I am in the middle of building out a proper stereo in a room of my home and feel pretty lucky. In speccing out the system I discovered Roon and am really intrigued. I fell out of music for many years after streaming became the norm and wound up in podcast land. I’m realizing what I’ve been missing. I’m planning to re-rip my CD collection and am in the middle of my Roon and Qobuz trial. So far I’m really enjoying the overall experience but I haven’t gone deep anywhere yet. I’m contemplating going all in with a Nucleus One and NAS to connect to my AV receiver and extensive SONOS / AirPlay infrastructure elsewhere in the house.
My question is how is Roon doing in 2026? How active is the development team in fixes and new features? How is the quality of the service overall? How stable? How finicky? Thanks so much for your thoughts.
I suspect that you’ll get a wide array of responses ranging from “It’s great!” to “Roon sucks!”
FWIW, I’ve been a Roon user since 2017 and it works well for me. My library is not massive (around 3,500 albums, 72,000 tracks, 2,900 artists, 7,000 composers and 24,000 compositions).
Roon is great for most people, sucks for a few. Use it for a while before you invest in hardware that can’t be repurposed. Roon has always worked perfectly for me.
I’ve been using Roon since May 2021. So almost 5 years now.
Currently my library has become pretty large. Large enough that my little NUC isn’t capable of handling it anymore. So I have moved Roon over to my Linux Mint powered Lenovo laptop which already acted as my file and media server.
Local collection, together with Qobuz and Tidal. I have 3 streamers at home. And I can also use Roon while away on my iPhone and CarPlay (through the Roon ARC app).
Go for it. I’ve had Sonos, in endless variations, since 2007. After the Sonos app misstep (polite interpretation) I trialled Roon and instantly discovered what I’d been missing in terms of local+Qobuz library management. As a headphone listener all the MUSE DSP stuff was an added bonus.
Roon support is always on hand when support posts are created. A search of Support can give you an idea of various issues, bugs that affect some. There are some longstanding bugs still yet to be fixed. Someone else may list these.
New features. Check out Feedback > Feature Suggestions , not all feature requests are implemented and sometimes those with little to zero votes get implemented.
Team Roon are passionate about music and they’re passionate about the product. As for quality of service, well, they only interact via the forum and this has gotten less and less over recent years. Quality of service is user specific I feel.
A decent network, follow their best practices and it’s as stable as any network reliant software service.
Start with a decent spec Nuc as per their recommendation based on library size and DSP needs and put enough RAM in to expand your library. More memory doesn’t mean quicker.
My current music server is a i5-8500T Dell with 32gb or RAM. My library is ~400k tracks, ~170k are local and the rest are Qobuz. 12gb of RAM is used when I use Roon.
I have a UniFi network and the majority of zones are on Ethernet. WiFi devices are stable.
I’d say only finicky if you don’t follow their network best practices. Some have issues with endpoints randomly disappearing, this occurs more after updates but not necessarily due to an update, just one of those things. Sometimes fixed by rebooting everything.
My thoughts of the software. Once drawn in it’s hard to escape. Its UI is hard to beat IMHO. The issues I suffered last year which saw me stop using Roon as my sole playback solution have been fixed, but took a good while.
There is good competition out there, but some are more finicky than Roon IMHO. I tested/tried most other options. Roon is hard to beat when it works well.
The leaders of Team Roon could do with being more involved in the community as some, myself included feel their commitment/interest levels have shifted. However, their time has been spent on developing the nugs integration.
I would also adhere to the K.I.S.S. methodology at the beginning.
Simplify the setup to get used to it, (server wired directly to router, wired endpoints, Roon Ready/Tested if possible etc) then add in gadgets and devices (wireless endpoints, switches, bridges, extenders, etc) after you are used to how Roon functions on your network. This is a good method for troubleshooting issues, also.
It’s a great concept with solid implementation, but there are lots of missed opportunities, all with Roon support that absolutely doesn’t care about customers’ requests, or fixing their own failures…
My first contact was with Roon Essentials back in 2016, and having tried many alternatives in terms of library management and browsing for music in the meantime, I can say that roon is in my understanding by far the best.
If you explore music in some kind of Wikipedia style, going through discographies, reading bios, browsing composition lists per composer, filtering recording lists, checking which musician has been taking part in which recording, roon is so way ahead of anything else that I cannot even describe it. Every time I am left with using Qobuz´ proprietary app, or occasionally Apple Music or Spotify, it feels like being set back in time.
As roon is really handling available music in some kind of multi-dimensional database style, this does not come without a few glitches of metadata inconsistencies and albums sourced from streaming service being unavailable, though. My best practice is combining a decent local library, with an attached streaming service and keeping a limited number of albums added to that one. I personally recommend Qobuz for an optimum of file as well as metadata quality, my experience with Tidal is mixed.
When it comes to multi-room streaming capabilities, roon works almost flawlessly for me, but admittingly there are alternatives and I am not sure I would be willing to pay for these aspects alone.
It may just be me, but my experience has been miserable with Roon. I have spent thousands of dollars on software and hardware and hundreds of hours on network configurations trying to get it to work. But Roon works only half of the time on a good day. I’m not exactly a newbie. I manage the network at an office with 100 employees. Not an expert for sure, but I consider my technological literacy and skills at least above an average internet user. You surely sure take this with a big grain of salt, but do think thrice before you end up in the same hell of frustrations I’m in.
describe what goes wrong , why have you not raised a support ticket to resolve it ?
I know you don’t want to hear it BUT …
10 yrs ago I got a 60 day trial when I bought a DAC , been trouble free since , I use Roon 100% and every day !! I have run Roon on 2 desktops and a NUC in that time with seamless transitions between the various devices
There is nothing wrong with the software so it must be a local config glitch
If you mean that music isn’t playing or working for anyone then they are pretty fast to respond in the forms to let us know what is going on. Recently there was a cloudflare issue affecting a lot of users and they pinned the problem at the top of the forms page so it’s clear.
2.) New Features
We get a slew of new features each year, this year the main one is nugs. Two years ago, I believe, it was Arc and a lot of smaller stuff thrown in.
3.) The quality of service overall
For myself, the quality of service has been excellent. I don’t have a lot of issues with Arc not working and for the most part my server is always online and accessible. Some users seem to have issues with either their ISP or the congestion in their area with Arc so I would test it out in your environments.
For me, I have a hard time listening to music when I don’t have Roon. Having active DSP (Muse) in my car, at the office and at home is the selling point and I can tell when it’s not Roon. I would test Arc first before going all in and if it works in your area with your internet provider and you are happy with it then of course, Go For It!
To the OP . its all been said . Disclaimer I don’t use AR
KISS is the secret, no fancy switches etc
always use ethernet if you can - MANY support cases come down to flaky wi fi
put 16gb if not 32 gb RAM in your server. (I used to RAM is cheap but it longer is)
if in doubt re-boot or at least restart the server software (in summer i restart daily as I unplug at night) and I attribute some of my trouble free run to that.
Roon is not perfect but its the best out there. I have used JRiver for 15 yrs and still do , I have tried all sorts , Audirvana, Minim Server JPlay you name it Roon always wins
Yes there are niggles , mine is box set handling but on balance go for it
That’s odd. The only issues that I’ve had in the past were wifi related. After connecting my Roon server to Ethernet I didn’t suffer from dropouts, track skips or freezes anymore. It has been running great for over 4 years now.
I have a dual router setup at home. My ISP’s router is where the cable Internet enters the home. The only thing it has connected is my own ASUS router. Which handles the rest.
The Roon server and the rest of the equipment in the living room connect through a non managed switch. Without issues.
I’ve been using Roon on a NUC/ROCK server with Qobuz and Tidal on a simple home network, modem, router and 16 port Ethernet switch, since 2019. I had my house wired for Ethernet to avoid any issue with WiFi. The NUC runs 24/7 and the music is always instantly available when I want it.
Roon labs has been actively adding new features that makes a lot of folks happy. Hopefully one day the additions will be something I’m interested in but until then I can play music anywhere on my property any time I want it without fail.
I don’t know how it compares with other like services, never had the need to find out. It just works for me.
You opened one support request back in 2022 and the support team responded. You did not close the loop with them, so the thread was eventually closed.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
18
I would strongly disagree with this. It’s finicky if any number of factors apply to your network or library, whether they are best practices or not. Unless you consider things like “don’t have a collection of bootleg live recordings” and “don’t use too many tags” to be best practices.
This is not to indicate too high a level of bitterness. You get used to what is supposed to but doesn’t really work in Roon, and how to work around its issues, and it is still the best music library solution out there, with warts and all.
