Is a move from Sooloos to Roon worthwhile?

Roon Software Discussion
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IMHO yes, but it is not without caveats.

Large classical collections unfortunately require a lot of grooming and after 6 years I had the Sooloos library in reasonable shape. But what was missing was often information on the album which I was in the process of inserting into the “Review” page in Sooloos. But this was a massive and time consuming job which Roon appeared to automatically do.

Well, not quite as I’ve discovered, because a high proportion of the albums in this collection are unidentified by Roon so those links do not exist. Hopefully more will evolve down the track.

So I’ve bitten the bullet and am slowly going through the 15,000 odd albums and inserting tags to suit my needs and collating similar albums, a task which had been completed in Sooloos. This is a laborious and tedious task but has the upside in forcing me to re-examine what is in the collection and it is disclosing duplications I had not realised were still there.

Overall the biggest plus for me is the hardware simplicity offered by Roon at a much more reasonable price than that offered by Meridian. The C10/MS600/two NAS twindrive setups in Sooloos (which were not always 100% reliable) has been replaced by a simple HDD in this PC and an Aries output with certainly no loss in AQ. Backups are also a lot simpler. MQA, DSD etc advantages with Roon are unimportant to me but I can see how they are attractive to many.

But the negative of Roon is a more complex editing procedure, one which is not always intuitive but one which does become less of a chore through familiarity. And the faulty metadata problem for classical fare is no better with Roon than it was with Sooloos.

I see that lyrics are available for some songs with Roon and that is a big plus. Will this extend to offering opera librettos? That would be great for me as, after ripping in all my CDs, I sold them so no longer have them to refer to.

Bottom line it is a swings and roundabouts situation for classical music. Hopefully Roon will ultimately be better for me than Sooloos. In some ways it already is but there is still some way to go yet.

John

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For me, roon is a huge improvement over Sooloos. Aside from all the great architectural, usage and feature improvements, perhaps the biggest improvement is the incredibly rapid rate of positive change we are seeing with roon. Every few months there are significant improvements.

There’s a saying, “If you don’t like the weather in Kentucky, wait five minutes.”

I see roon as similar. It’s evolution has been so fast, I can’t wait to see what they’ll come up with next!

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Yes, the attention to consumers is far more impressive than Meridian offered with their insulation from the plebs by insisting everything had to go through the dealer. That said I have a begrudging sympathy for their attitude in that it left the dealer to fix simple problems and only worry them with bigger ones. But that fell down with their seeming disinterest in fixing those bigger problems.

Her is hoping the Roon team are able to cope!!

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