I am really curious for whats next for Roon.
There are lots of feature requests in the community however will Roon give a hint of whats next for the next release.
Maybe the dust has yet not settled after release of 1.3
It may be early for specific features to be announced but cant Roon at least mention the areas that are in its attention for 1.4.
They haven’t even finished what was planned for 1.3! Is there anything really major left to do? ROCK and MQA support have me holding my breath in anticipation but after that it should be a matter of fine tuning and reacting to changes in the streaming environment I would have thought.
Well… I am a recent convert to Roon, but can see that the basic premise is excellent, with many (slightly) rough edges which need polishing… And infinite possibilities for great, “out there”, ideas from the community.
The basic concept is superb, but really now the fun begins to evolve this slowly into something even more special.
Wonderful stuff!
For instance is there an official answer for DSD ISO support.
It doesnt have to be a YES but it would be good to know. For me it is the reason to switch to Roon.
Yes?
Or Investigating?
Maybe someday?
Or a definite NO ?
There’s a whole thread on the subject, including a response from Danny indicating that it’s not trivial to implement.
I am really overwhelmed by that new version in a very positive sense.
On DSD ISO I had a strong interest in the past on that feature. I gave up on that a year ago and translated all my ISO’s into .dsf. Bought a new NAS for that purpose and for me problem is solved. Any new SACD now goes automatically as dsf into that NAS. And I have a huge number of SACD’s. I recommend that way to anybody.
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Hopefully better iOS apps. Currently the apps don’t feel like iOS at all.
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Use as an endpoint
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More gesture control
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A widget
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Volume control with the device volume buttons
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Use outside of the home network ( like plex)
I Dont get that as a definite no or should I
DSF is the way to go
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Definitely this. The inability to play music through the iPhone/iPad is baffling when iPeng and JRiver do it well. The lack of this facility is the main reason I will probably not extend my 60 day trail period. Pity really as I love everything else about Roon (perhaps bar the poorly implemented Internet Radio).
Danny’s response in that thread isn’t a definite no, but it suggests that perhaps .iso support isn’t a super-high priority.
That said, I think it’s wise to seriously consider converting one’s .iso’s to .dsf’s. I 
Roon and I hope it’s eternal, but even if Roon did introduce .iso support, it would almost certainly be a proprietary solution. So if you ever wanted to switch to some other playback software, you’d most likely be back in the same boat with your .iso’s, especially with respect to metadata.
Roon tells me I have over 500 DSD albums, and most of those were originally SACD rips and hence .iso’s. I’ve converted all of them to .dsf’s. Can’t say that was always a blast, but there’s now embedded metadata in all those files that’s up to my standards, and I don’t need to worry about playability issues down the road. Kudos to TraX and Yate for making the conversion less of a chore than it might’ve been.
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I use sacd extract on Windows. I wrote 2 batch files: one for stereo extraction, the other (not really needed) for multichannel extraction. On my PC it takes max a minute to extract the stereo content of an iso. And if you like you can translate the dsf files to flac (pcm) with audiogate on windows.
With a Mac and Trax that whole process is only one click, once you do the setup.
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I also did convert most of my SACD s to dsf (stereo only).
The problem is I have more than 900 maybe 1000 I did not count exactly …and most of them are classical titles.
The problem with the classical titles particularly SACD releases, it is a nightmare to identify them all .
During extraction not all SACD s are easily extracted some faster than others ( I dont know why may be an issue related to compression). In addition not all SACD s contain metadata as some are extracted as UNKNOWN albums. Since I used a batch file as @miklats it was a nightmare to find which ones were without metadata. I’ve also had problems with some SACD ISO s while extracting dsf and some albums were not extracted. AND when the whole process finishes you have to find which ones were faulty…A really painful process…OCD nightmare…
After extraction;
Just think of split albums, double identifications and so on … After you try for a couple of days to manually find the correct versions on roons database you still have 10 percent of the albums left as UNIDENTIFIED.
Among so many albums theres also possibility that there are misidentified ones which I come across while listening if I am lucky.
So as multichannel is now available just suppose all the painful process for the MCH layer of the ISOs and I don’t even know what will happen since not all SACD s are hybrid multichannel… To make sure everything is OK the best option will be to do it one by one .
Particularly less important but you also have to double (maybe more) your storage size
After all that a database failure or a crash means I may have to start all over.
So I believe in the convenience of SACD ISO support and is a major issue for me
BTW I know that ISO s cant be written metadata, however my FLAC albums are also not written any metadata by ROON unless I export them. So I am not a technical person forgive me if I m wrong but ROON keeps the metadata of a flac or dsd file in its own database and keeps the original file intact. So I believe that ISO s will be tagged the same way.
P.S: After I identified DSD albums correctly, I tried to export them to an external dirve using ROON so that ROON would embed its own metadata and I wouldn’t have to retag again someday. However in my experience ROON only updates metadata of FLAC files not DSF during export. This as a new feature would also be very appreciated even if ISO support is not on the roadmap. thank you
I’m 99.9% certain that’s the reason. I see the same thing. Pretty much all SACD’s with multi-channel content use DST compression, so you can count on extraction from those being slow (even if you’re just extracting stereo). TraX lets you know when an .iso uses DST compression.
[quote]BTW I know that ISO s cant be written metadata, however my FLAC albums are also not written any metadata by ROON unless I export them.
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It’s true that Roon doesn’t write metadata directly to track files, but it reads embedded metadata from files and will display the embedded metadata if that’s what you specify in Roon’s settings or on an iterative basis. I realize (believe me, I know it only too well) that adding/editing metadata album by album is really labor intensive, but taking the trouble to do this when you add new albums to your local library solves a lot of problems before they arise (e.g., your issue with unidentified albums). And yes, I realize that one has to have more than a touch of OCD to approach “library grooming” this way.
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For the “Unknown” extracts I use mp3tag to resolve that.
Usually that gives good results.
I know its a huge effort. I extracted a real big number.
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Maybe a little OT, but I came across a good article relating to the DSD format and DST compression. It’s by the developer of BitPerfect playback software for MacOS:
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Yes I use m3tag too
However suppose you have put 500 iso sin a folder and using the batch file you extracted them which takes more than a day …
then I come to see that 20 of them are unknown albums so it is painful…
BTW thank you all I know that I can achieve what I want ( extracting tagging …etc) and I have however my point is that ISO convenience would suit better to my taste…
Most SACD s also contain metadata which maybe limited but enough for roon to identify them I think
I did not use trax but I would like to have a look at it. I usually sacdextract.exe with a batch file . Can trax extract a folder full of isos at once
I hope this topic doesnt get diminished among other feature requests. I hope there are enough people that ask for it to be supported in the future releases
Yes, but keep in mind that it’s Mac only. Another nice thing about TraX (the batch thing, not the Mac-only thing) is that you can do some metadata edits while you’re queuing .iso’s for extraction … but my preference is to do only rudimentary edits in TraX and save the bulk of that work for Yate, since the latter is much less cumbersome to use.