Makes sense, who is responsible for user testing at Roon? Ultimately the CTO has to carry the can, but who knows, perhaps the CEO forced the release. Unlike Apple with their completely owned system, poor Roon has to cope with so many different configurations and user-personas. It must be a nightmare for Roon!
This forum shows the extreme variability and volatility of Roons user base which in turn must make it very difficult to attain consensus on features.
But whether a user likes the UI or not, STABILITY is crucial.
BTW forum users who upgraded to 1.8 - you ARE THE TESTERS! Cheers
My first impressions aren’t particularly positive either… but I acknowledge that:
I don’t like change, in general. And this is change.
One of my two biggest wishlist items for a while now has been Portrait mode support on Android Tablets, and I’m not sure if that came with this update or before and I just hadn’t noticed/tried it in a few months, but we have that now… and that’s fantastic for me.
At first glance I don’t like how they’re showing albums and discography. For one thing it seems like when I’m looking at one of my albums, I used to see which tracks from that album have been added to various Playlists. I liked this both in terms of quickly identifying some of my favorite tracks (I actively added them to Playlists), and also the link to that playlist often got used, and that feature seems gone now? I’m not seeing playlist links, and that’s a feature I used to use? But I think the “new presentation” is something I need to just live with for a week or two in order to really make an informed opinion on Pros-vs-Cons. Change is hard… and I always resist it at first.
To the roon developers though, a big Thank You from those of us Android Tablet users.
In 1.7 and still now in 1.8, if you focus by records label you only see albums currently in your library with no extra list form Tidal/Qobuz. Conversely, if you focus by eg. Production > Rudy Van Gelder you see your own albums PLUS over a thousand extra ones to check out on Tidal. Why this inconsistency? The data is there to use as illustrated by this example.
With the above example it’s sort of a workaround because I know Rudy Van Gelder worked on nearly all the Blue Note records for a long time, but if I’ve found a new record label that I like it would be great to be able to search Tidal for others I might like.
It seems such a simple thing to change that would make a big difference to music discovery to me.
You use a tablet. That would have been my guess. I’m glad that the UI has improved for you.
It used to be great for the desktop and less so on mobile. It appears that the opposite is true now. They need to optimize the experience for the different environments. One layout does not fit all.
Sorry this is not fair. It isn’t that bad at all! Actually I like it. The initial crash bug (iOS) was corrected in a day.
Roon: I am happy. It’ s nice, it’s fast, and works as it should.
There are seemingly very few stability issue being reported. There are a small number of people having serious crashes, that is not good.
There were a few big bugs that should have been caught (Settings for international users). There were load issues when everyone was trying out 1.8 for the first time.
The rest are design choices. We may not agree with them all, but they were researched, explored, prototyped, iterated, tested, tweaked. I agree with you that Roon has a diverse set of Use Cases and Persona to try and meet. I am hopeful this release rearchitected the system (front and back) to make incremental releases happen faster (unlike past history).
Haha…I cracked at this. Its probably because most of the Roon community members are perhaps from the older era who are holding on to their hard earned collections instead of adapting to streaming era…Roon 1.8…Ditto!
In any case, I like the 1.8 update just fine. Sure, it doesnt address most of the feature requests made earlier perhaps…but surely leaves roon people to anticipate and get excited for the future. Now, if only I could add albums in Roon without adding all the album tracks in my Tidal favourites (coz no one like ALL the songs in any album) and if one could use Roon out and about…that would be great!
That’s what I had to do. Classical metadata is inconsistent, badly formatted and sometimes just plain wrong. I’ve always used MP3Tag to reconstruct my albums’ metadata so that it is consistently formatted and structured across my entire collection. Being a perfectionist, anything else would drive me up the wall.
You’re confusing anecdote and evidence. The last information that I saw (can’t find the reference - sorry) showed that younger people are far more likely to stream music than older people. There have also been a huge number of studies that show resistance to change increases with age.
This is statistical information and so obviously deals with averages. The fact that you, or any individual, bucks the trend does not invalidate the trend itself.
Agreed. It looks passable on my 24” PC but shocking on my iPad. The album title font is far too big and the album artwork too small. The background used to be the artwork refocused and spread across the entire screen. That broke up the background nicely. Now it’s shouty plain white or absolute black level. The waveform is uselessly small and the track title in the bottom right hand corner doesn’t show everything unless it’s short. Roon now looks like an unfinished prototype. It’s horrible to look at and I would go so far as to say I dislike using it now. It just looks like an amateurishly designed package now. The under the bonnet stuff is great but the front end has been wrecked. Please give me back a UI that looks like 1.7!!!
I like the big title fonts, and use dark theme,I have no trouble with the smaller writing as it’s just about the same as everything else I see online, in fact I love the design and the professional look of the whole UI. I really like the mauve colours… Well done Roon…
