While it’s true that Microsoft over the years has acquired tech from outside, they’ve also built plenty of tech themselves. And the NIH comment really applies to the internal fiefdoms of Microsoft. Things may have eased up under Nadella, but I know from the days of Gates and Ballmer (when the company I worked for had close contacts with Microsoft) that the internal organisations were notorious for their NIH attitudes. This cartoon from the time was an exaggeration, but not by much:
JimH has a very open mind when it comes to streaming services, whether Amazon may change it we wait to see.
Put a request for Tidal on their forum and see the response, even if the post stays there for any time 
JRiver customization of views could however revolutionize Roon. I still maintain both systems mostly to get around the dreaded Classical box set syndrome …
As it has been greatly stated here by forum users: more and more are concerned what is going on, where is Roon heading to.
So top priority should be to keep this solid community engaged and keep the trust.
When communication is lacking and obvious major bugs in vendor implementations like Devialet or Bluesound are still not fixed this understandably adds to annoying those users.
So taking as advice or „ranting around“ I’d recommend getting back to homework. Sure there are other long term discussed features like UI, room correction Integration etc but that is a different story.
All this talk of a buy out is making me nervous. Don’t mess with Roon!
If you look how many audio company getting ROON ready is the best indication how stable and healthy ROON is.Beside that the software getting stable and needs less up-dates.However it would be nice if ROON gets ready for the new APPLE SOFTWARE CATALINA which at the moment is not the case as its not recognizing external drive? Lucky I did not upgrate yet but some of my friends that did complained to me.I’M sure ROON is working on it !
I take this at face value, so speculation is just for fun.
I think content companies are trying to take back the customer from the likes of Netflix and Spotify, so how about Sony?
Before you write them off, consider all the labels they own and whether they might be planning their own audio streaming service?
On the electronics side they are threatened by Sonos, Apple, Amazon, along with their traditional competitors like Yamaha and other “higher consumer” brands for lack of a better descriptor.
They are also promoting a new music format called “360 Reality Audio”??
Having said all that, Sony is probably more likely to build their own app (not a good one) vs. buying Roon.
They are essentially a hardware company, AND they have been burned by the Playstation VUE streaming experience (which they’re trying to unload now). I don’t see how Roon would fit with their businesses.
Please Roon team, DO mess with Roon. Of rather: clean up the mess that is Roon. Please start with the messy search and then clean up the messy interface.
Of were you trying to express that Roon is already messy enough?
Can you elaborate? I don’t utilize the search features much. I like the interface though.
I agree its a longshot, but Sony is far from a “hardware company” alone. Sony exists in the intersection of gaming, video, and music (in that order). They are very interested in streaming and communities around gaming and music and see music being “first released” within video games.
Just throwing it out there for fun…
It’s an interesting company:
I’ve had two Sony computers. I currently have a Sony TV and a 2010 Sony Vaio laptop. TV works well; laptop is functional but quirky. Spoke at length with their customer service trying to fix a desktop PC (which I no longer have - my last desktop PC purchase) and the Sony rep opined Sony wasn’t great with computers…he added Sony used Android firmware on their Smart TVs because of their computer experience. I think they are out of the computer hardware biz now. I had nothing but problems with the Sony PC Vaio integrated computer software.
Moral to the story - stick to producing what you’re good at.
Pick any thread about search on this forum and you’ll find my critique of the search function in detail.
As for the UI: it’s visually attractive, but it’s unstructured and all the tags and focus thingies in Roon don’t make it any more structured. For me, the only way to find what I am looking for without having to trawl through the UI is by using the search, which is also very time consuming because you can’t narrow down the results on execution.
I just want to find music fast and start listening. It seems that this is quite a big ask.
Read my full comment… “Buy out”
Of course I want bug fixes and upgrades.
Curious as to what the requirement is.
What packet loss is acceptable? 0.1%, 0.0001%, 0.0000001%? And what jitter? 1ms, 100us, 1us? Even less?
Thanks,
Steve
I have never had issues with any wired network. The only time I have had problems is with WiFi and suspect that is not due to packet loss but rather pauses where no packets can be sent. These pauses are difficult for Roon as it does not buffer huge amounts of data.
Well, I guess that is jitter. But a “pause” implies I guess a second or two. Ethernet LAN isn’t going to do that except if something like a MAC address or IP address conflict is causing problems, or switch crashes or what have you.
Wifi I agree can be a different story with radio interference and air interface contention. We see this in our Voip business where jitter is a big problem and WiFi networks need to be well designed to work properly.
What’s hard for Roon is that WiFi is pervasive - users are streaming their 1080p Netflix over WiFi with no issues so telling them that their WiFi Is too poor for some music is hard to accept.
So I guess that implies Roon should consider compromising and upping the amount of buffering in RAAT even though it will impact responsiveness and might mean no multi-device synchronization.
Oh I should say that Roon error messages are misleading. For me Roon tells me that its loading slowly from Tidal where I can see well that the problem is problems to the RAAT endpoint. That is misleading and add to that a tendency for the well-meaning support to propose voodoo fixes and it can be frustrating.
Misleading? How is Roon supposed to know why Tidal is loading slowly? Roon doesn’t know if the problem is your Internet connection or your WiFi.
Simple. Long before I see this error my RoonServer has already received the entire song from Tidal. In my test the entire 72MB was received in 11 seconds. I see the error 2 min or so into the track. It is spooling the audio data to the endpoint device using RAAT - in the packet capture I can see the clocking/sync process which paces that and it is obvious the problem is with the connection to that endpoint. So why doesn’t Roon say that?
Would you like to review the pcap file and see for yourself?
Good topic.
A buyout might be a possibility.
The market cap of Roon is not likely enough to put it on the radar of a Spotify, Amazon, et.al. It has a nice sized user base, but the existing user base of ‘owners’ don’t contribute to the bottom line for future revenue. This leaves only new subscribers and/or purchasers as a possible source of revenue. At this point its late in the game and everyone who is likely to buy or rent Roon is probably already doing so in the “Audiophile” community. Normal users aren’t likely to see value in renting or buying an extra UI on top of Tidal etc for music. Grabbing metadata is not exclusive to Roon so no value there either. For the money, it might just be easier to spend money building a competitor. Squeezing out some barely perceptible improvement in sound quality is not a selling feature to the mass consumer so it all boils down to UI, ergonomics, content generation, integration, look and feel etc.
My opinion is, no sale, no buyout, no real improvements in the future…ie staying the course.