Oh, absolutely. I think I’ve said this before, but it feels like it’s an almost philosophical question on both the future of Roon, and, with it, the future of how we consume music: is Roon just a fancy interface for streaming services, or is it something more ? My feeling is that part of that answer came with the effort put into Valence, and that the ambition is much closer to Spotify’s, i.e, that the looking glass says that streaming services will be commodified, and that what’s left to offer is an experience. I’m really curious to see how the constraints of “mobile” are going to be handled, not just bandwidth, because that’s not very interesting (though I wouldn’t be surprised to see a religious war or twelve there) but everything else: you can’t just port the current experience to CarPlay, for example, because you can’t have people reading bios and driving. So how do you deal with that ? Do you ask Siri to read the bios for you ? And how does that translate to Android Auto ? Your partners also have different tiering depending on the number of concurrent streams. How do you deal with that ?
To answer @saschamt’s question, the updated website indicates that a rather big interface refresh is coming.
Roon lifetimer here (when it was $500). All I’m looking for is a cleaner, more intuitive UI - i.e. scrolling in one direction on all pages - preferably vertical - with a full library funnel down on all pages (similar to search), more customizable menus and views, and less clicks and scrolls to do simple functions (a top level streaming album delete or genre metadata editor for example). Mobile I could care less about.
Of course this is a feature many would love to have (and I might even use). But I would hope they could get some pretty basic usability requests out of the way first.
I’m sure everyone here wants updates but they will, as always be released, as and when they are ready and running with out issues. At least this is what has been the track record in the past.
Point releases have typically dropped on an annual or sometime earlier schedule, and while I’m not going to be holding my breath I’ll just be happy if we get something that has had the kinks ironed out properly whenever and whatever that is.
“I’d talk about future Roon software plans, but you will have to wait for 1.8 – it’ll be our biggest release ever, addressing many long outstanding issues.”
So something is in the works, but all anyone is likely to hear before it is released is tease.
It’s been a year since I trialed Roon on my Naim Hifi system. It was a bodge job as it doesn’t support Roon natively, so very limited. I was hoping that after a year and a few updates, Roon would find a way to play nice with older uPNP streamers. but I see there is still no easy way to do this. It’s a shame.
thanks for the heads up. Yes I’ve read about some of the hardware third-party solutions to get Roon to talk to UPnP. I’ve not tried it myself as there have been mixed reviews about how well this works. There is also a software solution which again has mixed reviews and requires quite a bit of computer/server know how to configure. I was hoping that Roon would be able to implement this software plugin within Roon, so it’s there for those of us that need it. Well, maybe in the next update.
Your choice of SPDIF endpoints will also do the trick. Depending on how comfortable you are around computers / your religious views / your definition of value and cost, from rather affordable to fairly expensive.
No issues on my side with the hardware workaround I use @Dominik_Tomaszewski
I have an older Naim streamer, my Roon Core is provided via my Innuos.
Fitted a Sonore UPnP bridge a year ago and haven’t looked back since.
Yes, it’s an extra piece of hardware, but it is relatively low cost and for me it’s been rock solid.
Thanks. Still no luck with iFi Bridge on DOS2. I have tried the Sonore bridge software on a MicroRendu with extensive support from Sonore and it didn’t work out even with a local Bubble UPnP server. I’ve also tried the original software made by Phillipe44 without success. Seems like Devialet Phantom doesn’t play well with the Squeezebox workaround.
