New user: to Roon or not to Roon?

I believe it depends of your personal situation and how much disposable income you have available. I’ve been a lifetime subscriber for 7.5 years, so it’s worked out as a good bet for me. There is some risk involved, but I don’t think Harman bought Roon to trash it….

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Buying lifetime today is much less risk than it was back in 2015. Back then, Roon’s future was based on hope. Today you have a huge basis and the backing of a formidable HiFi company. $820 for life still sounds like a fair price to me. Roon’s future looks bright to me.

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I feel exactly the same way about not recommending it to anyone, even though I love it.

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Haha! No worries :wink:

What a great reply! I think the points brought captures most of it. Roon is great, Roon is awful, Roon is expensive, Roon has a great value, Roon is better than the rest. On top of that Roon does not work offline (which sucks) and is now owned by Harman/Samsung.

What a (silly but important) dilemma! I am leaning towards a lifetime subscription at this point. I would hate to see this option go away.

Well, my trial ended a week ago and I did take a lifetime subscription
What is 829 USD compared to the great Roon experience and the value of decent hifi gear?
It’s nothing!
So for me no doubt, and even if there would be other software in the future Roon will evolve also.
I think they will be market leader for a long time

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I just started with Roon last week. After been dabbling with raspberry pi (Emby, Plex, Owntone) as dedicated music servers for years and fiddling with useful remote apps…I am now in heaven with Roon.
I like it very much so far. I like it so much that I decided to get a dedicated Mac mini as headless server (crazy perhaps).
Anyway, my trial is going te end within 5 days. And just like the op i am on the fence of going for yearly subscription or lifetime…

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I paid for my first year’s sub then was gifted a lifetime a few years ago so I’m lucky. I agree that Roon can be frustrating for the money though I’m never sure how much that’s Roon or my setup?

It’s interesting that Roon is still selling lifetime subs after the acquisition but does it really tell us anything? Lifetime is generally agreed to be lifetime of product and most software has an expected 5 year lifespan.

Will Harman integrate Roon into all their hi-fi products? This seems likely - why have different teams working on App control when there is one Roon to rule them all?
Will Roon be available outside of Harman in the future? Again it seems likely as they probably won’t want to alienate a huge swathe of their market.
Will future versions,3.0+, be included in lifetime? Well there’s the forking rub! Who knows - I certainly don’t believe Harman/Roon have a concrete answer to that either. The tech world moves more quickly now than traditional corporate strategy ever did, whatever was envisaged when the deal was done might have no bearing on reality in the future.

If you make the purchase now I would hope you would get either, at least 5 years of Roon functionality, or some kind of sweetener on the future products if Roon was to cease.

Your dice to roll!

I believe that the consideration of whether to take out a lifetime subscription depends entirely on your personal circumstances.
It is often negatively noted here that you need a permanent Internet connection. This argument doesn’t apply to me, for example, as I have an 800 Mbit/s fiber optic connection. If that were to fail, I would have more problems than just no music. The often criticized ARC also works perfectly for me. I haven’t had any outages yet. But that’s just the way it is for me, for someone else it could be completely different.

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The “real” advantage of the lifetime purchase is a pretty obvious savings at the 4.5 year mark (under current pricing) if Roon still exists. A gamble to some degree, but, then everything in life is. I have enjoyed Roon for sometime now and have found it to be a valuable “tool” in my music library that provides significant value in that it organizes my music, is easily operated (i.e. my tech-challenged spouse can operate the software easily), it opens an entirely new universe of musical information and really helps keep me interested/study/enjoy the “art” of music.

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That depends on where your $829 is otherwise invested. But, of course, that’s the reason to go for lifetime. I still recommend monthly, then annual, then lifetime. I would rather take a risk of missing out on lifetime versus paying $829 for something I ended up not liking.

As a lifetime buyer after 5 days of trying (actually, I was into lifetime after two hours), I think, today this is indeed a serious question.
I would base my decision on my needs.
In my case, half of the library is local files and half is favorites from quobuz. Roon brings it all together, there is no hassle about needing to switch to get access to either library, there is a plethora if information avaible on a click, etc. The meta data are just fantastic, and one can even edit them to improve them. Overall, Roon has given me access to digital music as I have to my vinyl collection - and sometimes even more, very often I load the album I listen to in Roon to read the reviews, the lyrics, or browse the artists’ other records. Overall, with Roon, I have a better connection digital music tgan I had via CDs, which actually was aphysical medium.
So if Roon covers your streaming services, and you are into metadata and additional information, lifetime would probably be a no-brainer.
If I were into local files only and not into metadata and or additional infornation, things might be different. Hoewever, even then, it would offer some kind of „physical grip“ onto the digital collection superior to the one you get from mconnect or other apps.

I would not worry too much about too drastic changes about the service in the near future, simply because Roon is part of the gear of too many hi-quality brands these days, and degradation of the badic services would not work out for Samsung/Harmon Kardon, or even lead to splits where the lifetime subscribers might lose the least.

Therefore, as said I would base my decision on my needs and on how Roon fullfills these needs, and not on a future, which is always uncertain anyway, but might be actually less so in the case of Roon because of the environment it grew into as a basic ingredient.

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soooooo many threads like this

I knew after day 1 of my trial that this was for me. I was blown away by the interface and the integration of local vs streaming. Loved it immediately. Was never on the fence, although i will admit I did pay for a year before buying lifetime. But I jumped in immediately, and used it every day, and it changed the way I listen to music.

I find it fascinating when people take a long time with this software to decide if they like it. (Like in our current political climate, people are still on the fence about things. Amazing.)

If you haven’t figured out if it’s for you after several weeks/months, then I would say it’s not for you.

As much as we’d try to convince you to do one thing or the other, you have to make that decision, and use the service/software yourself, and come to your own conclusion.

Interestingly i’ve had far fewer issues than many people on this forum. (Although it’s the ones with the problems that are the most vocal, that’s pretty common.)

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If you haven’t seen it - take a look at this interview. It certainly made me feel more optimistic about Roon’s future plans

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Has nothing to do with that.

  1. This forum is the only way to get support (from Roon or forum members).
  2. Roon requires an individual topic for each case. Maybe that works fir Roon, but not for Roon customers running into problems.
    It is just a mess to find out if other users are experiencing the same (kind of) issues.
  3. As this has become primarily a support forum, would you expect nit to see many requests for help!
  4. As the number of support people seems to have decreased in the last couple of months (my personal opinion), users often have to wait days, weeks, … for reaction.
    (I explicitely do not say solution).

This is a situation created by Roon, and nit by vocal customers.

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oh, I’m not blaming customers who are vocal. I’m just saying I’ve rarely experienced the issues many of them are having. And it probably seems like issues are more prevalent than there really are, simply because complaints are more common than praise. Human nature.

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It’s a response I ignore these days. No one understands how bad support is for Roon until they hit a problem and really need it, which of late is more common with each release. A lot of it works for me must be your this or your that. Not helpful.

I have gone 6 years with out any major issues a few things here and there which you can work out mainly updates freaking things out and a reboot sorted it. But in the last year with nothing changing my side to any other year it’s been one thing and then another. I have several support tickets that have had no response at all. If enough don’t moan about them or persist long enough they tend to be ignored and hope they go away. Some trivial ones just remain untouched, it’s the low hanging fruit that seem to get left and left and left. Comments on sharing an album via iOS most of the 2023 it’s not worked and was flagged and admitted it’s a bug. Surely it’s not hard to fix this one but here we are nearly in 2024 and it’s still bust. Feels like it will be like the export functionality they broke on macOS and took well over a year to fix

Remote issues have been building for some time, much like ARC issues did. There is something fundamentally wrong with how Roon works here if you ask me, just don’t get these issues with any other client/server app I have.

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@jonasti,

Welcome to the forum!

It must be of comfort to you that your post has attracted so many replies: your dilemma is not uncommon.

If you hold off on lifetime until you’re sure, you can be satisfied knowing that you are (still, nevertheless) supporting an outstanding (industry-leading) product and system with your subscription.

Assuming Roon ends up meeting your needs, which - as a (lifer) of three years use - I suspect it will, you can always opt in (for lifetime) and break even after about five years.

As you have probably seen, there has been extensive comment on these forums about what the future holds: one might have hoped that 95% of it would have been, “None of us can see into the future”. In fact, reaction seems to have included most likely schools of thought about what the takeover holds… and some unexpected ones.

I’m not aware of any quantitive survey of the hundreds of responses to the news.

But I have a feeling that the majority is optimistic. I know I am.

Good luck!

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One slight, but maybe not slight correction…you may or may not be able to “always opt in (for lifetime).” You can opt in now, but we don’t know how long or if that option will be available in the future.

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If Harman is still selling lifetime, they will honor it. I would go that way before it is not available.

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Thanks for the correction, Jim. Yes indeed. My optimism emerging :smiley: