Bob Marley is smiling at this…
I would be happy if Team Roon would just fix the Radio. I am so tired of music playing that I have marked as Dislike (circle with a slash through it) and the Radio flat out ignores my preference. Today, I left Radio playing all day and not only did it play music I have marked as dislike, it played some of them twice! Even after I hurriedly skipped them the first time through. What’s the point of marking them if they are ignored?
To the point of this thread… What is Team Roon doing? Why can’t we have more frequent Agile updates?
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If you want a hint of what Team Roon is “focused” on read their job postings. Unfortunately the one and only position posted references the first half of 2019.
Here’s the post:
Software Developer
The Role
Roon Labs is looking to hire several software developers during the first half of 2019.
Experience with our technology stack is a plus, but we place more value on the breadth of technologies you’ve worked with in the past. It is important that you are comfortable and experienced working in a large pre-existing codebase and with a variety of languages, toolkits, and technologies, picking up new skills and expertise as needed.
Possible Areas of Focus
This role is open to all generalist developers who can comfortably work on all areas of our systems and get stuff done.
We are also interested in growing the team in a few specific directions. These are some possible areas of focus, based on the work we have coming up. Experience relevant to these areas is a bonus, and if any of this resonates with you please let us know.
Mobile Applications
Our mobile applications share one UI codebase across platforms–so this isn’t about building screens. There is some technical debt in our mobile infrastructure, and some expected product touch points are missing or not done well. Furthermore, as we expand the scope of our mobile apps to include streaming/playback away from the home system, there will be a lot of under-the-hood work required to make a lot more of our code run (and perform) on tablets and phones.
Machine Learning
A few months ago, we launched Roon Radio, our first machine-learning feature. We have a healthy roadmap planned for future features that incorporate machine learning, and could use some help making these plans a reality. This work would encompass everything from data acquisition/warehousing, batch processing, learning/training steps, and surfacing the results via cloud services, dashboards, or our client applications. In parallel, we are working on ETL and Analytics systems for the rest of the company.
Devops/Cloud Services
We recently moved our cloud operations to a new provider and containerized everything. While things are up and running, there are definitely some aspects that require shoring up and long term ownership, and we still have some rough patches in the system that we are slowly moving through. Adding fresh perspective, experience, and ownership in this area would be a great help to us.
“End-to-end” Project Ownership
If Roon were a web based product, we’d call this “full stack development”. We are always at work implementing new features or integrating with other products. This generally involves work in several layers–cloud services, the media server, and the user interface. We’re looking for developers that can handle the detailed aspects of projects like this without losing sight of the larger goal.
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I had a problem with Roon and networking too.
I am an IT professional and in my house I have a not so standard network setup and I think Roon works best in the most simple network. One switch for Roon core and NAS connectivity. One access point for Roon remote devices and keep it that way.
I have 3 smart switches all connected to a core router via LACP bonding trunks (2*1Gb) to the core router and 2 access points connected to 2 different switches.
I am using some VLANs but everything Roon are on the same.
My problem was when my phone/iPad was roaming to the other AP and I lost connectivity. I found out that it had to do something with broadcast traffic on the AP.
The solution was in the end quite simple.
Give Roon (I am using ROCK) a fixed IP address and when a device cannot find Roon click on help and enter the IP address of Roon manually.
Now the Roon app on your phone tries to find it using a broadcast/discovery protocol but cannot find it. After 5 secs it will fall back to the manually set IP and it finds Roon.
So the more complex your network is, the more trouble you get because of those stupid broadcast/ discovery protocols being used
Wow. You are calling out Roon for doing something completely standard because your overly complex home network is not configured to handle it?
Thanks for your reply but this is all not the case in my situation. I have a core PC running Windows 10, internal storage and direct connected USB dac. I have no NAS. My network consist of three Asus routers in a Mesh setup. My Windows PC is the only thing that has a wired connection. There are no switches anywhere except for the ones built in to the routers. Even when I connect the core to one router only (no mesh) with only the core PC connected with static IP and only one android device, one meter from the wifi atenna, no go. Not with three different routers. Not when I switch core to my macbook or mac mini. Not with any android device. Ipad works, macbook works, windows laptop works. Remote desktop works like a charm, streaming video back and forth works perfectly, videocalling perfect, Tidal, Deezer, Spotify, netflix, Plex all without any glitch but no Roon. Never worked. How simple does my network have to be to make it work? I have stopped trying long time ago.
Ehmmm I think you are missing the point. I want to try to give people a direction to look into because 9/10 it is network setup related.
I am saying that Roon is trusting too much (like a lot of other software) on broadcasting protocols like mDNS and Bonjour. I get it because of the auto discovery features of applications and the more PnP experience.
I really like that I can specify the Roon control app to look at an IP address I enter manually. It solved my problem hopping from one AP to the other.
Roon also states it does not support any kind of complex enterprise infrastructures and I am not blaming them.
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Yes, already tried that, amongst many other things. It doesn’t help.
I use windows remote desktop on my android devices and on my Ipad to connect to Roon, works many times faster then Roon itself. My Ipad almost instantly connects with remote desktop. Roon takes ages to connect on startup and after the Ipad went into standby which is pretty annoying. I have spent way too much time looking at the Roon fish logo when I just wanted to see what was playing and the now playing screen is simply unreadable from more than two meter distance. Works instantly with remote desktop, no lag at all. But all of thos is off topic. Like I said, I have given up on Roon on android long time ago.
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Ahhh, I yearn for the days when it was Sony Superscope. They sent me a replacement part for my Reel to Reel deck at no charge, even the warranty ended several years earlier. Today’s Sony?? Yeah, right.
You have searched the Forum for “Remote Desktop”, right? It is known to be a problem for Roon.
Teamviewer seems to be a somewhat equivalent program that doesn’t fight for drivers.
I think you read it wrongly. You are replying on a phrase of my message that is put out of context. Remote desktop always works perfectly, never had any troubles with it. It connects within a split second, it is very responsive, in fact so much so that it is much more responsive using remote desktop than using Roon directly on my Ipad and it just always works on my android devices. I am using remote desktop instead of the Roon app because it is there instantly, with the Ipad app it takes 10 to 20 seconds for Roon to connect each time the Ipad comes out of standby, android is completely hopeless with Roon over here. Remote desktop is much faster in reconnecting. So using remote desktop is not my problem, it’s my solution to the problem.
Okay. I didn’t know if remote desktop could be a reason for the problems you have. But if you have tested it, that’s not an answer.
edit: OH! Now I get it.
Wow, never even thought about remote desktop. Duh. Works like a champ. And displays in portrait mode on android. Thanks for the tip.
Fixed for next release.
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You are welcome. And…it can play audio from Roon to the other end of the world for those desperatly waiting for a mobile solution
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Presumably with an IP helper on the relevant switches you could forward the broadcasts appropriately?
Probably it is dying, but then, so am I, albeit very slowly. I’m hoping Roon will go just before me 
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Fine, just so long as I go before you… Odds are, I will (but not just yet, oh lord…)
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