Lifetime subscriber here. Just to share my experience and frustration with Roon.
When I first started out on Roon, my setup was mainly for local playback, server, endpoints, control are all on the same LAN. That works fairly well and with a slick UI and ease of use, I became a lifetime subscriber. As my library gets bigger (>600K tracks), the user experience starts to degrade. So I got a new server with plenty fast CPU and lots of RAM and it did improved to the point of usable. But it also point out that it was not design for efficient library management as I tried using JRiver accessing the same library size and it never slow down.
However, once my use case change, Roon is really not designed for that. I need to be able to access Roon from different locations. ARC is supposed to address that but it never work reliably for me. It works on my iphone some of the time, crash randomly and does not work on the ipad (keep saying syncing with Roon server for the first time). But I don’t just want to listen on the phone but stream to a local Roon endpoint (on a stereo system) instead. It should work the same way as if the server, the endpoint and the controller reside on the same LAN. But it’s very far away from that. Adding insult to injury, there’s simply no support for ARC as a paid subscriber. I posted on the support forum and there is simply no response.
I never pay attention to Plex, thinking it’s video centric. But once I tried Plexamp, it just worked. I have remote access, run user interface on a controller (iPad) and stream to a local endpoint. And all this from a free piece of software.
That begs the question for Roon, is it really that hard to support such flexibility?
Seeing that Roon can’t even get the basic ARC function to work reliably, let alone adding new features. I have no choice but to give up on Roon.