This is not intended as a critical message. Its a suggestion for a relatively straightforward way to improve roon support and customer satisfaction.
I understand small company resource constraints: I was VP/Engineering head at 3 technical startups. I’m new to roon, and early on (15 April) I posted to roon tech support on the roon website (not in this forum). I got my first reply on 28 April. Obviously roon is overwhelmed: sometimes success is a problem.
When a user requests technical support from roon, as shown at the end of this message, they are asked to fill out a template. This is a start, but not all users are technical, there can easily be erroneous information, and more information may be needed, increasing followup messages. The template is also pretty barebones. I made a suggestion related to improving this in the ROCK forum
That suggestion was specific to ROCK, and I would like to generalize it here. Clearly if 2 approaches were to be acted on , they should be coordinated. The ROCK suggestion is simpler because of the greatly reduced number of system types, and could be a trailblazer for some capability along the lines suggested below.
The roon application should have a way to collect system information into a file that could be uploaded for technical support. The contents of that file should be defined by tech support and the roon team, based upon their knowledge of the software and the most frequent problems. Many companies do this. its not super hard, and has a terrific payoff. Contents of the file would include hardware/SW platform details from OS utilities (CPU, memory size, OS version, disk layout/type/size/current capacity, network connections etc). It would also include key information from the roon app/database (audio devices, number of albums indexed, I dunno enough to define this part). A more advanced version (or an optional additional file generated on roon TS request during troubleshooting) might include dynamic, runtime information on system load, network and disk activity, information from system logs, etc. There might need to be a short user questionairre to cover infomation not easily obtained from utilities and scripts.
The payoff of this should be clear. roon defines the information they need, and the script ensures its collected in an automated, consistent way. support gets expert in using this consistent set of information in resolving problems. There is consistency from one problem to the next. Users get faster resolution and more consistent responses.
In another forum post, I heard the roon COO @danny say that reducing the burden on TS is a important goal for roon, as it should be. A new user has a 2 week trial to decide whether to spend money and resources on roon. Ensuring responsive resolution of problems will result in more customers and a better experience.
As indicated, I left the current support template below, for comparison to my suggestion above.