Quality is a feature (an open letter)

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This is a bit of an open letter to Roon principals, who we don’t see around here much.

I adore Roon. I love its premise, its interfaces, its vendor-spanning architecture. In spite of that, I find it frustrating and often quite depressing. Years ago, I recommended Roon to friends. I don’t now. My audio setups are fun to play with and sound pretty good. When we entertain, people like to play with my Roon installation and the custom volume controls I’ve got everywhere. When they’re curious about setting it up themselves, I discourage them. I live with its flaws and issues, as do many of us, but I don’t consider it a good product. I consider it a finicky product that’s hard to set up and has inconsistent quality over time.

I’ve worked in the software industry for decades. Many of us have worked in tech in one form or another. I didn’t start running mega services, there was no such thing when I was coming up in the industry, but I did end up there. Big services.

We evolved a fundamental way of thinking about quality and features. It’s simple. You work in the following order.

  1. Reliability. If data goes into the system, it always comes out. No corruption, no data loss.
  2. Availability. The system always works. When a user wants to do something, they can.
  3. Performance. The system works quickly. The user never has cause to notice or complain about performance issues.
  4. Features. You earn the right, as engineers and product owners, to build features when your product meets reliability, availability, and performance targets. It’s a privilege. You earn it.

Here’s a well known anecdote. In the early days of facebook, Zuckerberg’s mantra was “Go fast and break things.” It was posted on the walls. It was smart. It got them moving quickly and the laddered into owning the market. Then an intern pushed a change and took the site down hard. Users were really upset. It was a defining moment. Zuckerberg read the room and understood that they had evolve. The mantra became, “Go fast on stable infrastructure.”

This is so important. You need stability in the foundation to build a building. You need it in software, too. Users love features. But they love reliability, availability, and performance even more, even if they don’t know how to articulate it. If your mobile carrier can’t deliver reliable dial tone and high quality audio calls, than no amount of T-Mobile Tuesdays (where you get free stuff at least here in the US) will help you acquire and retain customers.

I know the people on this forum who will show up here and be dismissive of this. I get it - they feel protective and have the time and energy to form what some folks call the “Roon Defense Force” or, colloquially, the RDF. That’s fine - this forum is generally pretty good at allowing civil discourse and defending Roon is a valid for of that. But there’s a pretty good size population of people here that will agree my basic premise, which is that Roon does not have a stable foundation. This upcoming “announcement” will delight some and be dismissed or ignored by others, but it is a tough story to swallow when it feels like Roon needs real attention at the foundational level to be the truly phenomenal, easy to love, and easy to recommend product that it should, by all rights, be.

The list of fundamental issues is sort of long. Just a taste:

  • Database corruption. It happens insidiously. It happened to me. The database goes silently corrupt but continues to get backed up without issue and at some point, the corruption surfaces, the user is notified, and finds that their backups are corrupt, too

  • Search. Sort of works. A couple of years back there was a guy hired to address it, there were some big blog posts, a commitment to making it great. It got a little better, and then nothing.

  • Network discovery and reliability. I can’t say enough about this. We’ve grown accustomed to accepting that Roon can be flaky about finding devices and has issues with wireless and various networks, etc. This doesn’t have to be. Even just investing in user-facing diagnostic tools in the product would be a major step forward - put the capability into Roon to show a user what the bandwidth, latency, whatever is to a specific Roon Ready device. Be willing to open up RAAT and make some investments in working better in more diverse network environments.

  • Box sets, metadata, etc. We hear about these problems from people regularly. We know they’re lurking in there. We know they’re probably really hard to fix. Fix them anyhow.

  • Memory leaks, crashes, serious issues that break usability. These show up and can take weeks to fix. A recent version introduced a crash in the iOS apps that causes the apps to quit when clicking on certain objects in the UI. I’m hitting it. Others are reporting it. This should be an emergency fix within 48 hours at the most. It should be accompanied by a humble apology and the community should feel heard and taken care of. It’s not like that at all.

I’m a reasonably influential person in my little circle of peers and friends. This isn’t unique to me. I’m an enthusiast in a variety of areas. If I loved Roon - I mean loved the company, the product, felt like it was really great - I’m pretty confident that this would result in me bringing on at least a couple of new users. Maybe more. Instead, I tell people to stay away from it.

This is truly intended as an open letter. If Roon principals actually are around and have the interest in engaging here with me or others in the community, I expect we would welcome that. Don’t just give us a new feature - come and talk to the community. Win us over again. Make Roon the absolutely delightful product it can and should be without the caveats and concerns. I hope you take me - maybe us - up on this.

Thanks for reading.

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I love Roon and it works perfectly for me. However, I would never recommend it to a friend or relative. It is too complicated, IMHO, for an average person who just wants to listen to music. You need to be somewhat of a “gear head” to use it and enjoy it and put up with the complexity.

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Thank you, @gTunes!

As a Roon lifer, but a relatively recent one (only since 2020) may I contribute?

May I suggest that this discussion is likely to develop along two connected - but if we’re canny enough - unrelated tracks: how your points get discussed here in the forum (e.g. what you call the ‘RDF’, and the detractors: your thoughtful and IMHO helpful post puts you in neither camp… Bravo!) on the one hand. And the substance of the points you raise on the other.

I am 95% happy with my experience of Roon. Sure, as someone who laments that my life (anyone’s life, probably) is too short to exhaust the wonders of what most people call ‘classical’ music, 1,100 years of inestimable richness, many of Roon’s features are irrelevant to me.

But I’d maintain that Roon is far and away the best there is. And that it works miracles by catering for the huge range of third party hardware and software as successfully as it does.

Your assertion that quality is a feature really rings true, though.

Although I am as aware as any (most?) of us here that the dedicated experts from fellow users to mainline tech support work very hard and achieve wonders.

And appear to be going in the right direction: remember the hand-wringing which perhaps all too few felt was misplaced (they were right of course) at HARMAN’s acquisition, for instance. And the recent obvious acceleration and augmentation of swift and apposite responses to technical issues first aired here.

Where I feel closest to @gTunes’s argument is indeed in those stumbling blocks of functionality, as opposed to emerging features, which do still undeniably appear to plague a minority (if Roon has, say, 100,000 users, then the 100 regulars, maybe half of whom run into difficulties not of their own making, here perhaps represent but at best fewer than 0.01%! of all those using Roon).

But to admit that there are still areas for improvement is a sign of strength, not weakness, surely. And would be welcomed by all of us. Perhaps (a survey might be helpful) welcomed over adding features.

I’m not interested in access to live pop concerts, for example. But I would like to see a fix for the fact that every few weeks - with nothing at all changing in my environment - Roon (2.56.1582 on macOS Tahoe 26.1) fails to find my Titan and I have literally to power it carefully down and unplug it from its PSU. Box sets for classical. Searching. Surely these are quality issues which would - in my case - push that 96% satisfaction level to 100%.

Isn’t this a useful debate to have? Isn’t approaching quality (remember TQM?) as a worthy goal in itself really worth examining?

I’d love to be corrected on any errors in what I’m suggesting - in full support of, appreciation for and encouragement to the teams involved in the entire Roon enterprise - to make it even better :slight_smile: !

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Hear, hear. This reminds me of my study of Systems Engineering and the “ilities”:

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Roon works pretty well for me, though occasionally an endpoint can’t be found after powering it on. Maybe once every few months at most. Rebooting everything usually fixes things. Now ARC with Android Auto is a different matter, but I don’t know if it’s ARC, my phone, Android Auto, or the car’s Google operating system. Rebooting the car’s infotainment system fixes the frequent no audio during playback I’m dealing with lately.

But ROON is far from the only software I, and my wife, and friends have trouble with. I don’t know how the general public is supposed to deal with computers in general. I kind of think of myself as my wife’s IT person.

Whether it’s a YAHOO Email issue, or her not able to see BLINK camera clips on her IPhone (she missed seeing the option of cloud vs local storage), or other random things that pop up on her Windows laptop.

A lot of times it’s just a lack of knowledge about the software, but it’s very frustrating to people. I tried showing my wife how to use ROON on her phone, and it wouldn’t work. (I think there was a needed update or something) She won’t touch ROON now.

I can always find my way out of a computer problem because I’m very stubborn, and won’t give up, even if it takes days, plus I’ve been at it for many years. Many people are not like that, and even when I try to give people advice with a problem, their eyes just glaze over, and hope is gone. Maybe this is more common with older folks, I don’t know.

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@gTunes - Thanks for your open letter, that I totally support

Torben

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