I’ve been using Roon for a week or so now, trying to put the trial through it’s paces before committing. Currently running 1.8.988.
There are lots of reports in forums about stability - but I have had no issues. This is in contrast to using Spotify, Tidal, SiriusXM, and others talking to a remote player, AirPlay, Chromecast, DLNA, etc. Songs can be juggled around in the queue/playlist without getting “out of sync”, or losing connection.
The user interface to browse music is great, on other platforms it was way too easy to accidentally start playing a song, interrupting the current song you were listening to, and wiping out your current queue of music.
Identification and ordering of music is great. The newly added feature to manage multiple versions of the same album a welcome addition. My music library is a mix of owned CDs that I’ve ripped, digital downloads from HDTracks, Octave Records, etc, as well as plenty of “acquired” content. Roon runs through the library and identifies it all quickly and easily.
There are a few issues with the library, not sure if this is the fault of Roon, or the music database provider they use, but a few albums have details mis-identified. For instance a Dave Mathews album is identified as “David Matthews”, an entirely different artist. Two Queensryche albums are listed as different artists, one with the umlaut over the y, and one without. Interestingly the following day they were merged in to the same artist. It would be nice if there was a menu option on these albums to report them for reclassification, or allow the user to rename/group/merge.
Album/artist art is missing for mainstream artists that you’d expect to be complete. AC/DC, Erykah Badu, Soundgarden, Taj Mahal, Ted Nugent, all lack images.
I have a few user-interface complaints:
Why are the icons for artists and albums so damn big? I don’t have sausage fingers, nor am I three years old. Why can’t I have a list view to scroll through the artists/albums instead of only fitting four or so on the screen at once?
When using the display feature via Chromecast or a web browser, the progress bar for the song shows the waveform, why can’t the mobile client do this?
When viewing the queue, there is a bar at the bottom to toggle radio on/off. Why does this need to be here? All it does is take up screen real estate. If I want to turn it on/off I’ll go in to the settings.
Amazing stuff? As mentioned above, identification and management of music (especially multiple versions), audio quality (no messing around with the audio, unless you ask it to), support for multiple file formats, including DSD (although ISO support would be nice), the signal path view, showing what transcoding/dsp/lossy decompression is happening.
Finally - as a Linux user - why isn’t there a Linux client, or at least a web client? Managing everything from my phone is “good enough”, but sometimes I’d like to be able to use my laptop or desktop to manage a longer playlist.