Lifetime subscriber here too- no regrets at making the purchase, but disappointed that Roon hasn’t yet lived up to its core promise and doesn’t appear to be moving in that direction either.
Removed to avoid offence , too quick with the mouse
Realize that, but not going back to Jriver
Maybe it helps to hear from someone at the end of a one year subscription. I like what Roon wants to be, but I don’t like what it is. I agree folders are not the most sensible way to acces a music collection. But!: it is the way our computers run. Roon wants to do things differently and presumably better, but offers very limited ways to import things easily into Roon and export them out again if you want that. Nice way to capture customers. Don’t defend that! It’s briliant marketing, especially once customers start defending that way of operating too.
I can see how you grow attached to Roon once you fully committed to it and built your music collection on it. Just like the topic starter I’m not going to do that as well. It costs stupid time and once your in, you can’t get out.
Example: I had multiple long playlists in TIDAL. Somehow I had constant syncing issues with Roon. So I was advised to create my playlists in Roon. Did that. Now I have multiple long playlists that I can’t export in any way from Roon. Don’t tell me there is an export function: it’s completely broken for a long time already. Again with Roon saying it is impossible to fix because of the way Roon operates. So now after a year of Roon I’m going to loose my playlists… again. That feels like being screwed over twice.
Roon not working with any good room correction software, sound quality being not on par with Audirvana (in my opinion), super slow remote software, unintuitive search results are other things driving me away. I think those are some pretty big omissions for a tool for music lovers.
Having said that: I don’t want to leave Roon! If it became just a bit more of an allround or interoperable tool I would happily pay the lifetime fee. It does a lot right, but it limits me too much to be fully satisfying. No tool can do it all… but it is Roon that limits me from using it in cohesion with any other piece of software because it wants to do everything itself and everything differently.
I agree Roon is great fot people who enjoy music curation. But making life easier for music lovers that are not-so-die-hard curators might actually help Roon grow and develop faster. For me currently the balance tips in the wrong direction. Maybe I’ll subscribe again later.
4 Likes
Use both for that reason alone
Surely a curator would require more flexibility for tagging and more visibilty for those hard worked on tags, I do I IMHO
I am the one who quit Roon after 15 monhs of use. At the end of subscription apart from some minor ( or major problems after some upgrades ) I found that missing folder structure is unacceptable to me. And I am still subscribed here sneaking if there is any chance that Roon strategy will be change on that subject.
Sound wise Roon is not as great as some wants to tell, it is good sound quality player, but nothing really special.
The best part of Roon in my 15 months of use was Tidal sound quality which was greater than listening Tidal via Tidal player itself.
And if you are wondering about 15 months subscription, it was some special offer (pay 12, get 15)
I wish you all enjoy Roon.
These certainly are “interesting” reasons not to like Roon, but to each their own I guess. I’ve been a lifetime subscriber almost since day one, and the software has met all my needs except one (vertical scrolling). Other than this, it delivers hi-fi bliss on my high end stereo, and it delivers music to the rest of the house with equal competence.
2 Likes
Yes, vertical scrolling, please Roon.
2 Likes
I’m so glad I don’t need to look at folders. The Discover view is so awesome, I am discovering my own collection as if for the first time. The UI presentation of my bought music right adjacent to often a more extensive collection of the same artist from Tidal is so well done I get lost looking and finding new connections. I think the UI is just about flawless. No offense to the OP.
I’ve asked some questions and voiced some criticisms about the technical specifications for technical support of the app, but that’s just a pet peeve of mine. So far all of the components have worked beautifully as a very polished and robust Architecture for managing a large collection on hard drives and extensive support of streaming sources.
After winging in the forum a while, I think I understand Roon a lot better. At its heart it really is a “streaming” app. Very powerful, and robust, but I think streaming music without large buffers does require good network performance. I am guessing, but I thing this is probably the most elegant way to provide such a seamless, responsive, and flexible interface. The UI and functionality is so good, I’d string up Ethernet cable all over the house if that’s what it took to support the streaming.
With MP, I could force load tracks to memory on the player to avoid drop outs. But Roon appears to put all the horsepower and the server or core, which makes the player or bridge very light. Forcing big buffers is just not part of the scheme.
Roon has made the most of this architecture. The dsp capabilities in Roon are amazing and it supports the cheapest and most exotic endpoints with aplomb. I’m ditching my vinyl friends and going whole hog in dsp room correction. I’m so excited to hear bass rendered accurately in my space and have bought a mini dsp microphone. The mini dsp tutorials in the forum are truly revelatory, at least to me.
It’s been awhile since I took a deep dive into computer music over at Computer Audiophile, and I got bogged down in formats, the limits of my own collection, and pursuit of pure audio. After using Roon for a few weeks I am totally turned back on to digital music.
Jamie
3 Likes
Dear Stan-M, it was abundantly clear from your first post that Roon wasn’t for you. And, fairly, you gave your reasons.
Nothwithstanding Roon’s 1 month gratis for you to check it out, you decide that Roon is in fact not only a deeply flawed, fundamentally mistaken piece of software, but, by god, you definitely want us to know how far up are own arses our heads have gone.
Fortunately, not all of us here inhabit your world, and have decided Roon rocks, it’s our thing, and despite its well-known flaws, we use it for the music - for listening to our fave tunes, guilty pleasures (Bay City Rollers, anyone?) discovering new music by search or by radio. A year ago I was looking at a pile of cds ripped into itunes - enthusiasm zero. Now I have entire libraries of music at my fingertips, and there’s no way I’ll live long enough to hear all they have to offer. Oh yeah, and the sq - that works too, very well, and the zoning and the tagging and the curation and the radio. Classical box sets are a nightmare, it’s true, but hey, one day.
So, Stan-M, rejoice in the fact that it’s people like you who make individuals like us reconfirm our own values, and prefer to live with our heads arse-free, untroubled and moving along with music delivered to us the way we like it.
Adios my friend, tempus fugit.
8 Likes
This is my 4th , dont like change 
3 of em white
Pfew, I’m unsubscribing from this topic. Lots of cognitive dissonance going on. So you immediatly shelved out for a lifetime subscription and now Roon is perfect and holy. And everyone who dares to raise a concern which is a bit more critical than moving a button should leave, because: they just don’t get ‘it’ and Roon is not for them. Got it.
Now how are those posts helping things? Will they help figure out how to make Roon even better?
I read quite some valid and well argumented concerns (and I think I raised some myself) of how Roon is lacking in some very basic functions in order to be an allround package for a music lover. It doesn’t integrate with other software, so it should be allround! Roon is far from perfect and in my honest opinion losing value for money fast. It doesn’t need to change it’s core functioning, but it does need to expand it’s functionality in a reasonable timeframe. At the moment it is simply being overtaken by other software in terms of functionality, value for money and ease of use. I’m moving to Audirvana after my one year subscription ends. But I am hoping Roon adresses some of it’s shortcomings so I can finally go for that lifetime subscription and be done with it.
4 Likes
Audirvana is not a step up…I own both Roon and Audiravana…but you certainly can navigate using folders with it. :roll eyes:
I too will back out of this thread, it seems clear that some folks don’t like criticism even if veiled in humour
Why do threads like this always degrade to a slanging match when they could be so much more fruitful
Peace
There is no way threads such as this are ever fruitful.
Really? Don’t you mean it is how are computer file systems are run? Computers today run on relational databases that don’t care a lick about how the data is organized on disk. What they care about is how the data is presented and that is NEVER by how it is organized on disk. I look at what Roon does with music files as to what relational databases do with data. The only time I care about the underlying file structure is when I add a CD to my collection. For example, I put any David Bowie CD files in the David Bowie folder in a folder with the name of the album it comes from. That’s the last time I see the folder structure. I only do that in case I want to go back and manage those files outside of Roon.
Exactly, you just nulled your own argument. However good Roons database is, files are still stored within a file system, and manual house-keeping requires knowledge of that, and third party apps. An integrated folder view may be useful, but perhaps not entirely necessary.
And that’s because we just can’t break old habits. I do the same, even though I know I could just drag and drop the newly-ripped album folder onto the Roon screen and let Roon take care of it. I really don’t need to do any manual house-keeping at all…
1 Like
True 