How much longer will Roon offer a lifetime subscription?

Well you could have easily bought a Nuc and the other stuff you need for running Roon, put it together in about 10 minutes, installed Rock (free) and had a great system including a Lifetime licence for about 850 Euros. Not as pretty as the Nucleus, for sure - but really and truly the same.

When I started off with Roon on trial I decided to buy a NUC and with that came the decision to go lifetime, because changing over from Squeezebox Media Server to Roon would mean a lot of work and grooming to get it right (classical music user) and that would only make sense if I stayed with Roon forever. So I dug deep into my empty pockets :wink: and put out the cash. Obviously I am hoping that lifetime, will mean my lifetime - so may Roon live long and prosper.

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Yes, a self-assembled NUC would have been cheaper, but I didnā€™t want to spend the time/effort assembling it and installing ROCK. Thatā€™s where the Nucleus shines IMO - a pure ā€˜plug ā€˜n playā€™, and elegant solution. Just a shame itā€™s so expensive. PLUS I think every Nucleus purchase should come with a lifetime subscription included!

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No if I already have a lifetime subscription I donā€™t want to pay for it again if I buy a Nucleus

Good point!
OK, maybe a discount on a Lifetime Susbription if/when you buy a Nucleus?

You get home automation integration, which you donā€™t get with Rock or other DIY servers. That, the fancy case and a plug and play solution is what youā€™re paying for when buying a Nucleus.

Anyone here suspect it may actually come down in price with competition on the the horizon? (PS Audio, Innuos)

Hi marc

I know about the PS Audio solution well but can you point me to what Innuos are planning? Iā€™ve missed that discussion.

Ps audio was a roon user way back. Iā€™m in my 3rd year of lifetime and see no reason to jump ship. Very happy so far with the developments and performance.

Perhaps as time goes buy with other products in the pipeline others might not realize such a benefit for lifetime.

Exactly.

Tomorrow Roon gets bought by ACME.
ACME announces all existing Roon plans expire at the end of the calendar year (legally, no explanation is needed).
Roon is dead.
ACME Music is birthed.
Jan 01, 2020 ACME Music releases their new monthly subscriptions.

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Not quite. Youā€™ll still be able to use it as is, just without automated metadata. Ron Jeremy, quite a name to carry :blush:

Could be the Ron Jeremy.

Guys we are talking about some software hereā€¦not a multi thousand dollar investment in the stock market. Iā€™ve lost much more than the cost of roon (Iā€™m a lifer) on now failed AV hardware companies and been left with equipment that is no longer supported or useful / repairable.

Take Oppo as an exampleā€¦

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I donā€™t think itā€™s about the lost subscription/lifetime fees. IMHO, the concern about Roon disappearing at some point is that Roon is a dead-end silo of curating effort. Going back to any other app, even a newly developed one with capabilities similar to Roon, would be a painful effort.

Being able to use Roon if the organization disappeared, unmaintained and unmanaged and without metadata, sounds very unappealing. I would bet 90% of its users would abandon it within 6 months of that happening.

Then there is the question of redoing all the tagging, metadata, artist name corrections, etc., that have to be done to make Roon work with large collections. With most software ā€“ Foobar, JRiver ā€“ the reliance is primarily on embedded metadata and folder structure/naming conventions, and customized views and sorting is primarily based on adding custom embedded metadata and organizing those structures. That metadata can then be used across other applications to create similar views and sorting. Sure, they all take configuration work to make the app view custom metadata, but it can be done.

Roonā€™s is almost all proprietary. Roon wonā€™t do anything with custom file-embedded metadata and that forces its users to use Roon Tags, and other Roon-only-based methods of curating and organizing, including re-correcting data that is already represented in custom data that Roon wonā€™t recognize. In fact Roon at times forces users to UN-DO their prior methods of organizing in order to work within Roon. This is not to say that the experience within Roon is not fabulous. But the concern is what happens if that fabulousness ends. Iā€™m more worried about Roon being bought by a major player and Roonā€™s mission being redirected than I am that they will fail outright.

Iā€™ve posted that I think Roon is a lovely Venus Flytrap. There are 2+ year old posts requesting Roon to read custom metatags and add Roon Tags from those instructions and other requests relating to the inter-operability of Roon with other software (not referring to endpoint compatibility - referring to file tagging and organizing conventions). Most of the other apps play nicely with each other and it would be great for Roon to do so.

I do understand Roon has limited development resources. The desired interoperability would come at the cost of some other fabulous Roon feature, at least in terms of when it is released. But hopefully at some point, Roon will at least be able to export what has been done within Roon in a way that allows us to re-embed that work in the files, in a usable fashion.

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Never seen Roon force me to undo metadata tagging, and by the same token for the reasons you mentioned thereā€™s no way Iā€™ll stop tagging music I ingest into Roon. Makes a post Roon scenario less painful and at the same time Roviā€™s metadata is not all itā€™s cracked up to be, in fact itā€™s rapidly deteriorating.

I would agree with this, but only to the extent that one uses Roon for their curating and editing work.

Early on, Roon proved simply torturous for me to achieve rather modest goals of a library that was correct, neat, accessible, and linked to as much metadata as was available.

It was the last objective which proved to be unattainable from within Roon. Composition metadata was the 800-pound monster.

It was then that I shifted gears, got a great third-party tagger, and started the task of cleaning and preening my library.

Now, I dare say that with the set of tag edits Iā€™ve made, I can port my library anywhere with minimal pain. All of my WORK and PART tags can be bulk copied to equivalent schemes of other systems.

But had I stuck with Roonā€™s editing scheme to achieve the same goals, I too would have been ā€œafeared for the future.ā€

Judging by PSAā€™s previous attempts I wouldnā€™t lose any sleep over their efforts, nor those of Innuos or any player trying to force you into a closed ecosystem.

As others have observed, the best way to keep Roon alive is to support it. Iā€™ve gone lifetime as I punted they will last long enough for me to come out square. Itā€™s a great product, and the financial loss would not be my main issue if for some reason they did not survive.

As to Johnā€™s first suggestion, if Roon decides to do away with the lifetime option, I guess they could do worse than give existing (or all) users a fair notice period (say 6 months) to change over.

Right now, Roonā€™s lifetime offer represents a capital cost to them of approximately 31%. Thatā€™s the kind of cost associated with second stage start-ups and is not unusual for a company on the steep end of a growth curve.

But make no mistake about it, Roon does this because it benefits Roon, not as a ā€œthank-youā€ to loyal customers. It will stop offering this deal when it becomes too expensive for them.

My guess is that time is coming soon.

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I would imagine that, as a relatively new SME, Roon could do with all the revenue they can get hold of, and ā€˜yesterdayā€™, for R&D, operations and general cash-flow. Offering lifetime membership gives them the opportunity to work towards that aim.
Qobuz employ the same ā€˜tacticā€™ with their annual subscription.
But I agree, it would make perfect financial sense to cease offering lifetime membership when some notion of profitability kicks-in.

My view on this differs from mosts I guess. I will happily pay subscription fees 10 years in a row for a service I use and want to support. No regrets or misplaced feelings of losing money.

This is what I like about the subscription model when it comes to services. Makes me more open to exploring other options and motivates the product to constantly evolve.

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