My subscription is up. I just got an email from Roon saying “Sorry to see you go” and inviting me to sign in and subscribe. I may eventually do that but first I am going to try to see if I can put together an alternative way to stream music in my home(s).
How did I get here? I started with Roon many years ago and I fell in love with a number of things. First, that it just worked when getting things to work was a royal pain. Second, it was a good/great UI - it pulled together many pieces of information and put them right in front of you. Third, of course, was that it let me stream to many endpoints taking music to all corners of my house and allowing me to leverage a FLAC library on my NAS.
But from that start, one that I thought I would never leave, Roon has strayed and the first dimension, that it just worked, is no longer true. I have 3 homes and Roon setups in all three. Lately, whenever I go to one of them and want to play music it just didn’t work. There were constant problems and I would spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get things working again. When I get to my house in Italy, I want to just listen to music, not try to debug problems that keep me from streaming music in my home. I need a stable system that does what it does reliably and without bugs and that is not what Roon is giving me these days.
So, I am going to try some alternative approaches. Maybe they will teach me that Roon, flaws and all, is still the best alternative. But I’ve dabbled with some and found them, while not up to Roon standards in some ways, stable and that is worth more to me that the latest cutting edge feature.
Hopefully someone from roon will notice and start offering a consistent, contiguous & reliable support system, the current (bordering on non-existent) one is letting a lot of folk down and I wouldn’t blame them for giving up & leaving…
2 Homes in US and one in Italy. Yes, nets are connected via tailscale but I have a server in each location with a copy of my FLAC music library so I only play using the server in the house I am in (only server/DB active is the current home).
One problem was, in fact, having tailscale up and roon getting confused. Turning off tailscale, running roon fixed the problem and then one could restart tailscale. problem would recur though.
May I enquire what the use of Tailscale was for if you have servers and music files in each location. If I had this type of setup I wouldn’t see the need of Tailscale.
I run Channels DVR on a server in the US fed by a HDHomeRun Prime (3 tuner with cablecard). I stream from that server to the other US house and also Italy to watch US TV. When I am in the US and want to watch Italian TV, I use Tailscale to create an exit node at my Italy home and use the RaiPlay app to watch Italian TV. Similarly, when in Italy and I want to watch streaming services in the US, a Tailscale exit node on at my PA home facilitates that (and my NYC apartment provides an alternate exit node in case my PA net is down - as occasionally occurs due to power outages in the summer).
There are other reasons besides that use case but that is the primary one. Whether music (ripped FLAC of my CD collection) or our library of movies, I replicate all media in each house - that way if I have an internet problem I can always watch/listen to any of that content whereever I am.
I authorize/unauthorize. I’ll give PlexAmp a try. I’d say that I have a love/hate with Roon as well. I’d suffer the problems but at $150+ for a year subscription I think table stakes are stability and a good user experience. It seems every time I go to another house there are a couple of problems that I have to deal with. Just not worth the hassle. Especially since I don’t really play that much music on my speakers/systems anymore. Most of my music listening is with earbuds and through my phone or computer. The only time I want it on speakers is as background music and that’s the last time I want to bump into a problem.
The problem with not running Tailscale on the roon server is that server runs other things as well where I do want/need tailscale. It will be even more true as I add a proxmox server later this year.
If Roon isn’t working for you, it isn’t working for you and the best thing is to move on. Ignore those that say it works for me must be your setup. Until you have a problem with Roon, you tend to look through rose tinted glasses. I stopped subbing early this year for a few months due to the consistent remote crashes that had been ignored for months. I returned to full sub last month as this issue is resolved ( although it has reared its head a few times after recent update). But the software is still not hugely reliable in other ways as I have discovered lots of database issues that hadn’t been around before and are known issues.
Truly sorry to see any loyal roon subscriber moving away although I fully understand your concerns and expectations when it comes to stability. I was at that point as well, had my difficult period with roon 1.5 years ago but finally came to the conclusion it is simply the best and I am willing to invest some time if things might not be as smooth as expected. And since the end of last year, they got significantly better.
Did you notice any root cause of the problems except the ones caused by Tailscale? Did you try running roon on a separated machine?
Was a bit surprised to read Plexamp is what you want to try. Not really what I would see as an alternative to replace roon in terms of multiroom streaming or library management.
I have the feeling that many people are lately reporting issues with stability of ´their´ beloved streaming system may it be proprietary like Sonos or more or less open protocol. Only exception about no-one I am aware of is complaining is Spotify Connect which seems to run rock-solid but the app really lacks everything I love about roon.
Plex is perfectly fine if you’re not a classical listener. For all else it’s pretty damned good and uses MusicBrianz and TiVo as sources for metadata like Roon. It may not be as complete but it works and it works well at finding and playing music. It’s also a lot more stable in my experience, never had an issue with it in 10 years or so I have used it. If only it supported Qobuz I would have likely completely ditched Roon when I stopped subbing in April when the remote issue was at its worst.
) Tailscale was introduced to overcome some of the issues (deficiencies ?) running ARC …