I love Roon. Have 2 ROCKs in 2 homes. Still for album listening, lean forward music where I’m actively paying attention, it’s great. Obviously having Tidal & Qobuz and my local library together is fabulous. The value proposition to me as a lifetime purchaser is enormous.
And yet…
I also have had a lifetime PlexPass for years. Bought it to use as a DVR, kept it around even after I stopped bothering (YouTubeTV etc).
And one I activated Plexamp headless on my Ropieee, and got it working on my Sonos, I started to listen to more and more Plexamp mixes. Even though they lost their Tidal access, and it’s just playing from my local library, it’s great. Album picker to start a mix, add the DJ type I want, pick related songs to intersperse with the few dozen tracks picked already, it’s just so easy to wander down a playlist because it’s essentially forward-looking and is asking me all sorts of readily-answerable questions that I can engage with if I want to or ignore. And it only makes “weird” choices when I have the “sonic adventure DJ” on, and it still has more (subjective) variety when drawing exclusively from my local collection than RoonRadio does when drawing from my library and beyond.
I like it.
So, though I’ve had a feature suggestion going for a while I just wanted to tee up to the broader audience that you should try it because it’s great. And to Roon that they should shamelessly copy the concepts and features (and the underlying music analysis). Because if they were integrated with streaming and metadata, they’d be transformative.