I’m frustrated without knowing who should be the target of that frustration. In other words, I understand Roon has a small team…I understand that every user has a different priority…I understand that if Roon were to just develop to my preferences they’d have a product no one else would want…I understand that at its “core” Roon is still better than anything else I’ve seen for a bunch of central attributes…but at the same time when I have to spend 3 hours doing something that I know will be sunk cost because the way Roon does it does not translate to being embedded in my media collection, and thus will be lost if I stop using Roon for any reason, or when I cannot do something at all because Roon stops just short of a completed feature…it’s frustrating. EDIT: but it is not frustrating on Friday night when I can just kick back and listen.
James are you actually posting anymore or have you trained a bit to post the same thing but using different word combinations. YES we get it. Now go listen to some music. 
It occurred to me the other day that I mainly use Roon for playback.
I keep JRiver around for ripping, tagging, organizing, playlist management, and phone syncing. It also has great sounding playback, dsp, and all that stuff. RAAT is solid, but so is JRiver in shared library client server mode. Plus, it does DLNA and you can fine tune it for perfect playback on just about anything.
Starting to wonder why I keep roon. The metadata is cool, but the novelty is wearing off. All that stuff is available all over the internet and more extensive. Plus, I’m reluctant to spend much time fixing roon metadata, album art, etc. errors since it isn’t portable.
Tidal is about the only other reason I keep it. But my roon overview shows the same hip-hop and other stuff I’m not interested in that the Tidal app shows, so what’s the point? And roon doesn’t even show the Tidal “my mixes” which are somewhat relevant.
Roon radio pulling up Tidal content is cool and has led to some discovery, but that novelty has also worn off as it’s been in a rut with the same old same old over and over.
I’m just about over Tidal anyway. Most new stuff doesn’t interest me. If it does I’d rather buy the CD or download and support the artist.
So, in regards to value, I’m having second thoughts.
Same here,I need DLNA for my soundbar and video so I keep JRiver alive too
The customization is a plus too, I use it big classical boxes because I can , Roon simply can’t
I agree that there is a novelty factor to Roon. When I first started using Roon a few years back, I’d show it off to anyone that would listen. The novelty was totally cool. Many were impressed. Some not so much. But like a shiny new car, the shine wears off a bit over time. But what I have come to realize is that Roon has changed how I select what I listen to, what I do while I’m listening, how I discover artists that participated in any given album, what else those artists have done, etc, etc… Sure, all of that is available on the internet, but not nearly as slick and convenient as with Roon.
Yeh, would be great if it actually worked consistently though. There’s a lot of that kind of thing Roon should be trying together but doesn’t for reasons known only to Roon. When you start scratching beneath the surface there’s no consistency so you can’t even point to something simple like unidentified albums…and don’t ask for support to assist on this front.
Agreed. About 5% of my albums cannot be identified within Roon. But some of these unidentified albums do have info in my metadata (as tagged in my flac files) that are found by Roon with appropriate links to the labels, artists, composers, conductors, etc… and thus other albums.
Not sure I can fully blame Roon on the failures of their contracted metadata suppliers but hopefully that will improve over time. I do wish there was a way for me to fill-in info on albums and/or artists myself. Although I have found it useful to drop PDFs and/or JPGs into the album folder for little-known albums & artists.
I don’t know what @evand is talking about but no, you can’t blame Roon for unidentified albums unless you somehow think it would be smart for Roon to be in the metadata creation and maintenance business. They are smart to avoid that…
I’m referring to this kind of crap, which works or doesn’t for no rhyme or reason, identified or unidentified as my library attests to:
I would argue they arent that smart, because they do maintain metadata by matching up MusicBrainz/AllMusic metadata and manually fixing issues with artist of the same name ectera.
Much better to spend that effort filing in the gaps in MusicBrainz and ditching AllMusic.
They’d have to abandon their genre schema also. Given how poor it’s become iro implementation it’s no biggie anyhow