Is Roon slowly “dying”?

+1 on this one

25 entries from a handful of people Vs real issues, support etc. No surprise there then.

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What do you mean by your post?

I do not think Roon is dying. It is doing exactly what I want it to do and it does it without any major issues. This is what I paid my money for and it delivers.
I had so many issues with my Devialet and drop outs when listening to music. Then I got Roon and IT JUST WORKS :wink:

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I guess it has a lot to do with what sort of music one listens to and how - Local vs streaming.

Popular music listeners using a streaming service seem the happiest, closely followed by people with mainly pop (for loss of a better word) with local music.
There you get the entire spiel - Metadata is mostly ok, no box set horror, most artists have bios and good artist pics etc. Perfect!
Then there are the others - those strange classical music listeners… :wink: Here the streaming service people seem relatively happy, but the worst off are the classical local library users - endless metadata problems, seldom you get an artists bio, horrible pictures of limbs of the artists (badly cropped)in a complete pixel soup and the ultimate horror - big box sets.
Don’t get me wrong, I do love and support Roon, but it is a bit of a love hate - when Search works badly or I have to spend endless hours to get tags for boxes right.
So yes, Roon moreless works - but not as well as promissed and hoped for - especially when you are in group 4. Hence there are always the extremely happy customers and the ones with mixed feelings. Different usage scenarios.
Yes I am hoping that a lot is gonna happen to solve the classical album issues and the search. Making it into this wonderful experience that Roon states on it’s marketing site - this new kind of album feeling with all the info interlinked - I really would love to have that.

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In my experience, the roon team rarely respond to this sort of thread and seem to do so only to those threads that have a single, well articulated feature idea or complaint. Having many, many people chipping in also helps.
Small threads with a general, “we feel unloved”, “where are roon” with low numbers of contributors rehashing the points that the roon team are well aware of and have responded to in the past; don’t tend get responses.
I really don’t see how a gap in releases makes for a dying product. The roon team have posted that they have 100k users now, that the buying trend is for mainstream turnkey solutions moving away from the geek hobbyist crowd, monthly partner updates adding new equipment are announced all the time and when a large number of hifi reviews use roon as a default tool.

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I suspect you are right and from a purist point of view this is a good approach.

However there is a lot of quality legacy kit out there running UPNP that if enabled could help to increase their market share.

Even if they adopt a form of bridge as an extension with published limitations. I use the LMS-to-UPNP solution to great effect on my Naim NDS but others won’t feel so motivated due to the complexity so they end up losing a potential customer.

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I suspect that Roon Labs don’t consider it a worthwhile investment in their business plan. I suspect they prefer the rate of growth and the market share that they have achieved thus far with the focus on RAAT to be satisfactory and sustainable for their future plans.

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Because people still wouldn’t be happy … then it’d be “are we there yet?”

Anyway, who reads the release notes?

We’re hard at work on our next release, but we have now shipped fixes for Android 10 and for the newest iPhone models …

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I think more people should enjoy Roon just as it is (complete with its imperfections), and less people should stop thinking about what will ‘come tomorrow’.
Just chill, enjoy the music and leave Roon to get on with what they need to do, in their own time.

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Roon is very different from its initial release, the product has improved tremendously over the years. Although, I still morn the loss of some of the original features that got me to fall for the product. But, that is life.

If you have been around for awhile, you begin to notice some release trends. Here are the release dates for the major Point versions.

Major Point Releases

Roon 1.0…May 2015
Roon 1.1…August 2015
Roon 1.2…April 2016
Roon 1.3…February 2017
Roon 1.4…December 2017
Roon 1.5…May 2018
Roon 1.6…January 2019
Roon 1.7 (?)

Looking at the list it shows that 10 month or so breaks between major point releases are not uncommon for Roon’s history. As Roon has added more features, I would imagine that major point releases will begin to slow down for a couple of reasons, including the added testing complexity.

Finally, I do want to say that, Roon can improve even when there is not a User update. One of the major changes that arrived in 1.6 were back-end changes that included meta-data processing, Roon Radio updates and search. Roon has said that they would continue to refine, tweak, and improve those functions. However, those improvements would be to the servers, so you would not see any releases or notes on the continued backed work and improvements. You hopefully would notice it in the results, though.

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Are you reading my mind?

You may get horrible shock😈

The problem with classical music is the quality of metadata that Roon uses as its metadata source. It can be awful for classical music, multi-part operas etc.
To a great extent (if not completely?) this is out of Roon’s control.
But I do agree that classical metadata is severely lacking in a lot of cases.

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Whats up with all these stupid posts - jesus, use it 4 what its meant for and be happy - play your music and enjoy! I don`t even spend a thought to these things as I am very happy with what Roon does for me as is - allows me to listen to music in the best digital way possible!

I would not care if there was never a new update - as it works perfectly fine at the moment.

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This is a rather ignorant and self-centred approach. Maybe it works perfectly for you, but there are also other people on this planet. I took time to write about different use cases, maybe yOu should read some of the stupid posts

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Indeed. One of those ‘stupid’ posts was possibly from me.

Here are some of my stupid issues:

  • Random playlist interruptions and disconnects.
  • Loss of options to change an audio zone on a remote
  • Random loss of connectivity from core to: Android phones and iPads
  • Random pauses in music
  • Fragmentation of music compilations into single tracks

I have positives too. Roon has allowed me to re-discover my music collection, without having to sync it to every device in my life. It can search through lots of directories, in multiple locations, very quickly and create a visual, touchable list of artists and albums. It does all this without changing or moving the music files. All good.

If any of my ‘stupid’ issues were due to inferior hardware, no-one has yet suggested that. Most of them have occurred on more than one platform. Those, that I have tested, have all been within the published hardware specs. Oh, and Plex has not [yet] had any of these issues.

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I don’t have any of those problems so what happens now?

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It sounds like you have a problem with your network. I would look long and hard at this first, before blaming the Roon software for your problems.

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Well, to be fair Martin, they are somewhat connected. Roon puts heavy demands on the network in ways that just about no other program we have in our homes does. More demanding than Tidal, or 4K TV connections under some conditions. So it you have a shortcoming in your network, Roon will tell you it’s there. And I can see a person would have a less-than-favorable experience. True, it may not be ‘the code’, per se.

@Lee_Hammond, I can see you’ve reported these issues to Roon Support before. It looks like they’ve asked questions about aspects of your setup in an effort to troubleshoot the problems but things have been left open (at least publicly) as of Sept 4. I’d encourage you to give Roon Support a chance to work out these issues so you can have a satisfying experience.

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Well all I know is I am all in. I had initial doubts due to the price.

Frankly the interface, particularly on iphone is atrocious, this hunkering down on a scroll bar thing is just nonsense.

But the back end, the integration with devices, DSP, all that stuff is just terrific. I would not consider other software now, all I ever think of with hardware etc is, will it work with roon.

I am not doing Amazon Music because its not in roon, etc.

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