If you look at the posts in the Support forum, it seems like the number has dropped drastically over the past year or so. Most of the posts are network related or equipment related rather than actual bugs in Roon. When I first started with Roon about 2019 I would spend a lot of time on the forum looking for workarounds or advice on dealing with Roon issues. There is very little of that now. The take away is that most people are happy with Roon at it’s current level of performance. Can it be improved? Sure, just take a look at the feature request posts. I don’t think it’s fallen off a cliff. If anything it’s stabilized quite well at this point.
9 Likes
Roon is a great product, but it can be a little complicated for some people. It requires a fairly robust network to work properly. I have had no problems in 4 1/2 years using Roon on Roon Nucleus, Dell XPS 15, and Apple Mac Mini (late 2014) servers and iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPad Mini 6, and iPad 8th Gen Roon clients. Roon ARC is also working perfectly for me now.
EDIT: I’ll add that I have tried Audirvana with subscriptions to 3.5 and Studio, but very much prefer Roon.
EDIT2: If Roon has fallen off a cliff, it has landed in the valley of bliss.
EDIT3: But, Roon is not a radio. Roon requires a little computer knowledge.
7 Likes
Just a quick update from me and thanks for all the different thoughts. Just using it from my Android phone (OnePlus pro 9) and the display apart from the bottom section and the top line is blank. I get loads of things like that which gives me the impression of being flaky. They are not all UI related, often times playback stuff. I have a pretty robust network and setup (Nuc server, multiple R-Pi players, some Linn players, source is local FLACs plus qobuz, been unchanged for quite a while).
+1 on this - a huge number of problems that I see with Roon (and that I have gripes about) stem from networking. Roon is so closely hinged on the idea of multicast that if you have anything hindering multicast or even causing blips here and there, you’ll have a degraded Roon experience, from autodiscovery to playback.
Unfortunately a lot of consumer equipment doesn’t play super smoothly with multicast, because that kind of traffic is usually few and far in between in your normal home network. That said, if you have your network smooth (good hardware/firmware, wired networking or very robust WiFi, no complex scenarios [i.e., diverse subnets, IGMP proxy, VPNs, etc…]), I’ve found Roon to be almost seamless.
Could Roon be improved to work better on subpar networks and hardware? Absolutely - but the same can be said anything; it can always be continuously improved. Multicast is just the mode that Roon chose to go for “seamless” autodiscovery and we kind of just have to live with it.
3 Likes
Or we have given up trying to have the little irritations fixed.
7 Likes
To begin with: correct for me would be that you hear all channels routed to the stereo channels, which both formerly named Software packages can do and Roon does not with Quad files. You hear only the fronts, the Surround channels are just gone. I have also considered your option but at the moment I don’t have the time to do so.
Still I find this a poor performance on the Roon side: first break it and then never fix it.
Whichever is better, RAAT and UPnP are different technologies with different requirements
Maybe consider your Memory Playback Options in JRiver , I would guess you are set to at least track if not album.
Roon’s design for multi zone requires a much lower buffer to manage the sync. A big difference between RAAT and UpNP. There is no setting for Memory Playback in Roon
UPnP passes un-decoded FLAC for the end point to process, RAAT passes pure PCM
Not necessarily many UPnP servers allow you to transcode to wav, aiff, or pcm.
The first explicit ‘mix it yourself’ suggestion I can find is almost exactly 12 months ago, but ok.
But looking back has sent me down the rabbit hole that is The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka - thanks!
We are well off topic though - so I’m out…
Are you my personal Time manager?
I was not. I made a point about Software quality. that’s what the Topic is about
1 Like
Thank you for the post. It is so on point in every way. I personally am continuing to have minor issues with Roon but don’t have the time or stomach to come here to seek help. I just plug on, swear bit and hopefully get back to my music. The biggest thing for me recently is the news that the new owners are going to take customer service seriously. This is a nice forum until you have a problem…then it can get pretty nasty. I like the Apple analogy. Spot on! My belief has always been that a forum is not the place for people who need help. The common answer is…Well its fine for me…or…its your fault/equipment. Thats just not helpful at all. So, yes Roon is still buggy but not sure if it has fallen off a cliff especially in relation to how horrible it was a year or two ago. And a huge thumbs up for allowing us access to our own music when the internet is down!
6 Likes
I think it depends a lot on how you phrase the question. At least ‘it’s fine for me’ is easy to ignore.
1 Like
I don’t think this is correct at all. Many people like @Menzies, @BlackJack or myself, and many others, spend countless hours helping people in very detailed ways. I lost count of how many router manuals I read to explain networking basics to their owners. Just the three of us alone have a combined 1000 posts marked as solutions, and that’s probably just half or less of the real ones.
There may be a need for other ways to support some users, but it’s just not true that the common answer is „fine for me“
11 Likes
I’m not denying that but I’ve also seen so many people post questions or make comments and get roasted or ignored. Its very nice that you do that but your 1000 posts are just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to people seeking help. Anyway I did not make my post to start an argument, quite the opposite. I said it was very cool that the new owners are going address this issue. So all good here!
1 Like
I got this on the 20th no updates from Roon, the only way to resolve it myself was to create a new account.
Needless to say once the trial ends I’ll be sticking with Apple Music, looks like nothing has changed in Roon support world.
1 Like
Try a scheduled Roon Server reboot nightly. How it’s done depends on the OS you’re running. It’s made for many a stable years for my setup on Windows, more stable than ROCK (or MOCK as it wasn’t a Nucleus).
I’ve had some issues lately too, but it’s oddly hard to pinpoint, just not responding crisply or even appropriately. I’ve had to reboot a lot.
You should not need “IT” skills to install music software and use it. If you do it is too hard.
„IT skills“ in this context refers to the ability to open File Explorer and navigate to a host address, and stuff like this.
2 Likes
Excellent point on plugging in an ethernet cable if at all possible. There is no substitute as you are removing a layer of complexity (wireless).