There is an entire category on “feature requests” on the forum. Just go there and do a search on your favorite topic. Periodically there are attempts to collect the requirements in one place. That happened within 48 hours with 1.8. There is already a thread trying to make sense of a thousand (two thousand posts?).
Do a search on box-sets for example. You will see repeated requests going back 5 years. I rather suspect that this release has been a tipping point for many long-standing roonies, including myself, who will now have to adjust their expectations.
I just noticed the performance of Roon is slower than it was in 1.7, when skipping forward or backwards, it takes roon a 5-10 seconds to actually skip to the next song and doesn’t do so immediately as it did before, I even got the spinning wheel icon a few times.
What are they complaining about anyway? Reading hundred posts, most are about font sizes too small, album pictures too small, purple not good on dark mode. Others are complaining about something they could not find in 1.8, even they are there, right in front of their eyes.
Unfortunately I feel the same way. Maybe it’s my ultrawide screen causing it look worse than it has to, but to me the 2017 version (when I signed up) of Roon was much more pleasant to use. Dislike the font, and text is way too small creating lots of dead space in the UI. Reminds me of a mockup UI created at the beginning of a application project just to give users an idea of how things might look/work, with placeholders all over. Will look into downgrading to 1.7, hoping that is possible.
Agree - this is by far my biggest disappointment. The previous UI was not perfect, but it was good enough and IMHO didn’t need an overhaul. At least not in this direction, and definitely not of the expense of fixing things that are still out right broken or lacking and have been so for years (handling box sets properly, mobile roon, total control over metadata etc).
The good news for me is that it still works. I haven’t discovered any playback issues as of yet. My real first impression is based on the layout and interface alone. ( I haven’t had time to really dive in to functionality) To me, graphically, what we were given is somewhat less than the “museum like” environment that was promised. The big purple recent activity box is jarring and unnecessary. (I know what I just listened to…) I’ve probably been to MoMa 100 times in my lifetime, I don’t think they would ever identify all of the artists in round circles so we could tell the difference between them and their works.
The new look is kind of the opposite of what was advertised. It’s less museum like. More busy. Distracting.
Roon wants to look like a music magazine with a very classy look, a trendy minimalist aesthetic but ultimately confusing and over-seen, and wants to reproduce a sort of editorial line. But this is just a computer illusion based on aggregations of data. To achieve such a challenge in an elegant and relevant way, you need a lot of resources in software ergonomics and design, data analysis, text analysis, music processing, deep learning and globally in all fields of artificial intelligence.
Everything on my laptop is now so large (Thumbnails, fonts etc!) & I really dont care what I’ve been listening to, history, genres etc! So much real estate lost on this build & its not exactly quick!
I use Roon to sort, prepare, tag, build & play my catalogue, this is very clumsy & elongated in 1.8
Some of us came from JRiver or Mediamonkey with decades of curating our collections. We asked Roon to make it possible to transfer all the personal tags to roon and develop that kind of smart playlists we have appreciated so much with these apps. No! Roon refused to do this and adviced us to use focus instead. But focus is nearly useless without our personal tags, without boolean operations and without five star track ratings. So I decided to use JRiver and Roon in parallel: JRiver for collection management and Roon for Tidal, Qobuz integration, discovering new music and playback (though SQ is not as good as with JRiver or Audirvana). I am using the Roon tag editor to emulate five star track ratings. In JRiver it is easy to manually edit the ratings for every album. Now we have 1.8 and this process is not possible any more, because they destroyed the tag editor with the check boxes and the tags are not shown anymore at the tracks. I will not leave Roon because of my lifetime license and the cool user experience, but JRiver remains the main application for my collection. Roon has now been degraded to a pure discovery tool like other web magazines. Click, hear, discover… and purchase the good albums e.g. in the Qobuz online shop. In Roon 1.8 it is now even difficult to see which albums are in your library and which are not. And they even do not show the Allmusic ratings in the album view. Conclusion: ROON IS NOT INTENDED TO SUPPORT COLLECTORS.
I hope your conclusion is wrong (but I’m afraid you could be right). I only have locally stored music in my Roon library. I only use my streaming services to explore/discover new music…
The ALL button that is missing, is the one in Artist Overview or Discography.
You now have Main, Appearances etc - as before, but there used to be an option to show ALL albums alphabetically etc - not separated by the above categories.
The not finding bug used to only be on iOS, less results than on Windows, then an update changed that, now the results are the same - not as good. All my files are tagged, if possible also by Roon. Obviously it is tagged correctly since the albums are found by only searching either the album title or the artist - searching both does not show all results.
I don’t have crashes but I miss the rapid scrolling through the Albums - takes quite a while and partience to get where you want to - I like horizontal scrolling much better.
