Last week I decided to try Roon, after hearing enthusiastic talk about it on Head-Fi. So after trying it for a few days, with the core initially setup on my PC, I decided to get myself an Intel NUC (7i7DNHE), 8 GB of DDR4 RAM and a M.2 SSD (Samsung 970 Evo 250 GB) and move the core to that device.
What I like about Roon is it’s ability to have all of my music displayed in a single program which is also able to come up with a myriad of information on artists, albums and songs. It feels like the old days, where you could go to a record store and physically hold the LP/CD, look at the sleeve before deciding to buy it, getting back home, putting on the LP/CD and just feeling immersed in the music.
So far so good, however there are also quite a lot of things that I dislike about Roon, over the past week, I’ve ran into issues like Roon not syncing with Tidal, even when manually synchronizing it, Roon remote not wanting to connect to output devices on my phone, Roon being stuck in fixed volume mode on my computer and it coming up with error messages like “TIDAL: This track is not currently available from Tidal.”
Now being a quite a tech savvy person, I was able to resolve all of these problems myself, however that doesn’t take away from the fact that I find Roon to be quite buggy. I’m doubtful that I’ll upgrade to the paid version, since having so many issues during the trail period combined with a lifetime license that costs $500 is a bitter pill to swallow.
During my time as an audiophile, I’ve seen many audio players, that are of better quality, like Foobar2000, Mediamonkey, Jriver and HQplayer, while some of them are even freeware. I really feel that for this price, quality control should be doing a much better job, to justify for paying for a license.
Other users may have completely different experiences while using Roon, So I look forward to hearing from them.
Edit: My Roon setup is as follows:
Intel NUC running ROCK (Roon Core), database stored on SSD, while my music is stored on a NAS. The NUC is setup to connect to the NAS. It is feeding a Schiit Yggdrasil DAC, a phone with a Chord Mojo connected to it and a tablet.