I find it particularly interesting that it always seems to be bashing or sanctification. Sometimes I get the feeling that this has become a little like with Apple. Either you are a complete and utter fanboy, not acknowledging any issues and always blaming the user or people are bashing all over. Now, I am not free of said emotions, I myself have bashed quite a few times when decisions have been made that made me wonder: I cannot think of one single user scenario where a particular change could make any sense possibly. For example, I still think it has been a catastrophic decision on Roon’s side to check for the license online practically every five minutes. Rendering music files useless on my network which I physically own, to me just seems like temporary theft. Even more catastrophic since superior cloud features, which have shown to be so slow that I really don’t like to use thise, were used as an argument for their online only philosophy. I’m living in Germany… despite stuff people stereotypically believe, Internet stability here sometimes makes you feel like you were living in a far less developed country. Software Engineers out there be aware: even in 2024 Internet outages DO HAPPEN. And I would very much love to still be able to listen to music I physically own - even when internet is down.
Maybe it would be good to be a little more nuanced… users normally want a working set up and are not interested in a blame game.
In the past my criticism of Roon has mostly been about strategic decisions they have taken and not about stability and performance of software.
For me personally the software is a lot less stable than it use to be. Not able to display any albums after the app has been in background for seconds which can only be solved by Swiping up and rebooting the Remote App. The remote app losing sync with what is actually replayed at the moment. Also I have noticed that it takes forever for the remote applications to find the server again after a server reboot. In the past this has been a matter of seconds. Records that don’t show up while clearly being stored in the right folder, etc.
It’s a lot of small issues. Issues so small that you are sometimes reluctant to spend time and report it on a forum, yet still annoying because the software has been more stable in the past.
Furthermore I am always astonished when people make comments on how other people might just not be able to set up a proper network, not knowing their circumstances. Personally, I am not a third level supporter but perfectly capable of successfully setting up and maintaining a stable home network, including port forwarding for Roon ARC.
Especially when in most cases the set up was working fine for years. Considering my personal network audio setup absolutely nothing has changed within the last two years or so, yet the stability and performance of the software have steadily declined. I think that is the case for many users and I don’t think it is very productive to primarily assume that people just don’t know what they are doing. Even more so if the set up had been working fine for years before.
And one more remark: Telling people how laggy, faulty and buggy UPnP is, because there’s no real standard, is one of Roon’s major selling points. So I do think that it should be one of the primary goals to provide users with a good solution for standard scenarios without them having to be third level supporters. And that has been the case as far as I’m concerned. But these days I can’t have the Roon Remote App opened in the background for 30 seconds and still expect it to work properly when coming back to it.
We all just want a solution that is working properly, because after all it’s a great piece of software and it’s without a real alternative in the market.
ok please bear with me.
