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!