Near misses in Roon

[RobOK]

I loved the poll about what people like about Roon, it shows what a diverse, complex product (suite) it is! Everyone has a different collection of three things.

I was writing a reply and I thought it was coming off negative – I’m not. But I feel like so many things in Roon get close to Awesomeness and fall a bit short.

Wow, this is tough. There are many to choose from and as noted above, it is the collection of them together.

I do have to say my love of Roon is dropping off. The things that used to wow me seem a little stale – the metadata is good but not great… the promise of having more sources of data like a magazine (wikipedia was a good add) never fully got there.

Same with Discovery. For reference, I am a Tidal streaming (gave up on a local collection a while back) and almost always Playlist focused.

Some near misses:

• Discovery can be great but does not recommend tracks to a playlist like Spotify and Tidal do
• ARC is game changer, but because I stream only, it is not available on airplanes (no cache), so that means I need playlists on Tidal and save them local. So that keeps most of my playlists on Tidal. (I don’t see this as Roon’s fault at all, I doubt Tidal would let them do this.)
• the playlist integration (Roon+Tidal two way sync) is a game changer to have both Roon and Tidal playlists editable, but inexplicably they are not shown on one combined list until you search. Weird miss.
• Also, the playlist optimizer tools are awesome… about 20% of the time the changes don’t sync back to Tidal
• Artist images - I was excited a few years back with the tools for uploading images, and maybe I lost track of activity there, but it does not seem artists are getting any new art. I see the same images over and over. Again, near miss

I use Roon everyday, I am a huge fan and I’m sure everyone has their lists of near misses that I don’t even notice, so take this all with a grain of salt!

Poll: What do you like most about Roon?

Hey, Community friends, I want to share a question with you that I frequently get when talking to current and prospective customers, Roon partners, reviewers, and sundry music lovers: What do you like most about Roon? I have numerous answers to this question, but I’m basically thee most biased person somebody can ask! So, I thought it would be fun to ask all of you and then create a poll from your answers—similar to your speaker responses —and see if there’s a Roon feature/trait/solu…

[Anthony_B (Tony)]

@RobOK

Artist images - I was excited a few years back with the tools for uploading images, and maybe I lost track of activity there, but it does not seem artists are getting any new art. I see the same images over and over. Again, near miss

I believe that artist images only change when new pictures are uploaded by Roon users and that picture gets sufficient votes to be chosen as the one to use. If no one updates the pictures then this will not happen of course.
I recently updated one group’s photos (as they have had a lineup change) and added photos for a relatively new group. Both groups were updated within a week or two, so I can only assume that it is still up to users to update pictures as they see fit. If no one bothers then nothing changes…

[mikeb]

On the Valance page there’s a mention of a new feature: “Quantum Timelines”, which is “coming up”. There’s no timeline with timelines.

[mikeb]

I’m disheartened by the fact that so many feature requests are blatantly ignored. Folder browsing shows how quickly things can be implemented if the will is there.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@mikeb

On the Valance page there’s a mention of a new feature: “Quantum Timelines”, which is “coming up”.

Not holding my breath

@danny

We are getting closer to “beta” quality release for quantum timelines, and it’s my feeling we will do a much more open beta with this than we did with Art Director.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

Frequently missing composition property resulting in inability to recognize recordings of a composition.

This is a major official selling point for Roon but it’s been broken for years (not sure if it ever worked as advertised).

After many posts by other users and myself I decided to make a more formal report, which seemingly found some initial interest by Roon Labs, then the interest seemed to disappear as is so often the case, nothing of relevance was fixed despite my posts with additional examples and details, then the replies by Roon Labs stopped, and eventually the thread was closed „due to inactivity“, well, duh.

Missing composition property: Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert. Example for a very common problem

@joel is there still an intent to fix this? I just found that some time after this update regarding Giant Sand, Purge & Slouch, … it got WORSE. Now, all of the tracks of the local album have ALSO LOST their composition property, except tracks 6 and 12 (i.e. the local version is now as broken as the Qobuz version)… The remaining track 2 issue on the Cat Power album has stayed unfixed but the rest is still ok. Comparing my other old reports, noting changed as far as I see

[CrystalGipsy (Resisting the flow!)]

I no longer use the software sadly due to its misses. But here’s a few of my gripes.

Biggest one is Roons performance when it’s doing library maintenance, a function you can’t control at all. Happens far too often and out of the blue. I have more than adequate hardware yet it still stopped basic features from functioning during metadata updates. Told this is expected behaviour!!! Yet it never used to do this???!!

Various Artists sorting causes oddities with library counts, showing duplicate albums. Been around a year now.

Export of library to flac fails when it hits a certain track count I believe it was about 15k. Still not fixed reported well over a year ago and others ran into it to.

Search is still awful after all these years, promised to improve, it’s really not in the 3-4 years they said it would.

Recommendations are generally ok but pop up too late and then don’t update for sometime. I have already found and listened to them before they generally appear.

Qobuz integration full of problems and why I gave up keeping favorites. Recent issues still happening. I don’t buy it’s all Qobuz fault either. Roons model with them is full of issues especially the unavailable album problem.

Metadata doesn’t always update after it’s been edited, only way to get it to do so is often a full delete and add it again so lose playstore edits etc.

Every new feature seems to be released half baked and takes months to fix the issues.

Seems all testing is now done via EA and not internally (maybe they do but really doesn’t feel like it).

Support again was supposed to improve it hasn’t really, it needs to not be via forum and when I have actually needed it, I have had no resolutions that are satisfactory. See first post.

Oh and one last one, sharing on iOS stil doesn’t allow comments, I flagged this years ago now. Says it all really.

There is more I could list but will stop at here. Not used Roon for two months, I thought I would miss it, but I don’t. I can get all I really need from another piece of software that costs me nothing. Although the money I save on not subbing this year will go as a donation to their server maintenance and the support I have received from their volunteer developers.