As its 1.00 software I thought I’d make a suggestion. It is great to have a section for downloaded offline albums. However, when you want to remove them the first option in the menu is Remove from Library. Further down is remove downloads. This really should be at the top as Remove from Library removes from Core and most likely unwanted. I think it is confusing and should be after remove from downloads so it’s not jumped at and mistakes are made.
Thanks for making Roon much better and for making it significantly more compelling as a product. I think you’ll grow your company much more with this feature.
I love Roon. The sound quality is outstanding. But I do think there is a lot of room to improve with their ARC app. I use the Android app and I am really missing a “Download All” feature. I’m about halfway through attempting to download ~800 albums one by one. I get crashes, app freezes a few times a day while waiting for ARC to download them.
ARC isn’t a particularly good music player as it does not send a broadcast signal to notify the OS that it is starting playback. This prevents Wavelet from being able to recognize that anything is playing to apply my EQ settings. Bluetooth playback in my car always shows that the track number is 1 no matter which track is playing. I’m hopeful that these issues will be resolved, but I don’t think a lot of attention is given to Android as most people use an iPhone. But it is still better than YouTube Music. That app is the worst for local playback. I’m just happy I don’t have to use multiple apps for listening to music at home and in the car.
Downloading 800 albums one by one. Wow, you have more patience than me!
I want to do exactly the same as you (although in my case to an iPhone) but for now I’m reluctantly going back to keeping a shadow copy of my Roon Core library files in an iTunes library and using iTunes to sync it all to my iPhone and using the Apple Music app for playing offline. I had really hoped that Roon ARC downloading would have given me a solution that didn’t involve iTunes but sadly it isn’t there yet.
By the way, I posted a feature request that would solve your issue by allowing you to do a select-all on the album view in Roon ANC and then use a drop down menu at the top to perform an action on all selected items, in our case that would be download to download every album selected all with one click but play, queue or any other action applicable to an album could be other options in the drop down menu. If you agree that such a multi-select including a select-all capability would be a useful feature to add to Roon ARC then please vote for my feature request here - Allow multi-select and select-all for albums, artists etc in Roon ARC library screens
I’m somewhat in awe of you even trying , I’m just lazy I guess. Thanks for voting for the feature request.
Actually though, if Roon resolved my issue 1 by providing the ability to transcode/compress files downloaded to ARC I would probably jump back onboard at that point even if album downloading still had to be initiated one album at a time. My library is reasonably static so I suppose I could pick away at the downloading with my phone beside me on my desk as I work on the computer pausing briefly every few minutes to initiate the next download.
That would actually be quite nostalgic since it’s not dissimilar to how I approached ripping and tagging my entire CD collection probably about 20 years ago now. Rips were a lot slower than downloads of course, it must have taken me the best part of a month to do my whole collection and afterwards I never ever wanted to load another CD into a reader again!
Same here. Once I digitized my library, I stored all of my CDs in storage bins and haven’t touched them.
That is what I am doing. I just go select like 20 or so to download and then come back and check on the progress a little while later. Sometimes the app freezes or crashes so I have to check it frequently. I queued up like 50 or so last night hoping that they would all download while I was sleeping, but something went wrong with the app and nothing downloaded. Oh well. I’ll get there. But I ran into another issue. It seems like even though I have the setting on to only download over WiFi, it seems to continue to download over cellular when I leave the house. My wife is going to kill me when she finds out I used $60 worth of data in 2 days.
I actually had good luck with ARC stability. As a workaround I created a playlist of every local track on my Roon Core (I picked 320kbs AAC versions not the lossless originals) and downloaded that entire playlist to ARC. It took 2.5 hours but to Roon’s credit it didn’t crash once.
I had hoped this would be a workaround and that Roon’s database would work in something of a relational manner using global track IDs so that the album view would be able to identify that the album tracks were resident on ARC despite them having come over via a big playlist not as part of the album but unfortunately, and in fairness unsurprisingly, that didn’t happen and all I got was one huge unmanageable list of tracks in my “everything” playlist with no ability to browse by artist or album. Oh well, it was worth a try and at least it did give me a chance to really hammer the download protocol with a huge request.
Roon are so close with most of the code required already existing in other parts of the system, e.g. it can transcode when streaming to Roon ARC, so I suspect I might not be sitting on the sidelines here for too long.
I agree with the comments of Profile - Neil_Lavitt - Roon Labs Community in the 1st post above. I wanted to delete a download this morning and accidentally went to Remove from Library and was asked if I was sure if I wanted to delete the album from my hard drive. It was only then that I realized that I might have gone with the wrong option and so I backed out of it.
Another variation of this feature request would be to provide an option to prevent users on ARC from doing anything destructive such as deleting music.
P.S. I find ARC is very good. Thanks to all at Roon for providing this cool capability.
Yep. I did exactly the same thing yesterday. Only one screen press away from accidentally deleting an album from my library. Definitely something that could be improved.
, I’m just lazy I guess. Thanks for voting for the feature request.