Well, the obvious starting point is adding a performer sort so you can at least see all performances of a song by an artist instead of having to needlessly trawl all entries hoping to spot them
1 Like
With all these gripes, whatâs the alternative to Roon?
Itâs the best of a bad bunch, a good idea poorly implemented.
Underneath the front-end/UI Roon is excellent and I suspect thatâs where the dev teamâs true skills lie - back end architecture and engineering. UI/UX and use case are definitely not their key strengths.
4 Likes
I think having been around for some 6+ months now, which in the overall scheme of Roon isnât a long time, however, in that time Iâve been an active forum user & so feel I can make some commentsâŚ
In my time here there have been a myriad of suggestions/complaints and so on. It is a forum and so thatâs to be expected. Notwithstanding, whatever the complaints or suggestions are, I believe there is an underlying theme, that Roon can do better. I suspect, (but could be wrong), that much of this has to do with the pricing structure.
I do believe at top dollar for a music program, the expectation is that Roon should provide a seamless and perhaps highly flexible experience for the vast majority. Clearly, those that are here are mostly because they care for this particular piece of software and want it to grow. That includes some of those that are only often found when they chose to post some negative comments. After all, there would be no point in doing so if they didnât care.
In terms of music playback alone, Roon does it likely no better than a plethora of other software options & this includes apps that can be bought for roughly $5. Therefore, in terms of differentiation, Roon is about metadata usage, UI, DSP, integration with multi-room rigs, and more. If Roon canât get those features to operate seamlessly or to the bulk of userâs satisfaction, then of course there will always be threads that are deemed as so called complaints.
I have said it from my early days hereâŚI am all for improvements, whether they suit my needs or not, as the continual betterment of this software will only grow Roon, which is not only good for Roon devs & its longevity, but for all current and future users.
So, back to the quoted comments above; I donât think itâs a case of what are the alternatives, people want âtheirâ product to be better, especially given the cost of entry compared to any alternatives.
Cheers.
11 Likes
I might as well chip in here as Iâve been doing a lot of re-evaluating my Roon subscription. I agree with @Nostro that I think gripes arise because of the price of this software. This is by far the most expensive app I have every paid for and it is a yearly expense. I have now used Roon for just over a year so has cost me ÂŁ200 already. The competition does not necessarily do things better (Audirvana search is severely lacking for example) but I did expect more from this very expensive package. I am still in conversations with Roon about the app crashing daily on my Mac, and I still have issues with my home wifi causing drop outs and Qobuz to steam poorly due to a lack of basic caching on Roonâs part. All of these Audirvana does for me flawlessly and it is a far cheaper. It never crashes (not so far!), caches Qobuz streams so it never stutters or stops even when streaming around my house, and it makes no unmeetable demands on my wifi set up. And at the end of the day for me itâs listening to the music that is the most important thing to me.
Having said that I had high hopes for the actual experience of using Roon. I would have expected search to be excellent in Roon and it really isnât. Focus is majorly disappointing, eg choosing tags Cantata and Baroque gives me everything tagged as cantata AND everything tagged as Baroque, rather than âBaroque Cantatasâ. My tags have composers with last name first for my continued use of MinimServer to some end points (this predates my use of Roon) and Roon does not merge them with the correct composers. The quality of the metadata is variable - for one of the albums in my own library I listened to recently the album info section was actually a critic rubbishing the recording I was listening to rather than giving me interesting info about it!
Donât get me wrong there are many aspects of using Roon I really like and have enjoyed, but not enough for ÂŁ100 per year so it is unlikely I will renew again. But I have quite a few months to go for this yearâs money so maybe some of these basic issues (as the OP hints at) might be improved on.
6 Likes
I use JRiver Media Center to create and manage my library and Roon to play/stream music around the house. Yes, it would be nice if I could go Roon-only; however, JRMC offers several features that Roon does not have. For me, the most important are:
- Basic playlists: My favorite Tom Waits songs. My favorite Oldies.
- Complex playlists: My favorite Jazz songs that havenât been played in the last two years. Songs that have both Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter as contributing artists that are rated 4 or more stars.
- Metadata Management (including custom fields): Simple interface to add/modify things like date recorded, comments, notes, source, date composed, et. al.
A related issue is that Roon does not import/process the rating field from imported files.
5 Likes
Do you play a lot of games? It is not even in the same ballpark in terms of cost in comparison. I have games that cost 15 dollars a month to play, 3 or 4 of them,every month for years. I have netflix which is over 18 dollars a month, Tidal, Qobuz, etc etc. Roon is cheap in my universe.
5 Likes
Roon is only $9.92 per month. Although itâs paid annually, I think anyone who can afford the equipment and network to use Roon, can come up with $119. I pay more for Tidal, Qobuz, Sirius Radio, and Netflix, not to mention all the premium movie channels on AT&T U-Verse.
This thread is about missing basic features. If I felt Roon was missing basic features, I would have left a long time ago. Price would not be a factor. I wouldnât use it if it was free.
2 Likes
Ah yes, one of these threads (meaning The Roon Sympsthisers should be out in form to shut you down soon).
Iâve been a Roon user for nigh on 5 years, so not the longest time, but still longer than some in this thread. I, too, expected much more development, and have voiced my concerns over these (what I consider to be) basic features numerous times. The devs do not care, and show no interest in implementing nor improving them.
For some unknown reason there was streaming service implementation before sub genre editing or alternate metadata sources, despite the overwhelming majority of users holding personal (not cloud based) collections, and the very basic function of a large scale music database is to organise libraries. In fact, the latest update now causes my search function to lag for several seconds. The UX is still a nightmare. Iâve become complacent, and, Iâm afraid, as a user of multiple years, that my position is now that Roon only wants new users, and neglects its existing user base. Were I not foolish enough to realise this before buying a full licence, I would have immediately stuck with iTunes. The small improvements Roon offers are not sufficient to justify the expense, especially when there ARE alternatives.
Take a look at my forum submission history. Youâll see Iâve suggested these and others years ago. I actually did some digging. People have been complaining about these for a good 6 or 8 years, probably longer lol Whatâs the point of commenting? Iâll leave that to you to decide
3 Likes
Masochistic fun?
1 Like
Nice research! Roon started in 2015.
Those guys must have been prescient to speak to problems 1-3 years before Roon launched.
1 Like
Standing corrected. I remember seeing the posts, which pre-dated my own requests by a while, asking for stuff from this thread, which mirrored my own requests and thinking, âwell, there goes my wishlistâ
For those new to Roon, allow me to introduce you to Famous Foreheads. A visual bug in an application which promotes itself as a visual improvement to iTunes, demonstrated over two years ago. I find it funny, more than anything else. They really need a UX team.
Iâm not intending to â â â â on Roon, or the dev team. But thereâs little to no traction for bug erasure, let alone feature implementation
I was waiting for someone to pick up on thatâŚbetter you than me
1 Like
He got the timeline wrong, as much as you and @grossmsj might want it to, it doesnât make the points he raised any less valid.
6 Likes
Hi Daniel,
I think the conversation was based around music software, although to be fair Sam didnât specify. Notwithstanding, he did refer to the âcompetitionâ, so I would suggest we are only comparing music software. And it is rather expensive compared to the competition.
Cheers!
1 Like
I donât disagree but a way around it is the Tag , also the new(ish) ROONALBUMTAG tag , set this to say Monty Pythhon Complete etc . Leave the individual CD names as they are and Roon will construct a Tag for you as it Scans
It means a Tag per Box but better than nothing
Really? Please tell me how I can have a view of just classical music, with composers at the first level sorted in alphabetical order of surname, then at the second level sub-genres - Symphonies, Chamber, Choral etc. - then at the next level compositions, and then individual performances. Oh, and another similar view but biased towards performers? Or any number of arbitrary views based on any selection of tags I find useful. I certainly canât organise my library the way I want. Lots of people canât. I canât use most of the tags to search with, or order by, I am stuck with Roonâs very limited set of views. Roon thinks a 2 minute aria is the same as the three hour work from which it comes. That is definitely not what I want. Not remotely.
Oh how I wish I could organise my library the way I want! And search it!
(And Iâve just found out that LMS now integrates Qobuz favourites and my own rips (which was the big reason I subscribed to Roon), and is free, so I may well spend a socially-isolated afternoon investigating that. )
3 Likes
Get JRiver @Jez. Itâs perfect for that. I mean absolutely perfect.
Roon will never be JRiver. Life is too short.
3 Likes