"Roon Lite" / "Roon Light" - Roon with limited functionality (and potentially less expensive)

With a proper grounding scheme there is no need to power your equipment with batteries. On contrary to popular believe batteries are not noise free, a good designed smps or linear supply can be made with less noise than many batteries. If there is anything would not power form batteries it is a server. A nuc does not have any safety auto-shutdown functions like a laptop. So, with a NUC there is a severe chance of data corruption when your battery runs low. Besides, I have tried man PC’s as a Roon Core and I can confirm that it all doesn’t matter, as long as your grounding scheme is right. Expensive PSU’s are a waste of money for a Roon Core PC. It needs to be stable for good operation but that’s about it

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Ray, @Xekomi has posted a link to the supported NUC’s. I believe the 10i5 is lower power than a 8i5, but honestly IMO, you’re better off just using the supplied PSU. NUC’s have on board switch mode regulation which you cannot avoid, so the benefits of any exotic external power supply arrangement is effectively negated.

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Once upon a time, Microsoft sold Microsoft Works, a lite version of Microsoft Office. They discontinued it about 25 years ago. Meanwhile, Office brings Microsoft many billions of dollars of revenue each year.

The basic problem: each user uses only a small fraction of the features of Office, but they all use a different subset. Note that in this thread, different posters can’t agree if “Roon Lite” should be streaming only or local library only. That’s the problem in a nutshell….

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Looking at new (young) customers and the future of Roon it’s maybe an educated guess that local media will not be a primary subject.

I guess most people who are asking for a Roon lite version don’t realise how many of the features of Roon full version they actually use. I an database free version (the light version requested by the OP) you won’t have any artists photo’s on the now playing screen. You wouldn’t have any automatically downloaded album art. you wouldn’t have any information on band members, record labels, discographies etc. You wouldn’t have any lyrics, you wouldn’t have any recomendations of any kind, you wouldn’t have any…well you catch my drift. It is all this information that comes from the Roon database and it is exactly this what sets the price and why Roon isn’t a one-time purchase but a subscription model. There wouldn’t be much left of the interface without it and I guess you won’t like it very much. Without the database you have nothing more than a player that is capable of playing your local library and capable of playing Tidal/Qobuz but won’t be capable of providing any link between these two. You won’t be able to see all the albums of an artist of which you allready have one album for instance, and that is just the simplest case I can come up with.

Second case is a Roon lite with only local content. That’s plain silly as well because Roon is first and foremost about local content/streaming integration and this is exactly it’s most attractive feature for the majority of subscribers. It’s only a very small percentage of users that only wants local content so providing a lite model for these people is only a double loss. A loss of income and a loss for cost made to provide and maintain such a lite version which ends up being more expensive than the full version. Lots of examples from other software compagnies on how this works out in practice.

Third, a lite version without DSP. That makes no sense as well because the cost of Roon is not determined by it DSP capabilities. My guess is that the Roon team didn’t even write the DSP engine themselves, only the user interface of it. Skipping the DSP for a lite version would make it maybe $5,- a year less expensive at most but if you add up the cost of providing a light version it would have to cost $5,- to $10,- a year more than the full version. Just estimating here because I don’t have any real numbers but that is not needed for setting an example, it might be even as low as $1,- up to $10,- a year but in either case it doesn’t make sense

Fourth, there would never ever, as in just never be any agreement on which functions there would be in a lite version, it would be literally discussed to death. If I where Roon I would stay away from it as far as possible.

Fifth, a lite version to cut down energy usage to be able to run your Roon core from a battery?. Well, do I really have to comment on this? Better not.

All in all, a lite version makes no sense from whatever perspective you look at it.

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Question is if RaaS (Roon as a service) might be a future model. Without the hardware hassle at home. Nice for the nerds among us. Quite a pain in the back for the rest.

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That another question than a Roon lite version. But I think even with a Roon as a service version you would need some kind of server at home to provide the cloudbased Roon information about your local content.

Besides, the hardware is not such a hassle, people make it a hassle. The simplest way is to just install roon on a laptop, attach a DAC to it or just plugin your headphone and you are up and running. It does not need anything more than that. Even in case of a dedicated Roon server it does not need fancy routers, switches, cables or power supplies. You reaaly do not need all that. Keep it simple and it is just as simple as a Roon as a service would be.

Nope. That’s not in my scenario :wink:

That’s assuming all users want these features. I don’t. I just want a reliable transport. I add my own album cover image–Roon often picks the wrong one. I do my own tagging–the metadata Roon pulls in is piss-poor and I’m constantly having to correct errors. The recommendations are just spam to me–get that nonsense out of the way. The reviews are from All Music…enough said. :roll_eyes: All that other information I don’t even want or need. Lyrics? Seriously? I’m not a teenager. I just want a good, reliable player that gets data to my devices bit-perfect. There is a lot of licensing to pay for extras I simply do not want in my player.

Roon does this for me–it sorts my music logically, blends in Qobuz, and does whatever else I need, but all the added clutter is just wasted on me. My idea of Lite gets rid of most of these licensed “features” do not want in my software–don’t think these data streams are free.

Your mileage may vary of course…

The data IS what you pay for. I don’t know if you know anything about software development and maintenance but a lite version almost allways ends up being more expensive than the full version. The only way to make a affordable light version is a full version with blocked parts, in other words everything will be there, active and vissible only it is not user accessible. Any other version will cost more time, money, maintenance, support. Roon has enough problems allready to maintain one stable version, software is not as simple as leaving a part out or adding a part, everything interacts with one and other.

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I’m currently using the Roon free trial period to stream Qobuz to a PS Audio Direcstream with Bridge II board. It works quite well, better than anything else I have used. The Qobuz Windows & phone Apps do not support network-attached playback devices.

However this is the single Roon feature I am using, and am likely to ever use. I have no media library, no media server, no purchased music. As such the $120 annual fee is an extremely high cost for a Qobuz user interface. There’s no more than a 1% chance that I will pay for a license when my free trial period expires.

It would be great if Roon offered a very limited feature set on a product to stream Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer whatever. Strip out the other features.

How much would you pay for such a product?

$120/yr, $10/mo, $0.33/day is too much, so what’s the right price for you?

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Well, streaming user interfaces tend to be quite inexpensive. Spotify includes one in their regular streaming subscription for no extra charge, and it does find network devices, like my Bridge II and works perfectly with it.

There are many free similar apps for smartphones, such as the Lumin app and Mcontrol, which also both work with network devices. The Sonos controller app is free for life when one purchases a Sonos streamer, which is a network device.

The Qobuz app can stream through Chromecast and USB. That’s a free app.

So paying $120/yr for essentially the same product (if there was a Roon Lite) is extremely expensive.

So what would I pay for an app which is normally free? Understanding that Roon has no hardware product or music streaming service to package with it, it goes that they would need to recover expenses. So I would think it would be around $20-$30. It is such a simple product, just an interface between music services and network-attached devices. They already have this capability within Roon. Just like JRiver and BubbleUpnp have it.

I already have three Android apps which do this for Qobuz. I’d just rather have a Windows app too.

Ideally Qobuz will add it to their Windows app, just like Spotify has done. I may just run a USB cable from my PC to the Streamer and that will give me the same functionality.

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If you write your own I’ll consider paying $20-$30 for it. Simple!

I suspect the cost of Roon’s metadata services which you would still be using cost more than that.

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That’s the cost few folk consider.

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If the Roon price was too high, they would not have 250,000 paying customers.

He’s not talking about those customers, he’s talking about the others that aren’t customers (yet).

$20-30/yr or 1 time?

I would disagree about being “simple”. The product itself involves weekly certifications and development from partners that we do for free. We do this because if we don’t, it’ll turn into the free UPnP ecosystem.

If you feel that Roon and Qobuz app are the same product, this is completely understandable. But we are trying to bring more value than that, and thus the fee. If that value doesn’t match what you need, you have an annoying problem of paying for things you don’t care about (library/metadata) or “overpaying” for things you do (devices/transport).

Note that larger players (TIDAL, Spotify, Apple) have built their own solutions to the transport problem, without having to piggyback on top of Roon.

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I’m talking about both current customers and possible future customers who think the price is fair, too high, or too low.

It seems to me that it comes down to Roon deciding if it is worth their while to offer a Music Streaming Interface product which people could use as a standard, well-designed interface to any of a number of streaming services, be it Tidal, Qobuz, whatever.

This would be an option for people who would like a common interface to many popular streaming services.

Support wise, Roon could offer the product with the rest of Roon’s features locked. So if those customers would later like to add those features they could purchase a key to unlock them. Roon would then have only one product to support, which would simplify ongoing maintenance. There are many software products which already follow this model.

Roon could possibly attract more long-term customers into the larger Roon environment. Customers who use and like the “Roon Lite” music streaming product, may start to purchase music and would already be familiar with Roon’s software.