It doesn’t matter if it’s hard

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I’m not a Metallica fan. But I still kind of care. I’m an old fart but I remember back in the old days when a new Rush album came out. If the record store didn’t have it I was ticked. I could understand if they had some number of copies and they were sold out. But if they didn’t have any and said “be patient, we’ll have it next week”…

Continuing the discussion from Where is the new Metallica album?:

What is Roon for? Who is Roon for? This may be hard. They should make the effort to get it right.

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This.

It seems to me that Roon is at the mercy of Tidal and Qobuz on this issue, and there is no “fix” Roon can implement.

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What makes you think that they aren’t? If the problem lies outside of Roon’s control (data dumps from Qobuz and Tidal) what can Roon do? They can talk to Qobuz and Tidal, but that’s about it. If the problem still persists then it still persists, regardless of the number of threads that are started on this forum.

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If it’s that important to you to have instant access to new releases then use (and pay for) a streaming service that gets you that. Nowhere that I can find does it say Roon provides this service.
As others have said they are at the mercy of the streaming services to give them data. They then process and present that data as quickly as they can (or as quickly as they are willing to).

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At what age does one become an old fart? I’m probably one, too. I grew up reading Rolling Stone magazine - I knew what was coming out and when. There were record stores in bike distance from my house. I’d reserve when I could. Show up on release day.

I also used to wait in line for tickets at the local venue. Primarily the Forum in Los Angeles.

I still have quite a bit of enthusiasm for new releases.

It is astounding to me how many words people write attributing this issue to Roon’s partners. It reads like a mishmash of “you should just deal with it” “it’s not Roon’s fault” “it’s hard”.

Assume for a minute that Qobuz and Tidal provide data dumps in a manner that makes it absolutely impossible for Roon to have anything approximating a realtime view of their authoritative data sets. Let’s even assume that Roon continues to push, behind the scenes, for Qobuz and Tidal to get their acts together and deliver a realtime feed.

Then let’s ask “How can this community help Roon create more leverage on Qobuz and Tidal?”

The answer would probably be to allow people to voice their frustration and to provide support for that frustration. Not to explain the underlying behavior, defend Roon, say it’s hard, etc.

If Roon employees want to explain what’s going on, let them. If Roon employees want to say “We don’t care about this issue”, let them. The community does not need to constantly defend Roon from criticism about this issue. It is a legitimate issue that detracts from the delightfulness of the product. It is not the worst issue and does deserve more attention than more pressing problems such as ARC fundamentally not working for anyone on certain classes of networks. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be somewhere on their backlog.

Thanks, @Kelly_Burkhart, for starting this thread even though you had to know, in advance, that there would be a white-blood-cell-like antibody response. Criticisms of Roon aren’t particularly well tolerated even when they are constructive. For some reason, people around here think that they should tell you screw off and use another service when you raise an issue like this.

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Why can’t community members suggest perspectives that differ from yours? It’s not a question of defence, it’s a question of discussion. You are free to make an observation and/or criticism and others are free to respond. Debate and discussion will involve disagreement. That doesn’t invalidate your point of view.

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Quite frankly, yes, just deal with it, what choice do you have (read on before you get bent out of shape)? That is the way it is now.

Here’s two choices (of many):

  1. find a service that does what you want it to

and/or

  1. keep giving feedback and maybe make a feature request vote and wait for Roon to address it when they can get to it (if ever).

Instead of just complaining and accusing Roon of not “making an effort to get it right” you could do the second option.
As @SukieInTheGraveyard says, you don’t know that is what they are doing (or not doing?) and making a post with a snarky heading (the way I read it anyway) and then bashing those of us that come in to participate in the discussion is not the way to get support or your change looked at by Roon.

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Very fair point. I’ll learn from that. I think I’m seeing many comments through a filter that causes me to see defense, justification, irritation with repetitive threads, and counter-productive suggestions. I’ll make an effort to look for cases where people are voice opinions.

Can I request, in return, that other folks on this thread consider new behaviors and evolved perspectives, too? Maybe skip some threads? Maybe also try to support different perspectives?

Roon would be better if content was available on release day. In my opinion, it would be much better. You may differ on the degree to which it would be better, but you probably agree that it would be better.

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I appreciate your post. Seriously.

You’ll find that I’m mostly #1. If you search my post history I suspect you’ll find many attempts at helpful posts from me on a broad number of topics. One, for example, is an end-to-end walkthrough on how to set up Roon using Docker on Synology. Another on Lutron and Home Assistant. Many on rooExtend. Some on KEF, Linn, Sonos, ZeroTier, networking in general. I’m certainly not easy to categorize as a whiner or whinger (depending on your side of the pond).

It’s an oversimplification to claim that your categories are mutually exclusive. They aren’t.

I am mostly a fanboi, though at 54 years old, it may be stretch to call myself a “boi” in any sense :slight_smile: Absolutely love Roon, and I’m all in on it. There is no “Plan B” for me - it’s the most delightful, complete, joyful to use music experience there is. Period. But it’s not without its faults and there are certainly times where there is very strong reaction to anyone pushing on these issues.

I sincerely heard what @SukieInTheGraveyard wrote. So how about in the other direction? Anyone think there’s an opportunity for the “fanbois” to create a little more space for criticism of the product? Perhaps not leap in as savior and defender? Either let Roon representatives do it or let their silence speak for itself? Perhaps not feel obliged to police threads? Perhaps not feel quite so annoyed by repeated threads?

Forums can be absolutely awful, toxic places. It’s not like that here at all. Hope we can all acknowledge that. And, for what it’s worth, I’d have all of you folks over to listen to music, have a drink, hear your stories. I don’t know your history, @AMT, but I understand what you mean about music saving you. It’s been there for me through every aspect of my life including some very difficult times.

This particular issue of releases not showing up does irritate me. It seems like a very reasonable expectation. The pushback on users pointing this out continues to baffle me. Ah well.

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I think the above triggered some people, and rightly so. It was indeed carelessly written.

I’m definitely in the pro-Roon camp and as a relatively new user, and new lifetime member I want Roon to be best platform it can be. While this issue may indeed be difficult to solve and does require cooperation with providers like Qobuz and Tidal. I don’t believe that we should stop expecting excellence, and reminding them when they come up short.

The reason I popped off the original post was in response to my perception of some community members reflexively defending Roon. Admittedly, this was done without my appreciation of the quantity of posts mentioning this issue and perhaps how tiresome it is to see similar posts regularly. I also frequently see complaints that seem spurious and unfair. I’m not trying to be that guy.

All that said, I do believe that Roon is making an effort to get it right. However, that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t feel a bit of discomfort when rough edges are exposed.

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[Edit]. I don’t believe there’s an opportunity here for further dialog.

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I did this data synch for a living for a while. Not music, information about building maintenance between suppliers and systems gobally with safety certificates, actual legal requirements. Guess how often it synched up, was correct, had all the data?
Less often than roon manage and it’s just music.
And both parties in my role were getting paid a lot of money to get it right.

I bet Qobuz and Tidal don’t have roon synch in their mission statements, and the synch is …get this done, and then we do the roon synch.

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IMO, It’s not the repeated bringing up of the issues, it’s the way they are brought up. I don’t really mind the repeated brining up of the same issues. These issues NEED to be brought up because, as we say in engineering, The squeaky wheel gets the grease. However, If you title the thread the way this one is and then proceed to say what was said, the Devs are going to take a pass on even reading it and you will garner the attention of us fanbois (or the trolls under the internet).

Also, if we “let silence speak for itself” then we would not have a forum, we would have a black hole where no one is communicating. If you care enough to bring it up you probably care enough to have others talk to you about it. We just hope it’s all in a civil and constructive manner.

Yes, this should go both ways, the responses should be stated well and not “pouncing” on someone for expressing their concern. But, it’s kind of Tit for Tat, start out snarky and get snarky (or ignored) back.

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I’m glad @Kelly_Burkhart started this thread because it provides an opportunity to discuss streaming service sync issues independently from any particular release.

I’ve seen numerous threads over 8 years expressing frustration that a particular new release isn’t available on the day of release. Inevitably the release becomes available within a few days and all the invested emotion becomes water under the fridge.

But the deeper question is whether Roon should do more to make new releases available on the day of release. To answer that question it is absolutely necessary to know how hard it is to do that. Development decisions are always compromises between finite resources and competing priorities. There is always an opportunity cost to any development decision. You can’t do everything and if you choose to do one thing you are also choosing not to do others.

If something is hard it will need more resources to do it. There is a higher opportunity cost attached to it. Developers have to weigh up that cost compared to the benefit of doing the hard thing.

It is also appropriate to take into account whether the hard thing is something that was promised or held out by Roon. In this case it wasn’t. Roon has never pretended that it will always have new releases available on the day of release.

Lastly developers might also consider whether the hard thing is something that has an easy workaround. In this case it does. We can listen to the album using the streaming service app on the day of release and through Roon after a couple of days.

If I was a developer then increasing the frequency of data sync would have a low priority having regard to the above, even if it wasn’t hard.

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Hi, @andybob.

I mostly just want to say “Thank You” for sharing your thoughts here. I appreciate it.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I’m certainly sensitive to prioritization tradeoffs and the associated opportunity costs. It’s helpful and reasonable for you to point that out.

I’d like to share my thoughts with you on the notion that the ease of doing something somewhere else should be a factor. That point doesn’t sit quite right with me. I don’ t know if I can change your mind but maybe I can influence you a bit.

I’ve been using Roon a little over two years. In Roon scale, that makes me relatively new. A Linn purchase led me to Qobuz. I had a bunch of Sonos. Frustration with control options (Linn’s app + UPnP) led me to look for options and, consequently, Roon.

Jump forward a couple of years. I’ve sold off my Sonos streamers (for distributed) and replaced them with a bunch of BlueSound Nodes. Primary HiFi is a Linn Selekt + Organik controlled only by Roon. Desktop is a Naim Uniti HE controlled only by Roon. DAP is a FiiO M11+ (Roon Ready) on which I pretty exclusively use Roon (with ZeroTier when out of the house).

I’m as Roon as Roon gets. I have a lifetime subscription that I regret buying, but if you try to guess why I regret it, you’ll guess wrong. I regret it because I feel like I’m taking advantage of you folks. I worry about the moment at which I cross over the break even point - I’ll need to figure out how to keep paying or something like that.

So when you suggest that there are things that are easy to do outside of Roon, it feels kind of tone deaf to me. Of course I can do things outside of Roon but I’m not set up to do that. I don’t want to be set up to do that. I just want to keep betting on a single point of access that does everything competently and delightfully.

Saying that something is simple to do outside of Roon is also a slippery slope. If this topic were about Search in Roon (which I think we all agree still has much room for improvement), would we be saying “Search is hard. We aren’t going to work on it because Qobuz and Tidal have better search and you can just use that.”? I know it’s not a perfect example, but maybe it illustrates the point. Maybe ARC is even an example - certainly people have suggested that it’s not worth the effort because alternatives exist (at least for the streaming service components).

Reducing the time involved in new releases showing up would not be #1 on my list of asks. Just as an exercise, my off-the-cuff list of what I would prioritize is below :slight_smile: New release latency is #4.

I do appreciate and get your points. I hope you think about mine. Also would, of course, love to see more transparency from Roon about your priorities and backlog - something like that, in my opinion, could be helpful in discussions like these. It would certainly make these conversations less abstract.

Here’s my list for fun. Thanks again for your time.

  1. Continue to Improve Search
  2. DSP Support for ARC
  3. Bit-Perfect ARC on Android DAPs
  4. Reduce Time to New Releases
  5. Improved Daily Mixes (Variability / Creativity)