I have chosen Roon purely for pragmatic reasons: it currently represents the best combination of sound quality, convenience and value for money on the market. But when the day arrives that an equivalent product that can also manage classical music properly (rather than as some sort of fringe activity carried out by well-meaning cranks) becomes available; well that is the day that I will change allegiance.
From my perspective, and I’ve waited patiently for over 3 years, Roon still fails to master basic principles of data management. For example, it doesn’t appear to offer simple set selection rules (e.g. an OR option in the filter instead of the default AND), needlessly drops key function (such as edit) just because I change the orientation of my tablet, doesn’t allow me to add my own hyperlinks (e.g. to libretti), doesn’t let me add my own reviews (what do I care about an uncredited review by someone almost always from across the other side of the Pond), and remains frankly clueless in terms of metadata and credits management for classical music.
So, if MusiChi say were to turn professional then you wouldn’t see me for dust. I don’t care a hoot for the ‘discovery’ concept or other fatuous, bloated marketing ruses. I just want an efficient means of managing and accessing (not curating) my digital music. I would even pay a premium for a Roon Classical product, if that was what it took.
But for now I’ll remain what the marketing Larrys call a dissatisfied customer.
If you want those things, make them known to the Roon team. Services like Roon are looking for ways to attract customers by enhancing the UX, and they are competing with other services in the process.
I guess it’s an expression of frustration. For people like me classical music remains the core of the creative industry and was, and should remain, a key driver for audiophilia. Yet it has become increasingly marginalized, typically labelled elitist (what!) or irrelevant (will people still be listening to the Beatles or Madonna 300 years hence I wonder).
I recall similar comments in respect of Sooloos - Roon’s progenitor. Basically, if the best that Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Sibelius, Bartok, Janacek et al can hope for is MusicCHI, essentially a non-commercial hobbyist offer, then culture itself is surely under threat! Calls to mind Fahrenheit 451.
The key to the music survival is its continued production. Issues around effective tagging and curation aren’t really any threat to it going forward. Passion is great but perspective is also important!
MusiCHI seem more interested in punting their server hardware these days.As far I see on their web page it’s close to impossible to even buy it theses days.
I understand it was close to a one man project anyway.
An absolute shame really . I use the Tagger for all my metadata manipulation, the text processing is magic
Interesting. Maybe it will get roon interested in adding some features, like playlist export to thumb drive/mobile. But $5000 for a Pentium PC (Zenith, 2tb)? $1400 for the Mini sounds like a better deal. What does the $3400 extra get you?
No. The Roon team say they pay attention to customer inputs. Any broader look at streaming will tell you that all providers, from streaming services to software-only companies to server manufacturers with embedded apps, are all looking at ways to grow products. Paying attention to customers matters and it helps to differentiate services. So don’t pass up the opportunity to make your desires known, it can hardly hurt.
Classical music still is a key driver for audiophiles. The problem for streaming services and Roon is the need to attract more than audiophiles in order to be sustainable and competitive. Key to attracting the MP3 generation is widening of genre coverage, without which there is no competing with Spotify or Apple.
Classical music is what I care about too, along with great jazz coming out of Scandinavia, the U.K. and Europe. I’ve found Tidal to be good, in fact I rarely rip any of my 3000 CDs because there are newer and better recorded productions of most works. It’s fun perusing different versions of pieces to compare performance and recording quality, something that never was possible before streaming.
My Roon subscription ended a few weeks ago so thought I’d give the Innuos Zen Mini a punt.It’s basically a very expensive LMS server with squeezelite, CD ripper and a music DB.
That said the material skin interface is brilliant, as it’s running LMS the radio paradise stream is rock solid (on my ROCK it would frequently drop) and the music database is fantastic, on that front I actually think it has a better music library than Roon, I have a lot of old MP3 and Flac files that are poorly tagged and Roon wasn’t able to sort them out. I did an import on the Zen and it rearranged them all and sorted the tagging.
Looking forward to 2.0 and I can’t see myself going back to Roon very soon.
Interesting perspective and good to hear what Innuos does well.
If you want streaming support and discovery, their software is not on par. They have inadequate support for Tidal now, with no announced plans for it in 2.0 other than to say it’s in the future. LMS has no MQA license so doesn’t support Tidal masters, and while the Roon experimental mode does, it’s too buggy without being fixable.
So I am looking at Antipodes servers as a way around Innuos’ software.
I have no interest in MQA let alone Tidal, I use Qobuz, Spotify, radio paradise and the BBC sound app but Roon don’t support 2 of those 4 and the RP keeps dropping on Roon.
I liked the interface in 1.7 but the changes in 1.8 just edged me not to renew.
I don’t know how companies get away with making some of these sorts of claims.