Agreed. Could we not have themes or skins so that those of us that liked 1.7 could at least have the way it looked, back and have it appear less like a cheap lifestyle magazine of the sort you find at supermarket checkouts? That white background in 1.8 is God-awful and the black one is funereal. What is wrong with having a colour palette so the USERS can pick a background and text colour? Also font size? Artwork size and position? Why are we endlessly forced by Roon to simply accept what they give us instead of providing a configurable interface from which we can CHOOSE things? Other packages manage that so why is Roon only ever a “take it or leave it” approach?!
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Maybe user customization could be the focus of Roon 1.9 ??
A man can dream…
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Exactly my experience and feelings also.
Making everything configurable in terms of user-interface is going to end in an even bigger mess than we have now.
But:
- Offering one or two additional color themes: Absolutely!
- Providing the option to switch off/hide unwanted clutter like “Popular Artist” or “Top Performer”: Bring it on please!
I am not too keen on the light theme but the dark theme actually looks pretty good on my iPad. If your cover art is all black - then indeed you get funeral. 
But my coverart is actually reasonably colorful so I do get a visually appealing overall presentation.
If just everything below the surface would work… pheww
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There is an active thread over on tinkering where you can change some basic color/font settings. Its not officially supported and its at your own risk. Your edits will have to be redone at each release. But it may take the edge off for you:
“Standard” roon has an unusually low contrast grey text on grey boxes on grey backgrounds specially for Classical. So there is a third color scheme many may have not noticed. Yuk. A simple change to the default higher contrast white background is not ideal but it is at least an immeasurable improvement to readability.
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Yes, anything with ‘Popular’ or ‘Top’ in it (Popular Tracks esp) should be hide-able.
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Yep, populism needs to be erradicated 
There is a simple indicator in terms of what sort of “top-billing” Roon is giving to bug fixing: There isn’t even a dedicated area in the support forums called “Report Bugs” - or similar. This has always puzzled me.
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Perfeitamente de acordo, não gosto nada desta versão…
Carlos Santos
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There is a huge difference: that mess will be all on the user. I’d rather work with my mess than be forced to accept someone else’s.
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Not necessarily. Allowing configurability slows innovation typically (because there are so many more permutations to test against, and especially at UI level you can’t just easily write unit tests that are durable). I’d happily accept some things that might possibly be configurable not being configurable, and being in a state that I don’t personally love, if it keeps velocity high.
None of that is to say that you can’t make some pages modular or configurable. The idea of consistent-shaped widgets that you can turn on or off is a perfectly good example that is well-used. So if people want a highly re-orderable and “turn this on turn this off” home page, I don’t see the point, because I nearly never see my home page, but I can see how that kind of thing is fine. Browse and ADP are somewhat potentially more complex, but not necessarily so - depends on the vision and how many degrees of freedom devs/product want to leave themselves.
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i am thrilled to pieces to see portrait mode on my ipad mini which is permanently mounted on the wall in that orientation!
Keep getting unable to update error on my android…now stuck between 1.7 and 1.8 not able to use Roon…any reco?
This is my personal opinion: if all this massive effort to build the 1.8 overhaul was instead focused on 1) the improvements in Roon Radio which are in 1.8 and 2) making Roon Alexa enabled, while leaving the UI alone, Roon 1.8 would have been a massive success with Roonies bragging to anyone who would listen about Roon.
As I am and some others are bragging to anyone who will listen?
(Sorry, I try to be balanced, but that was too obvious an opening for me to not launch into)
We Roonies are not a homogeneous bunch.
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Not sure I would run to “massive failure” but there are certainly lots of problems. Top of the list for me are:
- The composer list is a total waste of space and computing power. I have over 1000 composers and probably 80% of these lack photos, resulting in an ugly and hard to navigate mess. Oh for a simple alphabetical list.
- Ditto the space and computing power wasted on the additions to the home screen. I may be over 80 years old but I can still remember what music I listened to recently! Of course, it is super-important to know that I last listened to a soprano on Tuesday last - really?
- The new Roon icon is incredibly uninteresting, appearing on the Windows task bar as a white square with some essentially unreadable grey print inside.
- Using Roon remote on a Windows 10 computer, the waveform bar is progressively obscured as the music plays.
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iOS crashes just as frequently in 1.8 as it did in 1.7 for me. There’s a 50-50 chance of it crashing and restarting when switching back to roon from another app. And when it restarts, there’s a 20-80 chance that it will have lost the navigation breadcrumbs.
So many annoying bugs! Crazy. Zero QC going on here. Wish I could go back till they get it straight!
I’d love to be able to complain about some of the issues people on this thread have described, but I can’t. Because 1.8 doesn’t work for me at all. Total brick, and a week in I’m still waiting for anything resembling a solution from tech support.
You have a look to your support post?