Leaving Roon after price increase

I appreciate where you’re coming from. I have the opposite experience though. I just ‘left’ Audirvana 3.5 (after they quit supporting it when they solely focused on a new product, leaving 3.5 days in its current buggy state). Audirvana 3.5 would act up as soon as I sat down for a listening session…restart computer, check firewall settings…then when it did start streaming music it would skip over some songs in the album queue. Too many bugs for my taste.

Roon has been solid for me. Plus it’s still supported. No bait and switch from Roon regarding the product. I haven’t noticed a difference in sound quality between Roon and Audirvana. But Roon is more user friendly regarding volume controls and other filters.

It is so interesting, how so many people have different experiences. A3.5 has been running perfectly, 99.8 percent of the time. On the other hand, Roon would be running perfectly for a good run, but then would do or not do various things that would require a complete reset. I am giving LMS, Volumio, and Moodle a try, and see how it goes from there. I personally, don’t see Roon as we know it, lasting another 10 years. The high subscription price and the suspect lifetime subscription have my decision to leave Roon, sitting quite well with me. Plus, ARC is one buggy and useless rollout as well. Just my opinion though, and we all know opinions. The key is, are we having fun and enjoying the music? I for one am, and will continue to be. I forgot to mention that physical media is my primary source of musical enjoyment, so media servers and related, such as Roon/Audivana/LMS/Moodle and such are all just geeky fun. Something I don’t take too seriously. I enjoy conversations such as this far more.

IMHO, I think Roon will be around for as long as Roon wants to be around. This price increase is really not all that painful and after 7 years of no increases, it’s not all that surprising. Personally, I think it’s damn hard to create a robust software platform that is primarily targeted at non-computer geek customers and support and evolve it as well as they have.
Sure, some people have had issues with it because it depends so heavily on each user’s home network, internet service and wide range of hardware. I’m still blown away by what it does compared to what was possible just 8 years ago.

Truth is, technology has had a huge impact on how, when and where we listen to music. I haven’t seen any platform that does it better than Roon although the competition is certainly heating up. But that’s a good thing.
Can’t wait to see where Roon goes from here.

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That’s surprising to me as I have had the opposite experience - audirvana was so buggy especially the studio 2.0 that I wondered how they even released it

As for sonic quality roon sounds different but not sure if it’s better or worse than AV

Well as painful as a price increase is always - it’s most likely the only way to get a more sophisticated ROON software in the future.
In its core there are still major areas to address which highly need some work like search, ROON radio, iOS app problems etc.
Users very much know these pain points - but hopefully the additional budget is the start of getting these core requirements on par.

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Time for me to leave I think. Don’t use ARC at all as I don’t find it very reliable and working from home less so can’t justify it. Laters

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I can remember when the Rand Dollar was 2.5 and another time it was 22

It’s currently 17.5

Euro spenders have it easy :smiling_imp::smiling_imp:

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Add to that Naim/Focal and Cambridge Audio StreamMagic. They are both adequate for running the streamer but nowhere near the sophistication of Roon

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SORRY there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

The app cost is a part of the product development of the hardware

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About the lifetime subscription: as a subscriber I wouldn’t worry about my lifetime but more about Roon’s lifetime as companies like Roon come and go…

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I’ll add my 2 cents, not to criticize Roon, but rather to provide feedback. My use case is mine though and is possibly not the one Roon are aiming for. Essentially though, as Tidal subscriber and having stored my music on a hard drive / Network drive and having compared (perhaps not overly critically) Roon playing my locally / networked stored files versus streaming via Tidal, I have not noticed sufficient difference to make Roon my winner over Tidal. This leaves Tidal as a source I am more than happy with - one reason less to use Roon. Then we come to Tidal versus Roon for serving up suggestions, artist vs Roon Radio etc and my conclusion is that Tidal whilst not doing it as well as Roon does, is doing enough that it makes no real sense for me to shell out almost the same again for suggestions, information and a better radio. I feel Roon isn’t for me, much as I like it, but with prices increasing, it is never again going to be for me, as my requirements are met by Tidal and the extra that Roon offers is something I can happily go without. Roon at a fiver a month becomes interesting for me - as a layer on top of Tidal, without the ability to play local or network stored digital files, but this is not what Roon is trying to do, I get that. So, so long, and good luck!

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@Dans - your logic makes perfect sense. If I did not have my own local library of music, if I had no need to stream to more than one endpoint, if DSP and depth of metadata was of little interest, if all I wanted to do was to play music, then there is a wide set of options (Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer…) that all do that sufficiently well.

IMHO, Roon offers a much more robust way of listening to music, but not everyone has the interest, time or resources for it. Bottom line, enjoy music however serves you best.

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At the end of the day we all have to do our own cost / benefit analysis. Mine:

Pros:

  • Ability to change album names, metadata, tags.
  • Solid AirPlay connectivity for background listening.

Cons:

  • No option to view album year in album view, no option to not see annoying critics’ reviews, no browse by label.
  • Price
  • Bugs / Constant updates

I’ll probably cancel my sub in December and see if going without makes much of a difference.

Do you mean in My Albums, the overview? Good point, would be nice if years were shown, in particular if sorted by date. Did you check if a feature request exists?

In the album view itself it’s possible. The one at the top is the original release date, the lower one is the release date. It’s possible to sort by either in My Albums (option in settings)

In My Albums you can focus on years. This is from the phone, where it is limited. There are additional options on tablet and PC (you can choose arbitrary from-to years):

A solution for the second will come soon and is already in earlyaccess testing:

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In Focus (and Search) you can list albums in your Library by Label. So if you want to see what you have in your Library for a given Label, it works. Of course, if you want to see what albums Tidal or Qobuz have for the same label that you have not yet added to your library, Roon isn’t going to help with that. That would be a great feature.

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LMS year and album view.

I hope Roon implements year display, and I very much hope they don’t do it as ugly as this.

Anyway, here is the feature request. Zero people voted for it and 8 posts in the thread, so.

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Thanks. People should search for existing requests before opening new ones. This one isn’t a burner either with 4 votes though :slight_smile: