I know I could wade through posts on here and maybe find the answers to my questions, but it maybe easier if a few of the hopefully friendly community experts can point me in the right direction.
I have a 2000 album iTunes library. Everything is ripped in Apple Lossless. I have spent a lot of time organising the albums so they have the right release date, artwork and track listing including combining multiple disc releases into 1 single list (CD 1 CD2 etc. makes no sense in ripped library).
I play this from a Macbook Air via an asynchronous DAC into my hi-fi and I control it from my iPhone or iPad via the Remote App. The sound quality is fine and the iTunes program on the Mac is OK, not perfect but OK. The Remote app however is dreadful as it is slow, does not order my collection how I would like (artist by release date) and occasionally drops out altogether.
So I was thinking of moving to Roon for 3 reasons:
1 Better remote control (hopefully)
2 Less manual intervention in ITunes (finding artwork), relabelling tracks, entering meta data etc.
3 I like the idea of lots of additional information about my music and the ability to find new music form it.
Would Roon fit the bill here and will transferring my iTunes library be easy? Do I just copy the iTine music folder to the Roon folder and let it sort itself out?
It’s worth saying that Roon will identify the iTunes albums from their metadata and use Roon metadata in preference, which will remain within the Roon application and not be written to your files. It is possible to tell Roon to use your metadata, but that’s another question.
I agree with John B about possible issues where a custom disc structure has been adopted (multiple did sets). My Roon software watches an iTunes library and the tablet remote is very good.
Using iTunes (not Roon) the sound quality of my system is really improved by sitting the app Audiovana on top of iTunes. Jeff
I don’t mind having to re organise the combined albums back to their original disc structures if the advantages of Roon outweigh that sort of disadvantage, but I’d rather not as they make far more sense organised as one entity. The White album was on two discs due to limitation of the format the same way as it was on 4 sides of vinyl originally. Disc nomenclature makes no sense in an online library.
Roon organizes them by disc as you can see in he screen shot of the White Album. And you have to view the tracks by discs. But when you select play it will add all the discs to the queue and play the whole album. So for the play part it does what you want and ignores the separate arbitrary discs.
When I signed up for the trial, I thought the price was stupid. 10 bucks a month? For what? 2 weeks later, I paid 500 bucks for the lifetime membership. I probably listen to 5-10 MORE HOURS of music a week than I did before I started using this software.
You didn’t mention anything about streaming. Might I suggest a trial of Tidal lossless in combination with your trial of Roon. Roon’s excellent UI and seamless integration of Tidal is what really sets it apart in my opinion. Your library will expand very rapidly and based on the explanation of your current setup I would imagine that you should see a nice bump in sq.
I believe you will find this may be one of your best and cheapest investments in HiFi.
Thanks for all the replies, especially interesting about Tidal. I think I will give it a go, as Tom said, what have I got to lose?
Jeff, you mentioned Audirvana app, but as I am using an outboard DAC I assume this won’t do anything for my playback which is identical to the CDs I ripped from as far as I can hear. System I am playing through is an active Naim system btw so mid to high end quality wise.
