Wow, bizarre stuff over there, like a different world. iOS scrolling issues? There was some work done, not sure of the status, will check with the team. Because there isnât a toxic thread about that on the forumâŚ
I post far less as well. I love the product and my Nucleus. I donât have issue after 2x years starting with Rock. I am of the opinion happy Roon customers simply have no need to post in the Forum (negatively) so your comments regarding bullied/censored are not these people. I am responding since this post was curated in my email from Roon else wouldnât have seen it. I cannot comment on the âsupportâ directly from Roon since I have never had to reach them directly. However, each Christmas I send a thank you email because I am grateful for the work Roon does.
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Actually, I think the forum is working fine, thanks to the volunteer moderators who save us from our own worst impulses.
I do worry about Roon, though. When does the market for a sophisticated data-aware music player saturate? No voice control, no captive music library, support for local files continuing to falter, and continuous battering competition from the low end. Most people I know would rather say, âAlexa, play James Taylorâ than pick up a UI and fiddle with it to find something. If they can. I think the DSP and the Valence DB is great, but for how many users is that enough?
That question, I think, contributes to some of the peevishness on the forum, particularly for new subscribers.
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Thank you John for posting this. I had the thought to post something very similar a few weeks ago, lost my steam to do it. I feel like my posts have evolved towards the negative the past few years and I donât enjoy that, so Iâd more or less gone with the adage âif you donât have anything nice to sayâŚâ
Foundation: Roon is a fantastic piece of software. I use it every day and not just that but almost every waking hour. The only non-OS software I may use more frequently is a web browser.
History: posting on the Roon forum used to be a bit of an art form. Posters like Anders Vinberg and Chris Layeruk, Sloop John B, Sallah, and I would include myself, not only posted comments on the software but worked to create thoughtful posts that would engender deep, almost philosophical discussion. On the flipside, there was so much enthusiasm for the product that we would all post great ideas for enhancements, feature combinations, how toâs etc. There was a period when the forumâs energy was palpable and the outlook auspicious.
My moment: I, and many others, were having issues with Roonâs resource âleak.â (Whatever it was/is). I had posted a mixed response to something (with both praise for Roon and references to this problem), and a Roon staffer, not a moderator, modified my post to take out references to the issues I was having, leaving it as an apparent totally positive post that then appeared to disagree with those having the issue. I removed my post entirely because I didnât want what it now said to be under my name, and replaced it with a message that my post had been revised by Roon. Then my post disappeared. Then I started a new thread under the forum topic heading explaining what had happened and that Roon was editing and hiding posts, not moderators. Then the thread was hidden. So I said âgoodbyeâ to the forum and decided never to post again except when I needed support.
Realizations: I made it about a year without posting. Then decided I would dip back in. The forum had changed. The auspicious feelings were replaced by mostly support requests or people with issues. Very few creative ideas or deep thought posts. A lot of (justified) complaints about the slowness and lack of official support. More than that, Roon had added a process to vote for feature requests but limited votes to nearly nil, and moved the feedback section down âbelow the foldâ of the forum web page, implying to me that Roon either didnât want my feedback or didnât want anyone else to see feedback unless they looked deeply for it.
I also realized that I differentiate Roon the company from Roon the product. I love the latter. The former, while likeable people in their posts for the most part, I get frustrated with the directions Roon chooses to take sometimes, and feel a bit like there is an effort to âtake their product back,â or, if not
âback,â per se, then in another direction from what I first observed and hoped for.
Much of this Iâm sure is my own perceptions. Back in 2017 when I first used Roon and through maybe 2020, Roon felt like it had a trajectory. Each release enhanced or added a feature Iâd use. Then a few years back it felt like Roonâs direction shifted from that trajectory to something else. Not the niche users we are. Going for mainstream with an inherently niche productâŚstraddling categories in a way that would likely fully please no one. Again, my perception.
Roon is still a fine product. But I have been taught not to expect anything more from it than what it does now. That trajectory is gone. So then is the excitement of new Roon releases or any discussion of what could be added to make the product a perfect mix of features. It seems that we local collection owners have had our fill and now itâs all for the streaming crowd.
This may all just be natural growth pains. Roon is no longer a pub but a stadium and that naturally feels less personal. The modification of my posts was a splash of very cold water.
So I have a lot less passion for posting. The same passion for music, and the same passion for using the existing version of the software. But no hope for those features and enhancements (or, would say, fixes and remedies!) that Iâd hoped for back in those heady days. Itâs exactly right - Roon as a company feels no different from Microsoft or Google now. Itâs fine - growth is required and people have to feed their families, or make their millions. I do wish there had been a different way, and that this still felt like a tighter community. It doesnât. The only passion is for arguing. Oh well, nothing is constant except changeâŚ
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I have fallen in love with this forum.
A bunch of stuff sucks. A bunch of stuff is a train wreck of irreconcilable disagreements.
But, I believe there a lot of people on this board who may not agree with me on many things, but who are interested in the same things that I am.
The support stuff I browse but donât respond to much as there are many more knowledgeable people than me. The audio stuff I interact with frequently, sometimes to emit marginally informed info but frequently to read opinions from people with which I agree and disagree.
The non-audio stuff, or the non-equipment opinion based stuff to me is golden. Coffee. Photography. Bicycles. Audio, but not audio as in what equipment do you like but how do you listen and how does that impact you. What do you listen to? Probably not what I listen to.
Iâm relatively new here. Oldsters, donât give up. I love this place.
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Yes
Yes again
Oh, yes, absolutely. The sole reason Iâm not visiting more than once in two months or so. This has become a very unfriendly forum for Roon criticasters. Most meanigfull criticasters have left so whatâs left is nothing but hollow praise.
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And that encourages newer members how?
I havenât been here that long, but did they leave because of unfriendliness or isnât that the natural progression of things? I mean, isnât it normal that people who donât like a product leave? I certainly wouldnât stay on a forum for 5 years to complain about something that isnât right for me.
Thereâs a lot of complaining (both justified and not) for that
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A company with only $4MM in revenue is by no means a large company. The product is still boutique and has under 100,000 subscribers.
They are not large but I donât think thatâs quite correct. 100,000 has been the stated number of subscribers on the website for as long as I have been a Roon user (2020) but in February 2021 Danny wrote 250K:
and I think I saw a later post in reply to someone quoting these 250K that it was much more by that time.
Even if it had just 100,000 annual subscribers (excluding lifers), 12.5 per month x 12 = 150, and 150 x 100,000 = 15,000,000, not 4,000,000
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so, you think the company has no overhead or expenses? Roon Labs: Contact Details and Business Profile.
You said revenue.
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It was you who said revenue
Thatâs not official but a guess of questionable quality. They say this on the same page:
Forums great in the right threads the ones about whatâs important The Music! The rest well itâs seems these days to a fist fight about the same subjective vs objective arguments with neither side winning any new friends. It seems some just wonât let certain things lie. Itâs all rather tiresome. Also trying to give any decent criticism of the product is again hard as your often jumped on mass for any criticism especially support.
For me the product is loosing its way and been taken over by BS marketing. Why on earth do we need a name for each part of Roon especially the DSP engine.I am sure the resources put into choosing these names could be better used elsewhere. It all feels like we get nee stuff added to hide the stuff these doesnât really make the mark anymore. Search is still not very good overall, Roon radio has been stuck in a rut for years now, the library streaming integration needs a full rework as is a mess and gets broken very easily when you have a grouped album thatâs deleted from Qobuz. Plus many many other bugs that just seem to linger for ever.
Support is the big pachyderm in the room. To me itâs fundamentally broken and has been for the last few years. We were promised change in this area but nothings got better if anything itâs worse. ARC has not helped here. This isnât a dig at the staff themselves they do a great job, itâs the model at play thatâs the issue. It just canât support the people that need it. No one should have to wait two weeks for a reply to a call for support, yet it happens time and time again. Itâs also not the communities job to fill in for these inadequacies most of the time we end up causing more harm than good as not everyoneâs great at explaining or reading the user properly.
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Lots of good posts already. I think there is still plenty of value in the forums, although I mostly follow closely the music, gear (some anyway), and fun stuff threads. Iâm fortunate that I havenât needed much in the way of support (I guess my needs are simple, and I have no use for ARC), although Iâve seen how hit and miss that can be on the forums. I think it is also true, however, that quite a lot of people coming here for the first time looking for help havenât done much to read up on the product and how to use it first and are therefore not always able (willing?) to follow advice given by other users or even Roon support - e.g. there are only so many times you can tell people their network/how their gear is connected is likely the source of particular issues. But I can see how it must be frustrating when all they get is crickets from Roon support. The endless and mind-numbing MQA/ethernet/cables threads are easily ignored.
That being said, I still love the product and it works essentially perfectly >99% of the time - seamlessly integrating our local music collection with Tidal (and now Qobuz on trial) covering more than 50,000 tracks. It is as integral to our enjoyment of music at home as amp/speakers/source. Iâve also discovered so much great music here, which is worth the entry fee all by itself.
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Iâve been censored by Roon staff (they didnât like a topic title critical of ARC) and browbeaten by moderator fanboys. Less than satisfying, I must say (and ARC is still a poor piece of software).
At least I can mute people.
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We changed one word in your thread title to change the title from an insult to a question - the Community Guidelines ask for civil discussion.
And you werenât âbrowbeaten by moderator fanboysâ.
I suggest that you revisit the Community Guidelines again.
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Iâve never found the mods to be overly fanboy-ish. At least not in an unfair way. But it is true that threads very critical of Roon or the forum often get hidden. Iâve seen this more than just a couple times. I donât know who does it though.
There is a philosophical question about the balance of truth (or at least the whole story of whatâs been posted) vs. marketing value of the forum to the host company. This may be a conflict that canât be completely resolved.
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Thereâs a lot of frustrated paying customers here, the frustration very often stems from the support model. It is obvious to me that the forum struggles to meet the support needs of the customer base, lack of communication from company staff is often cited as something of major concern that could be rectified (IMO) pretty easily. This lack of communication is often described as temporary by the staff however that is not true, this has been an ongoing shortfall for years now and thereâs a significant part of the paying customer base that doesnât like that. More recently I have noticed interactions start out on the wrong foot, people with issues want to hear from RoonLabs staff, they want a ticket number with an estimated completion date/time. When interactions start out like that it breeds negativity that spreads throughout the forum.
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In my case, the support thread that I had opened was âunlistedâ by RoonLabs staff (rather than a community volunteer) when I became vocal about my dissatisfaction of communication and support. There was a lot of helpful information in that thread that others could have benefited from but I guess it was deemed that the dialog had run its course. To the best of my knowledge the issue still exists today although there is now a known workaround.