Roon 1.6 Feedback Thread

Not real happy with the update for all of the reasons listed above. The search feature is really, really slow and the radio function doesn’t seem to be learning what I like to listen to at all. I’m also losing connection constantly. Besides Qobuz support, this update is a big step backwards IMO.

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The addiiton of Qobuz is a huge accomplishment. Kudos on that! Roon Radio is working well for me, particularly in how in delves into Qobuz and therefore great for discovering new music.

I do understand many of the UI criticisms, but Roon Labs has acknowledged that the UI is a work in progress so I’ll give them a pass on this while waiting for UI functional and consistency improvements down the road.

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Guys, a thousand kudos and a million thanks for the 1.6 upgrade! Integrating Qobuz the way you did together with revamped Radio functionality has been a game changer for me. Also employing Rock to my full satisfaction. You rock!

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2 posts were split to a new topic: A cross fade option in DSP would be a great addition when streaming live concert recordings

Ten char, nevermind

This was discussed in great detail here:

No one from Roon took the time to respond. I’m not optimistic that they will fix this. Roon already said that they were pushing through high def versions of the photos, coupled with facial recognition, and apparently they think that doing so will fix this problem.

It won’t. The problem is that the Roon design team decided to take square photos and SEVERELY crop them to force them to fit in only the top half of a rectangular screen. This is the brute force sledge hammer and hatchet version of automatic cropping. Then Roon automation takes those severely cropped photos, with only the middle section of the square photo, and enlarges that small part of the middle square, and does so to an absurd degree. Many of the photos are simply too old, too grainy and too fuzzy to survive this process and look even reasonably good.

Tony posted yet another example of what frequently results – of the artist’s eyes only along with a nose. In most of these cases, you would never know who the artist is were it not for the fact that Roon pastes the artist name over the top of the nose. This is what happens when Roon automatically does a hatchet job of cropping a square photo, and then applies facial recognition to it. The result is a massively blown up center of a face, but thanks to face recognition, it is centered very nicely, thank you very much. The result belongs on a web site for plastic surgery to advertise nose jobs.

But just as frequently the Roon automation misses the target entirely, as the above examples illustrate, because there is nothing for the face recognition to latch on to.

Many other examples have been posted. While this doesn’t happen with all photos, just turn on Roon Radio with older classical, rock or jazz, with old square photos, and watch the results scroll by. It happens far too frequently.

The Roon designers need to take a crash course in Basic Photo Cropping 101. This will never work.

When photos are mauled by a hatchet job of automatic cropping, coupled with the resulting absurd degree of enlargement that is pixelated and fuzzy, the result is a MAJOR design problem.

But no response from Roon that I have seen, but maybe I missed it in the hundreds of pages of commentary on some of the poor design choices made by Roon.

My suspicion is that fixing this problem would involve a major change to the design. The designers either don’t want to undertake such a major modification in the design, or admit that their design is so inherently flawed, or both. I don’t know how else to explain silence from Roon regarding a design problem that is so obvious.

The solution? RESTORE THE PRESENTATION OF THE COMPLETE, UNALTERED, ORIGINAL PHOTOS (as seen in version 1.5) AND STOP THE CROPPING OF PHOTOS.

I just upgraded to a Lifetime Subscription. I remain optimistic that these problems will be fixed, but the general lack of response by the Roon team on their hatchet approach to photo cropping concerns me.

I can only hope that they restore a large illustration of album covers as an option on the Now Playing page that is clean and simple.

Hopefully without the dumb thumbnail, as having both a thumbnail and an album cover serves no purpose at all. To put large album cover above a thumbnail of the same cover is the design equivalent of an oxymoron, so I hope they won’t do that.

I only hope that the Roon restoration of album covers on the Now Playing view will actually be simple, elegant, and clean.

That is not asking too much.

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Totally agree. I also made that request, and was referred by Roon to another thread where that specific request was not addressed.

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A post was split to a new topic: New Core with 1.6

I’m enjoying Roon 1.6 very much. I used Roon previously up to v1.4, but then stopped. The Roon Radio feature and the availability of Sonore UPnP Bridge brought me back.

Good work Roon!

Ugly design! Before that, Roon 1.6 was a real mess and consumed pictures and this fat unnecessary bar.
Who thinks of such a thing?
Half a head no more eyes away all completely destroyed by Roon!

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A post was split to a new topic: Playback problems and remote disconnects

A post was split to a new topic: Slower performance since update

I agree on the speed issue. Roon is slow. It is very much noticable. Now that Roon “wait icon” pops up way too often.

@miklats @HWZ
I was going to agree, have written in this before.
I was going to say, as I have before, that it isn’t just in search, which includes the cloud, but even when just navigating to an artist to see the albums.

But before I did, I checked, just to make sure my examples were valid.
Lo and behold, it’s blindingly fast! (Almost everywhere.)

I was wondering about such changes, @brian denied there are any hidden client-side updates (of course). Cloud changes would have an effect on certain operations, but I wonder if that can be enough.

Hmm — I wonder if our boxes have been busy updating metadata in the background, especially the pictures? And now has begun to be done?

Just asked SWMBO to name a band, any band for a search. She chose The Bay City Rollers (hic) Roon found them instantly but the tidal albums artwork was sluggish to populate

I noticed the speed issue since the installation.
But I just noticed it quite “extrem”. I have a location bookmark for the label CTI. Now clicking on an album takes from 3 to 6 sec to see the content. Same if I switch to another album in that bookmark.
My local database is on various local NAS.
That has never been an issue with previous versions of Roon.
But the issue is with search etc…

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Btw, @Mike said casually in some thread that performance has improved because they have added more servers.

If you have not been involved with modern cloud-scale computing (but have been involved with classical database processing), you may not appreciate what a radical statement this is. With classical techniques, such as relational databases, you would speed things up by getting a faster computer. But there are limits: we can’t make computers faster because they melt. But they are cheap so we can have many of them. But structuring the code and infrastructure so that it can divide the work up on many computers, and not get stuck on some unforeseen bottleneck, is very difficult. More than difficult, it is a new skill — the demands of cloud-scale makes the old skills obsolete. Just like the demands of client-server made the previous skills obsolete.

This is why we must keep learning, until we die (or at least retire). There was once a mindset that you go to school, learn a skill, get a good job, and then coast on that skill. Today, skills are a perishable commodity.

So the Roon team already knew how to do audio processing, but they have to learn to build and operate cloud scale stuff, and machine learning, and…

I’m impressed, @danny and @brian and @mike and everybody else.

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See my detailed explanation above. You have provided another example of a gross failure regarding the Roon automated method of hatchet cropping of photos. Ironically, in this case even their automatic face recognition failed.

When will Roon wake up and admit that the automatic hatchet job of cropping photos and then massively enlarging them is a serious failure in many cases? As documented by others above, it is even worse for older artists with old square photos.

Roon, it is time to restore the original photos as they were intended to be seen from version 1.5. No hatchet crops. No huge enlargements that look ugly on older photos, as shown in previous posts in this thread.

Please, no more enlargements of only the eyes and nose of an artist. Let alone the top of the bald head.

No one from Roon responds to any of these posts on the issue of the automatic cropping and mauling of photos and the massive and often fuzzy enlargements.

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Just because they don’t respond doesn’t mean that they are unaware of the issues…

Roon has been quick to respond and acknowledge problems that they intend to fix. In this case, we have had complete radio silence from the beginning.

Complete silence on one of the most egregious and obvious failures of the new design. Just turn on Roon Radio and start with older classical or jazz and watch the results roll by. This happens in the case of far too many photos.