For me, this is the most compelling comment in this thread and it’s the only comment that caused me to question my own thinking on Roon’s discontinuation of disconnected playback. Roon essentially uses reinforcement learning to influence my behaviors. Over time, I’ve become more and more invested in, and dependent on, Roon. Most of the time, that’s a very fine outcome because Roon is generally delightful. When the power drops, though, I’m going to find myself in a worse state than I would have been in had I not chosen Roon. That’s sort of fascinating.
I don’t think this changes my opinion, though. I like Danny’s list of reasons why people keep local content. Other people tried to add things to it but I think those are just alternate forms of what he wrote. I’ve largely given up on a local collection and I now just keep stuff in Roon’s view that isn’t available online. I don’t have any emotional connection to the many rips I made. Who cares? I do keep them around in what’s essentially cool storage - they sit on my NAS, they get backed up to Azure. I can revert to them in a pinch but I don’t expect to need to.
What?! I’d argue that there’s a LOT of folks who load their local music into various devices. For example anyone with an SD card slot in their car stereos. I have a lot of co-workers with digital audio players in their offices who are listening to local music. Maybe because I live in a fringe cell reception area, I and my peers have more local music.
For me local music is about control. If I like it, I own it. My files aren’t in the cloud, my music is in my control. I have a Qobuz account for discovery and haven’t added any albums to my library, if I like it, I get it and put it in.
By that same token, because I’m a control freak, I also have a couple ways to squirt my music files to my devices. If my internet goes out, I’m still listening to music. Roon is only one of many ways.
This is tongue-in-cheek but I guess I shouldn’t be too worried about the musicians then.
To be clear, I am joking, everyone should get payed fairly. And having a few musician friends I really know how vital being payed is (I mean, isn’t it for everyone). But very few of them could afford a €7000 transport. Or even a €7000 speaker (which maybe is money better spent) for that matter.
Ah your point of valid. But you see, I never buy new equipment. In the used market you can get these are 1/3 or more of the price. Let someone else upgrade and we trap the benefits
Look out Mark…that kinda of talk will get you banned for 90 days…
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Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
354
Really, the solution here is to junk all the hi-fi gear, and just hire musicians locally when you want to listen to music. The musicians get paid, the transparency is excellent (“as if they’re in the same room”), and you no longer need a Roon subscription!
Even at 1/3rd the price I know very few musicians that could or would afford that. Audiophiles live in a pretty high castle compared to the rest of the world.
This is the biggest bugbear and why I have started to limit adding anything to Qobuz now as it’s just a pain in the neck to manage. I just prefer to buy what I like and stream the ones I want to try out or ones I haven’t got round to buying yet. So many albums removed, play history and edits gone and I have a redundant entry in my database that Roon cant even find via its focus for me to clean up. Makes me wonder why bother at all with the library approach for streaming as it really doesn’t work well currently and we have no tools to deal with it properly.
Just happened again… Roon recommending albums which already have been deleted from the streaming service (not even sure if the removed versions were from Tidal or Qobuz)… The two albums on the left were in my library, but are not available anymore and show a boilerplate cover. The album’s version which I saved into my library is not available anymore, but these albums still are available from both Tidal and Qobuz. This seems to me as just plain dumb. Roon must do better to keep track of the duds and recognize if the streaming providers replace one version of an album with another…
And how precisely do you propose to go about ‘spring cleaning’ an enormous library of files (assuming that one has not yet solved the small issue of life expectancy)?
One way you can do this is select all of your local albums in your Roon library, export, export for soundizz.
You can then use that to import (via soundizz) to a streaming service to check which ones exist. That will give you a full list of albums that don’t exist on a streaming service.
