worth, and I don’t agree with nearly anything my government does overseas).
Just my three cents 