Roon 1.6 Feedback Thread

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.

I’ve commented on this multiple times above. I know that 1000 posts is a lot in this thread…there is also a holistic element to this–we are working on a new iteration of the now playing design that among other things changes the aspect ratio of some of the screen areas in way that will help with this. There’s not a whole lot to say about that until you can see it.

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Regarding the artist imagery for displays, I think it’s too flawed a concept to be worth keeping at this point.

Cover art is a known asset. Sure there are very poor cover files out there but at least we know covers are, for the most part, square or shallow rectangles. Let’s make cover art the large centerpiece of the display functionality. Maybe on one side of the display area with supporting info and lyrics on the other.

Artist images are too numerous to even consider curating for dynamic inclusion unless some type of very advanced machine learning were in play.

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Ok. Many thanks for the response and I look forward to seeing the new design.

Please test your new design, prior to rolling it out, using older classical and jazz artists and albums with photos that are 50 to 70 years old and were in the square format of the time. (Photos that are 60 to 70 years old must be addressed – that picks up any of the great jazz and classical artists from the 1950s and 1960s.) Those photos are of lower quality and not suitable for severe crops to turn them into rectangular slices for huge enlargements to fill rectangular televisions.

If your new design works 90% of the time with those photos, it will solve the problem.

Do you have a few example artists in mind?

I like new UI. Nice photo :slight_smile:

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I get a different photo — I don’t remember if I edited that.
In any case, this highlights the problem that the Now Playing page shows only one artist, while the Chromecast Display cycled through them all, which was terrific.