I don’t come here often, but I have been prompted as I think the software quality of roon had fallen off a cliff in recent months. Loads of issues, crashing, can’t get back to anywhere sensible and tonight losing characters from the screen.
It’s been great for a long time, feels pretty rubbish at the moment.
Am I alone in thinking this?
I for one can’t say whether you are strictly-speaking ‘alone’. I doubt it because - out of the many (tens? hundreds? of) thousands of customers, there are dozens of those who report problems here.
But isn’t that the case with almost any piece of software - especially one as complex and rich as Roon?
And even if you added up every request here on these forums over the last year, the number of substantive, verifiable faults which have not been caused by incomplete or improperly installed or configured hard- and software, bearing in mind that successfully Roon supports an staggeringly wide range of the former, has to be an extremely small percentage of those users… I’d hazard a guess at well under 1%. But that is a guess.
I haven’t experienced any of the issues which you mention. For me Roon (v.2 1388 on macOS 13.6.5) works almost faultlessly - all day every day.
I have the impression of a dedicated, talented team of specialists working hard (with each release) to improve stability and functionality.
Yes, technical support could be improved. But there’s every indication that this is something RoonLabs is aware of, and taking steps to remedy.
But maybe I’m alone in my experience 
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My experience is different to yours, I find it to be encouraging that month by month new features are added that strengthen the quality of the product. But, I guess I’m lucky in that the direction of travel coincides with my needs and wants.
As a data point, I’m currently experiencing zero issues in my daily use of the software. This is probably a combination of (by pure luck) not using whatever features are causing issues at this time, and having a stable, dedicated environment.
I’m not saying there aren’t bugs. All software has bugs, and they become ever tougher to deal with as software works within more complex environments.
That said, for me, zero crashes, zero network issues, zero functionality bugs.
Don’t forget that people who don’t have an issue don’t post about this on the forum.
I have never experienced any of the things you mention, and Roon works essentially flawlessly in my setup.
For specific issue(s), you should create a new thread in the support section and include all the requested details of your setup and the issues you are experiencing. Then people have an opportunity to assist.
I‘m using Roon over 7 years. In general it is working well for me. I cannot say it is less stable.
On the other side, Roon attracts more and more people. Many of them have no IT skills at all.
It you look at the support requests, many are in this category.
ARC is another problem zone. You only see the ones not working. Again here Roon is extremely dependent on working Internet connections, firewall configurations and port forwarding, which is totally out of their control.
So I would say, in general Roon is working very well. So software quality is not really getting worse.
The look of Roon has changed a little but mostly cosmetic look and feel stuff to facilitate the introduction of a new feature eg,. the recent Playlist upgrade
But in terms of “quality” I think not BTW how do you define the quality of a piece of software ?
As a regular reader / contributor to this forum I browse the issues people are seeing . ARC has had it’s moments but since I don’t use it I can’t comment.
The major cause of unrest seem to fall into a few categories , these have all been argued ad nauseum on the forum in the past.
1). Inadequate / inappropriate Hardware
“Oh I will just use this old laptop I don’t use anymore for Roon”
Under specified processors
low RAM etc .
I will be shot down for this but low spec NAS as a server seems common.
2). Inadequate networks and wrongly configured networks ,
eg using WiFi to connect Server>Router , in general WiFi will work but not anything like as well as a good ethernet cable.
Roon are quite clear as to what the requirements are to run the software.
There is to me only one unsolved bug which is how the iOS remote app keeps going to sleep and becoming unresponsive (I suspect at iOS behest) this does seem to be a real issue. The rest are probably isolated to individual users and individual user configurations.
If you believe you have a bug then report it in the normal manner giving as much detail as possible. There are many 'super users" who will chip in to help probably quicker than the formal support mechanism. “It doesn’t work” really is of no help diagnostically.
For reference I run Roon - ROCK on a 10i7 NUC , 32 gb RAM and a 4Tb internal SSD (previously on a desktop i7-7700 16gB RAM). I have used Roon for 7 years and to memory have never had a serious technical issue. The feature set another issue that will vary by user but the only bug that “bugs me” is the iOS one I mentioned.
Please fill in a formal support request and let’s see if we can help.
Just my 2p
No I don’t have any issues, I use Android apps and my server is on a Debian Linux NUC.
I use DSP for PEQ on numerous endpoints, all is good here, even ARC in its most recent revision works well with USB DACs.
I stream with Qobuz and Tidal and have no local files in Roon.
Apart from a Roon remote that’s freezing constantly and Roon Arc where sorting albums doesn’t work, I have no issues. And in both cases I was assured the Roon team is working on it. Together with the survey they held earlier this year, Roon seems quite customer friendly (as it should but is no certainty these days 
)…
No issues here, apart making ARC work which seems impossibile with my current ISP configuration.
I see many issues depend on which hardware you run Roon server on.
I’m very lucky as my server is a QNAP NAS with oversized RAM and it’s working perfectly (requires some reboot periodically but I scheduled authomatic reboot so I don’t have to think about it)
I have a number of tickets in with bugs some confirmed some just been ignored.
I for one will say in my usage yes it’s less stable than it used to be.
iOS Lock Screen control sends audio to 100% when activated. Many users same issue no admittance of issue.
Remotes crash silently when in background or leaving a filter active. Been an issue since November nothing done as yet, confirmed bug
Editing albums on mobile is active when it should not be be, you get half of the ui, been a few months nothing done. Confirmed bug
Sharing album images comments don’t work haven’t for well over a year. Confirmed bug
We had the major Last.fm bug crashing core when using arc. Confirmed and fixed after Xmas took months to admit it was a fault.
Search meltdowns in November bringing things to a grinding halt. Ongoing issues crop up all the time.
Search is still not great and can crash or bring aa system to its knees when searching for certain parameters!!! The The for one. Confirmed issue ongoing investigation.
Exporting from USB drive crashes when it’s a certain amount of files. Confirmed bug.
Large library performance has got much worse, given unidentified albums as causes for some.
The qc of releases has dropped off more than anything else, we have had far too many releases cause mayhem and one was released and pulled causing more issues.
Roon, appears to be a complex bit of software and not everyone gets affected by these issues likely as they usage is different, don’t have that feature active, different hardware combinations . This doesn’t mean there isn’t problems when you don’t get them. I went 5-6 years not a problem since 2.0 it’s been a very mixed bag so yes I would say its got worse and I am not the only one who feels like this.
All of this is 100% true, yet I still love Roon and feel that less issues are coming out with newer releases which is an improvement on 2022 and most of 2023.
They do seem to have problems finding the issues that user’s have handed to them on a plate with a lot of information supplied, or reproducing issues that effect many user’s. I feel this is a bit of a blind spot at the moment, meaning they are allowing issues to fester and annoy users instead of fixing them.
I think they are overly ambitious with a lot of things.
And dealing with so many different hardwares can’t be easy.
As there is just so many issues that one can face with all different drivers and components.
I do think Roon will need to consider adding the option for users to roll back to a previous version that users feel is causing less issues.
Even Microsoft allows you to delete non security updates that causes issues with your driver or hardware.
Playlist is all good and well, but if you can’t log in to streaming services like the recent issue, what’s the point of a better looking playlist.
Thanks so for the replies. For the context my previous experience is that the software has been really robust but of late seems to give more issues that have caused me to question that view. The latest being missing letters in words in the android app which pushed me over the edge!!
Love the software and wouldn’t be without it, but I’d prefer to be able to go back to thinking it was rock solid rather than a bit flaky in parts.
Sorry to hear you have issues with Roon. No issues with Roon on my MacBook as well as with my Roon core. The iPhone app is sometimes a bit slow but otherwise zero issues. When I had issues it was mainly somewhere else: Router, Roon endpoint etc.
If you say that you have issues with characters on the screen, that is indicative that something is up with the graphics of the device. May not have anything to do with Roon per se. You didn’t mention which endpoint was having this issue, but, if it continues, you should post in Support for this issue with screenshots.
Missing letters in words in the apps, remote and ARC is not something I have ever noticed.
Is this within the gui of the app itself or the content, ie an artist biography?
It was in the content, but the letters came and went as the display was scrolled. Very strange. On the android app btw.
You didn’t mention the device. But as I mentioned previously, it is an indication the device is running out of resources. If you reboot the device, does it clear it up. Or, close all running apps including Roon, then restart Roon.
If you use the search function and search on Android Missing letters, here is one thread that might provide answers