My Roon review after 10days

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi,

I was looking for a solution to browse and to listen the music I have on a NAS.
Of course I tried upnp/dlna protocol with the devices I already had. But it wasn’t friendly and thing important it wasn’t gapless.
So, since a while I heard @John_Darko regularly talking about Roon. Then I decided, in this period of lockdown to test Roon.

I made different setups. At the beginning, I have installed Roon on my Macbook which was directly connected to my Qutest.
Few days later, I installed Roon on my NAS and I used an iPad or the Macbook as an endpoint.
And finally, because my NAS wasn’t enough powerful, I installed Roon on an Intel NUC.
As you guess the final setup is Roon on NUC, iPad as an endpoint and an iPhone to control.

In the same time I also subscribe to Qobuz.

My point of view after these 9 days of test is mixed.
Roon is a great software. you can browse your albums easily, you can bounce from an album to another.
You can search easily. You have gapless listening. You see clearly what is the path of the sound.
The information you have about a album or an artist are very enjoyable. There is also the concert date for example.
And the way that Qobuz is integrated is also a very good thing.
So Roon is very enjoyable, it give you the possibility to rediscover your library.

But, because, there is a but, there are some many irritating things.
The application crashed regularly on iPhone. Ii also happened on the Mac.
When Roon was installed on my Nas, each time I wanted to rename a device via the iPhone the app crashed.

Or I wanted to test airplay to my appleTV. I have never succeeded to stream to the AppleTV. The 4 numbers code never worked.

I also had some issue with the iPad as an endpoint. The music regularly stopped. It seems ok now.
There is also several things strange like the inability to swipe to see the different album on the discovering tab. You have to use the arrow.
Also on the iPad, there is no portrait mode for the model I have.

Or for example to manage the queue list where it’s impossible to click on the 3 points button because there is also the cross button :

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One more thing, when you have the path sound, you have a link to the user guide of your device. For the Qutest the link is broken.

To sum-up, I like the application and I understand why so many people use it. As I said it’s very enjoyable. It makes the job in an efficient way. And it’s compatible with lot of things. For this reason I decided to subscribe for one year. And we will see in one year.

But I don’t understand why there is some many issues, bugs.
I think it’s a high-end application and it’s not acceptable to have so many problem.
When I see the number of problems I had in just 9 days… I have never knew that on any device/application before.
The problem is maybe partially due to the fact that Roonlabs wants to have the exact same application on the different environment.

I hope it can help for the future of Roon.

Jim

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2

Salut Jimmy,

C’est parce que Roon aime pas la musique que tu écoutes:-)
More seriously I have had the same set up and never had a problem playing songs on ipad or iPhone nor the problem you describe. May be I say may be could be your network as if you use IPad in endpoint it is in wifi. Does It happen with qobuz only without roon on IPad?

And for the Roon environment annoying things you describe, I agree for some, but at the end all software have pros and cons. I agree it is sold as high end regarding the price we pay. But as a humble user I think they regularly improve it. It is not perfect but best match for me to share music all over the house between my qobuz and songs on my nas qnap.

See you on the forum

5 Likes
3

C’est parce que Roon aime pas la musique que tu écoutes:-)

:slight_smile:

I didn’t try Qobuz. But now it seems ok. I will see if it happen again.

I agree with you it’s the best match for playing music from a library.

4

One of the many annoyances I have as well. No idea why…

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5

Roon is open to suggestions. Post your thoughts in a constructive way and utilize the feature request subgroup as appropriate. I’ve been here four years. The product is constantly evolving and improving. Welcome to the forum.

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6

I can be of no help but just wanted to comment that I too enjoy the albums I have by First Aid Kit.

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7

Of course, I can make suggestion and ask for features. And I think I will.
For now, I can suggest to develop application with the very native SDK and not to share between different environment. I saw they use Xamarin and I understand why. But I think it could be the source of the issues I talked about. But I’m not sure they take into account this suggestion :wink:

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8

G’day Jimmy,

If you’ve listened to some of John’s more recent videos, he has learnt it is gapless using the correct software. It had been written in the comments many times, more recently he got the tip. Perhaps it also depends on all of your other gear whether there’s Compatability - I’m uncertain.

Salut.

9

Are you using an Airport Express? I’m sure I’ve read here that these are not advised to be used with Roon.

10

I don’t use an Airport Express. Just the box provided by my internet provider. And the iPad at one meter of the access point.
It seems it’s more stable when the iPad is plugged to its power supply.

11

As you said it depends of the devices. I have tested with the mconnect application, my Synology NAS and a bluray player and I didn’t have gapless playback.

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12

Oh right. I’ve never had problems with my iPad and Roon, it’s always been working fine. Any problems I’ve had have either been my own network issues, firmware/software updates being out of date in one part of the chain (most recently my streamer) or my own confusion. It’s good to have the forum here as there is a wealth of knowledge available when you need it.

13

It could be an network issue. But if it is, it’s a tricky one :).

I will continue to explore the forum and eventually ask for support.
For now, the goal was/is to give my feedback about my globale experience.

Anyway, thank you for your replies and helps.

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15

I too have regular iPhone and iPad crashes, I find it very frustrating.

I also don’t like that the interface on the iPhone is ‘dumbed down’ compared to the iPad. If I find a glitch in my library I have to hunt out my iPad to complete an edit.

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16

Hi

I had a very simple set-up, for most guys here I would probably be Mi-Fi with Music stored on MacMini as core and iPhone / iPad as endpoint, a Denon AVR and Apple TV with ELAC speakers. The MacMini to receiver was via optical cable, no WiFi and hence no multi-room. Only Qobuz in addition.

Worked well but of course there was the topic of having to connect the iMac every once in a while for updates, restarts etc.

I have now bought the Roon Nucleus - works so smooth, instantly up, no more fuzz. Great joy.

No crashes on iPhone.

So if you have a preference for not wasting life time try the nucleus as core.
That may be too simple for some here as there is nothing to configure.

But I am happy as can be car je ne dois plus « bricoler ».

17

I installed ROON in Mac Mini with music files in a NAS, then feed into a Rega DAC and use iPad as control. Everything goes smooth.
But I don’t understand why some friends here installed ROON in the NAS even they have a Mac in the system. Is there anything I have missed in my system?

18

You haven’t missed anything, but often people want to also use their computer for other tasks, and doing so might impact Roon’s performance. Hence the desire for a dedicated Roon Core server.

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19

No, you’ve not missed anything! Mac Mini for Core, NAS for files and everything (excepting control devices of course ) hard-wired. That’s the way to Roon nirvana!

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20

Well, I wanted to keep my music on my NAS, and it’s not good to have the Core elsewhere if you do that. So that’s one possible reason. Best to have them local to the Core.

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21

The Nucleus is, of course, the most simple way to enter in the Roon World. And I understand your point of view. I like the things they work without headache and “bricolage”. It’s the reason why I love the Apple world.
But the Nucleus is too expensive to just see if I like the ecosystem. So I bought a preowned NUC connected to my NAS, it’s cheap and it does the job.
And as I’m an IT guy, it wasn’t a big deal for me to configure it.

Anyway, Nucleus or not, it’s not logical to have so much issues.

1 Like