I’d agree with all of this and also add that I think Roon should swallow their pride and provide a solution to support UPNP endpoints.
Whilst UPNP is not ideal (neither is Airplay or Chromecast) and RAAT is undoubtedly a better solution this would widen their potential market considerably. Only determined people (like me) find a way to work around this limitation with a bridge. Integrating such a workaround would probably be quite straightforward and give them a new market.
Well, personally, I’m glad to have been able to turn my back on UPnP and DLNA - talk about putting lipstick on a pig! 
I think that Roon Labs are justified in having pride in what they have achieved with RAAT, and I don’t think they should bother with diverting resources into UPnP/DLNA. Reading their posts on the subject, I also get the distinct impression that Hell would have to first freeze over before they would do this.
RAAT works. UPnP/DNLA might work. At some point in the quest for quality and best experience, “might” just isn’t good enough. Far from hastening Roon’s end, RAAT might actually be the jewel in their crown.
Funny thing…why nobody from Roon (moderators or developers) doesn’t answer to this topic with an “happily and reassuring” answer?
+1 on this one
25 entries from a handful of people Vs real issues, support etc. No surprise there then.
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 
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… 
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Indeed. One of those ‘stupid’ posts was possibly from me.
Here are some of my stupid issues:
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.