It’s been almost a year since I first installed Roon. With this post I want to share my experience and feedback. What has Roon done for me, and where did it fall short?
About a year ago I noticed that Apple Music had once more messed up my metadata. Album art had once again been modified, tracks were moved to different albums etc. I’d had enough, so I decided to give Roon a try. I had come across Roon a number or years before, but the price of a license, $500 at the time, made me look elsewhere. This time round, I was in a financially more comfortable situation, so I did not let the price hold me back to give it a try.
When setting up Roon, I did not want to have a separate machine that needed to be running whenever I wanted to listen to music. I already had a NAS that was running so I wanted to leverage that. As I was only trying out the software, I wanted to containerise the application so that I good easily remove it if I decided it was not for me. I spent some time reading topics on the community and it seemed that a good Docker had been made available by the community so I gave that a shot. Sure enough, despite my limited experience with Docker, I was up and running in no time. I had already ripped all my CD’s in a lossless format many years ago, so soon enough I was playing music through the Roon client on my Mac. Maybe that someday Roon will provide an official Docker container that is fully supported, but given the recent evolutions, I can’t help but wonder I Roon will even be available without hardware a few years down the line. I hope I’m wrong.
Back to my Roon trial.
One year ago I didn’t have any Roon Ready endpoints (I now have 4), but my Marantz SR6015 supported Airplay and was showing up as a device in the Audio section of the settings so I enabled it. After selecting the zone and clicking the play button… nothing happened. I could see that the album had been added to the queue, but nothing was playing. The slider for the timer was stuck at 0:00. Browsing around the community, I soon discovered that this was due to the fact that my receiver was not in the same subnet as my NAS. In fact they were in separate VLANs. I did not feel like I should allow an application to dictate the way I setup my network. I didn’t have time to start tinkering with my network. So this was it. My Roon trial ended after a mere 4 hours… Ok, I did pick it up again the next weekend or I wouldn’t be here now, but basically my trial was reduced to 1 week. maybe a 30-day trial would have been more comfortable. Despite that, I’m still here. Keep on reading to find out how or why.
Although I’ve had few issues with Roon, it was not all smooth sailing. The most severe issue being the volume unexpectedly turning to max, which turned out to be caused by an extension and did get fixed. Also, a few months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night as music was playing. Again an unfortunate side-effect of an extension. Then there were some occasions on which I noticed high memory consumption and extreme logging (8MB of log files every few minutes) of the Roon server. All of which have been overcome by… disabling certain extensions. The ideas behind some extensions are great and I respect the people developing them and putting their free time into them. I wish I could use them but for now, I’ve removed most of them from my environment.
As I had very few problems, I had a limited need for support. I’ve found the community to be very informative and helpful. At the same time, I can’t help be see the struggles of the official support team. It seems to have improved, but there have been times in which users would not get an answer for several weeks. A few months ago I also reported a potential bug via Feedback without a single response. I didn’t need or expect a solution right away, but maybe acknowledging it would be a good start.
In my opinion, product support and a user community should be mutually exclusive. These are two separate things. A user community where users can support each other is a wonderful. But there are situations where users should be able to log a support ticket that is handled 1 on 1 with official support staff. It should be possible to do this without the need to publicly share your setup if you do not wish to do so. It should be possible to request support without the interference of other users saying “I have a similar problem, but it’s somewhat different…” or “have your tried…”. However well meaning this may be, it can interfere with a systematic and structured approach that is needed to resolve a support issue.
I see a lot of “duplicate” support posts, in which the same issue is reported over and over. I believe there is an opportunity to reduce these by providing the community with structured insight into known issues/bugs, their status as well as potential workarounds until a solution has been implemented. Simply updating the title of a post of an improvised tag doesn’t cut it. It lacks an easy overview, doesn’t show a status and requires me to read through the entire history to find any hints of a workaround.
So yes there are multiple opportunities for improvement, but that doesn’t mean there is not a lot of good. If there weren’t I wouldn’t be here now. So why did I stick around?
Like many of the Roon users, I am from a generation that purchased music. I started my CD collection when I was 13. Buying a new CD whenever I could. Initially buying mainly “various artists” compilations, later to move on to “greatest hits” and “best of” compilations of an artist, and finally evolving to regular albums. Compared to some users on the community my collection is fairly small. Compared to most people I know, my collection is rather large. I resisted streaming for a long time. The idea of paying for music that I already had in my collection seemed absurd. I preferred buying a new album each month over paying for a streaming subscription. Finally I gave in. For years I had been listing to my ripped CD’s using iTunes/Music, so I got Apple Music as part of an Apple One subscription. The result was not only that I stopped buying music, but I also lost interest. No more walking into music stores and discovering new music. I was stuck. I always had music playing in the background, but I was never actually listening to it. Losing interest was probably also a matter of losing time as a result of my personal situation. More than six years ago, my wife suffered a severe stroke, leaving her partially paralysed. I’ve been a caregiver ever since. Between work, the daily household and caring for her I had spent very little time looking after myself. About a year ago, I hit an all-time low. I had been getting most of my energy from my work, but for a few months I had been on a project that did not give me any satisfaction. I was out of energy an needed a way to find some. I then came across Roon. It was the tinkering project that I needed…
As I mentioned before, I put the Roon trial aside after a mere 4 hours. However, the idea of once again being able to have control over my music stayed in my head for the next few days. So the next weekend, I decided to make time for myself and make some changes to my network so that I could do a proper evaluation. With nearly half of the 14 day trial having passed I had no time to waste. My entire CD collection was already ripped in a lossless format so I quickly had full access to all of my music. I also decided to give Tidal and Qobuz try. Browsing through my collection via Roon ignited a spark. I had a view on my collection that I had never had before. I was hooked and had a choice to make: should I add yet another subscription to an already seemingly endless list, or should I take a jump and get a lifetime license? I chose the latter.
The first couple of daysI did miss track level ratings and dynamic playlists, and I still do every now and then. For years I had used Apple Music with a dynamic playlist built around track rating and the time since a track had been played to ensure that I would have everything in my collection play every so often. Roon forced me to look at my collection, or should I now say library, in a different way. Rather than playing my music in shuffle mode, I started listening to full albums. Something I had barely done since ripping my entire CD collection. With Tidal and Qobuz so easily accessible, I started listening to albums of which I did not own a copy. Initially I started adding all studio albums of my favourite artists to my library. Then I came across the Qobuz Sublime. This was exactly what I had been looking for and I would never have found it if I hadn’t started using Roon. Qobuze Sublime allowed me to discover music streaming, while at the same time giving me the benefit of purchasing a large part of their catalog at a discounted price. For me, it was the best of both worlds. I could listen to almost anything, and buy what I liked. If I bought enough, the discounts I received would pay for my subscription.
And so I did. After my initial enthusiasm of adding a large number of albums from Tidal and Qobuz to my library I removed everything that was not local and started buying music again. Over the past year, the size of my local library has grown with 30%. In the past year I purchases more than a 180 albums. On average, that’s approximately one album every 2 days. Initially these purchase were focussed around filling gaps in my collection, but gradually this evolved into buying music of artists that I was not familiar with. I’ve added more than 50 artists to my library in my one year with Roon. The trend of adding more relatively new music is nicely shown in the below chart which I pulled from Roon Album Focus. The purple bars represent my purchases over the past year by release year, compared to my full library.
Of course it’s not just the Roon software and Qobuz subscription which made me regain interest in music. A part of the Roon experience is also this community and its users. Thank you to those of you who helped with tinkering and getting Roon to run in its own VLAN on my NAS. Separated from the rest of the NAS and the network. Thank you also to those creating and supporting user extensions. Even though the extensions did not always behave the way I wanted them to, I do appreciate the help and support you put in to them. I will definitely continue to explore them. And a big thanks to the users in the music threads in this community. Although I’m just an occasional poster I’ve always enjoyed following the, sometimes chatty, music threads. They’ve kept me coming back to the community day after day, helped me discover lots of new music and put a smile on my face more often than not. Unfortunately I’m also seeing that every now an then this is leading to some tension resulting in users being demoted or banned from the community. (I wonder how that impacts their ability to receive support if needed?) I hope these chatty threads can remain. Personally they bring me a lot of joy while discovering new music. I can understand that they may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I also have topics that I stay clear of. There should be enough room on this community for different types of users.
In summary, I think it’s fair to say that Roon has changed my life for the better. I have rediscovered an old interest and turned it into a new passion. It gives me the me-time I need every now and then, without the fear of not being there when my wife needs me. A Roon license is not cheap, but what is has done for me is priceless. I hope I’ll be able to enjoy Roon and this community for many years to come.