Easy enough using REW/rephase, and exporting/importing filters into Roon.
Yeah we have been down this road in another thread, its not particularly easy. I must get round to trying again, but honestly life is too short lol.
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Second to last bullet point is the most important. Also, it’s OSS. If you can code PERL you can make it do whatever you want.
I bought a lifetime Roon, but I have several Squeeze devices and didn’t like the idea of wasting the displays by turning them into Roon endpoints, so I run LMS–mostly for radio and alarm clock. After Netgear and Synology both deprecated their LMS I use Pi. Couldn’t be easier.
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Don’t forget to mention the SQ of LMS vs Roon. I’m using open-source LMS mainly on RPi SBC’s and closed-source LMS on InnuOS. I’ve compared LMS/squeezelite/SLIM and Roon/RAAT very often. In fact I have all flavours inhouse to compare continuously. IMHO LMS gives you MUSIC and Roon gives you SOUND. A compromise is Roon Core with Squeezebox option enabled and a Squeezelite streamer like piCorePlayer or moOde or commercial streamers like InnuOS and SOtM … Disadvantage of LMS open-source is the TIDAL MQA limit to 44.1kHz. So no high-res MQA. High-res MQA is supported bij InnuOS for example. They’ve developed a LMS QobuzLink and TidalLink plugin which are closed-source. Works great! Also with Qobuz- and Tidal Connect via their own apps. If you don’t agree with me or you have any questions please contact me …
Grtz Theo
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Both work. Both can do similar things. With LMS to get all the features you need to find and install plugins. But it’s free.
In general LMS works fine. There’s still the forum for support and there are still a few people upgrading it and supporting it as open source volunteers.
If you want to incorporate DRC with LMS it’s an issue, hard to do, and sometimes doesn’t work. The other DSP functions that are part of Roon are add-ons in LMS and a bit wonky. It may or may not do what you want.
With LMS you can add your own internet radio stations.
The LMS interface is inferior. Even with the improvement of Material. Roon gives you many more possibilities of how to view your music and how to find what you want.
The biggest downside of LMS is that while you can use it to playback streaming services, it doesn’t integrate the streaming service into your library and searches like Roon does.
I still use an SB Touch. But today for less money you can buy a Rpi with a touchscreen and set it up with an LMS emulator. Looks and works just like a Touch but with a bigger screen.
People who think there’s a big SQ difference between the two SW platforms have active imaginations.
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If you have a large local music library or .mb4 audio book files it is nice to have LMS in addition to ROON. It would surprise me if there would be a noticeable difference in sound quality besides differences originating from different endpoints performing the digital to analog conversion. ROON ignores .mb4 audio files, although is only AAC, and ROON lacks a search based on the file path. Sometimes I look in LMS to find certain music that I do not find in ROON since I do not remember the artist, but I know how to find it in LMS.
I agree with all your points. But do note that somewhat recently, LMS now has the ability to integrate streaming services into one’s library and searches. I know it works with Spotify and I think with TIDAL and Qobuz as well. May require LMS 8.2.x version for this option. It is an LMS plugin called “Online Music Library Integration” and you have to turn this on in the settings for the plugin.
Maybe I didn’t phrase it well. It integrates streaming services, but not seamlessly like Roon does. Roon nails it; LMS sort of does it, but not nearly as well.
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agree. I’ve referred to the LMS streaming integration as a “poor man’s” Roon type feature before.
Got to ROON 5 years ago, big mistake…way too expensive and clunky interface, bad indexing, busy UI, the DSP function is good but I’m not using it.
With ROON you pay way too much for a music player.
And the lack of plug-ins is a total catastrophe…where YT ? Where’s Deezer ? Where is internet radio ?
Sticking with LMS, now and for the future, it’s a straight road, well maintained by passionate people.
Roon is candy store…what we need it’s a good player with good indexing, nothing more.
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Expensive! Coming from someone flogging an overpriced pc server running someone else’s operating system that just happens to be based around LMS. No agenda then.
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“Active Imagination”… a bit condescending isn’t it?
Unfortunately (as the UX is incomparable) and after many attempts to convince myself otherwise (and with friends listening blind between the options), on my Server (which supports both LMS and Roon modes) the full LMS (server + player) is SQ wise superior. I have heard some explanations (that Roon precisely due to its “rich” UI requires heavy communication over the network which has a detrimental effect on SQ) which may or may not be the true root cause but the fact is that this is not the product of active imagination.
You’re joking, right?
LMS easily handles my ~130,000 track (mostly 16/44.1 FLAC files). And LMS is running on an rPi4B with an attached 4TB USB drive.
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I agree. LMS has never had an issue scanning a large number of files for me.
Large digital music libraries require a robust computer whether using LMS or Roon and with the proper computer both LMS and Roon can manage very large digital music libraries. My library has nearly a million tracks and Roon handles it without too many issues. One issue being the need to restart Roon once every couple of days.
For me what makes Roon the winner is the flexibility of Roon with respect to end points. RAAT, Squeezeboxen, Chromecast, AirPlay, etc. Let’s not forget about the built in DSP functions. I use convolution filters for almost all my headphone listening. Intergration with Tidal and Qobuz is another winning feature.
So yes, LMS is free and Roon is not but in this world you get what you pay for. 
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LMS is definitely a very good solution that I used for many years. I have still 3 LMS servers running, which are rarely used nowadays, however, typically only for listening to audio books. For hearing music I definitely prefer ROON. I cannot verify that ROON has sound quality advantages over LMS or that LMS has sound quality advantages over ROON of that both give the same sound quality. From my understanding, I would assume that both provide the same sound quality in principle, and that any differences result from the endpoints that are used, as far as differences are noticeable in a double blind test.
Regularly restarting ROON is not necessary for me, but I have only 113348 files in my local library of LMS and 123927 title in my ROON library, including TIDAL and QOBUZ titles. The Flac music files of the LMS library are of course included in the ROON library.
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But LMS indexer is pretty basic its not matching them to anything really all it takes is your tags and that’s it. It’s not matching it to metadata services finding artwork etc it just reads your files and presents them. It’s a very different beast to what Roon is doing. You canadd the extra artist info but by god its awful. I just started LMS up again to have a look, as I had updated Ubuntu since I last ran it, it would not start so had to find a newer version that worked so on latest 8.3 release now. It then didnt pick up all my new music thats been added so had todo a full rescan so not very robust either. Its just feels so dated, Material skin doesnt help i think i prefer the old LMS default skin to this. I would be exasperated to use this now for any great lenghts of time it really feels outdated and past its prime. As for SQ it sounds the same in my systems.
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I’m talking about hosting RadioNet or a similar Radio Station aggregator.