Me too. I’ve seen multiple small companies struggle or fail because they forked their main product to serve niche audiences. A couple that I was involved with.
Personally, when I buy a product, I buy it based on what it is, not what it might or might not become. If I don’t like what it is, I don’t buy it. I don’t buy it and then tell the manufacturer how they need to redesign their product. Bug fixes are one thing. A total product redesign is something else.
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Also, if I’m not mistaken roon has a lite version they licensed to Elac (and/or others?) for free use by their customers. Wonder if it’s actively maintained? What a pain in the butt that must be.
Hi @xxx
Just to add balance … from the same topic … that “said” I too think this is a PITA for the Roon guys.
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I’d like to offer some support to the OP, and I do wonder if Roon are missing a trick with their pricing model.
The only reason I have paid for Roon is because the control app for my Vitus streamer, mconnect (I think Melco use it too?), is beyond rubbish. I was of course familiar with Roon, but the idea of paying to play my own music was something I struggled with, even though I can afford it. But, if the annual cost of Roon were lower, I’d have checked it out long ago. I may run Linn Klimax and Vitus gear, but that does not mean I don’t care about how much I pay for services. So Roon was a last resort, but once I looked at it, I liked much of what it does (though by no means everything).
How many potential customers out there are put off Roon by the cost? Are Roon another example of a company that fails to appreciate that reducing the price you charge for a product can actually increase profit through a disproportionate increase in market size? Qobuz are very late to the party in figuring that out, but because they reduced price, I am now a subscriber.
Anyway, just some rambling Sunday-morning thoughts.
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There are already plenty of competitors in the space the OP is proposing Roon enter (HQPlayer, for one, along with many free, but less feature-rich, alternatives). I don’t see why RAAT is so compelling that it could carve out a significant share of that market, at the price RoonLabs would have to charge for it.
It’s not so much that it would cannibalize sales from Roon (I doubt that it would) as that it would never recoup the engineering/support costs that it would entail.
Thanks for clearing that up.
I didn’t mean to imply Support was falling down on the job; mostly about Elac abandoning the orphan Essentials.
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mike- like every other virtual discussion these days, it seems like it spins into not so much of a discussion that appreciates differing points of view, but who is right, who is wrong, sprinkled in with a dose of snarky, I’m the smartest person in the room type comments. I’ve posted b/f and I’d say that Roon presents to me a “relatively” cheap way of learning to live with virtual music libraries vs. the physical storage of CDs and LPs. AND the wonderful bonus of Tidel/Qobuz which does introduce you to music that you’d never, ever hear and thus never, ever buy! Roon in that regard has expanded my musical appreciation immensely. I cannot think of a better platform for playing music, say hosting a party, or having background music playing all day as we toil in front of our laptops doing what we do for work. I’m aggravated, mildly with the updates - they always “take” but sometimes the updates don’t play nice with my “older” iMac that is my dedicated Roon device/music server and it takes me time to get it working again. For $10 a month? Hell man, my pre COVID Starbucks, mid-afternoon latte is now by the boards and I can now easily afford the entry fee. So, I’d say go for it and don’t look back. And I am an avid vinyl nut, so it’s a big deal for me to say this! 
Jeff
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@Jeffrey_Mead: Thanks.
As it happens, I have decided to keep Roon for the RAAT sound quality. It is that much better than JRiver and Audirvana to me. (I would try HQ but my computer really isn’t ideal for it.).
Since I don’t even really use the interface at this point, it’s strictly for the SQ that I use it. The interface (including the quality of the data supplied or, too often, the absence of data altogether) just isn’t for me.
In any event, I am one of you now.
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Of course you do. You may not use all of it, but you do use it as there is no using the software for anything if you don’t.
Funny, there are entire threads on this forum complaining that Roon doesn’t sound as good as JShiver or as good as Audirvana.
I am in the RAAT camp.
Sounds like you’re describing, stating you want what Signalyst HQP does very well with NAA. A complete and utter focus on SQ without much of an interface, just enough to view the library and select play or pair with your favorite UPNP server and go.
@Larry_Post, thanks for the suggestion. I agree that HQP might be a solution, but it requires more horsepower than my general purpose PC can make available. RAAT, for better or worse, does a really excellent job upsampling files to DSD256 without bogging down the PC.
I take it your a classical listener? Classical music does not have great metadata sources unfortunately so Roon can fail here when relying on its metadata. If your files already have good metadata then you can let Roon use those and you might fill in the blanks better. But you have to tell it to do so as it defaults to its.owb metadata sources first. In some cases you do have to fiddle a bit to get it populated, box sets are known to be an issue. For my library which is mixed and doesn’t contain much classical if found all but a handful of albums some that are pretty rare to.
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Yes, lots of classical and jazz, with a fair dollop of indie rock.
Since classical metadata is all over the map, I often edit it for consistency from album to album, which completely disconnects much of it from the allmusic.com database.
Much of my jazz brings up no metadata, either, especially the independent or foreign stuff. Even with stuff that has a major label domestic release, the presence or absence of bonus tracks or alternate takes also throws off the metadata and I get a lot of “unknown” references that don’t include credits by album or track. Also, I hate having to wade through “Miles Davis,” “Miles Davis Quartet,” “Miles Davis Quintet,” “Miles Davis Sextet,” “Miles Davis + 13” or the like when I want Miles Davis.
I can correct album by album, at least if there aren’t track discrepancies between my version and Roon’s, but I have thousands of albums or classical compositions with no tags, the wrong tags, or tags that make it more difficult to find what I want.
Add that lots of the allmusic.com text is pretty mundane or unenlightening, and I find most of the interface actually to be of negative value.
I didn’t want to make this thread about my specific objections to the user experience rather than a proposal for a “lite” version that might attract different, additional customers, but there is a method to my madness when I say I don’t have much use for most of the Roon experience. If I were someone who just listened to classic rock or Diana Krall, I guess I would feel better about what Roon does, but that is not me.
In regards to Miles Davis or any other jazz artist that Roon may differentiate based on quartet, trio etc it’s fairly simple to just merge them with the main artist. I find this to be one of Roon’s most useful features to overcome such discrepancies.
Cheers!
Thanks for the tip, but I did that for Miles in particular. Dozens of albums all manually shifted to just Miles Davis. But then, the interface continued to display Quartet, Quintet, Sextet, etc., as search results, but now grayed out because there no longer were tracks that fell into those baskets. That’s just clutter and a waste of otherwise valuable screen space.
Add that manually overriding thousands of albums for thousands of artists that way is a lifetime’s work. Not my idea of fun.
Oh - that doesn’t sound right - virtually defeats the purpose of merging. I’m not the expert round here. Perhaps others may have some suggestions. I don’t recall when I’ve merged artists that I’ve been left with greyed out tiles. I’m not a fan of those & indeed have spent some time fixing many artists that were greyed out as Roon was obviously unable to ‘find’ a pic.
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It only requires power if you wish to upsample, and upsample to DSD. I use it as a replacement to Roon Bridge and it requires the same, next to nothing CPU even with upsampling to 192/172 PCM. The first upsample they say is the most important.
I’ll add, there likely isn’t a snowballs chance in hell RAAT will ever be a standalone product. If it was part of Roon vision we’d already know about it or have it; thus the suggestions to workaround your specific issues/wants.
Have you looked at Songkong or other metadata managers to enhance the info stored within your classical files?
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