Roon 1.6 Feedback Thread

The Now Playing screen on my CCU redraws in stages: first text, then album, then background art.

A more professional appearance would be slow fade in, all at once.

If the Configure Now Screen is this:

image

The way I read this is the user wants Artist Photo as the default, yes? That’s why he put it up top.

If Artist Photo is not the default, what is the point of reordering the options?

If it is supposed to be the default, it’s not working. I keep getting lyrics up top.

Now Playing nit: to move between different content up front, I prefer buttons that recycle to the front/rear when they reach the rear/front, a la a circle instead of a line.

Same comment for album art.

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I think if there’s no Artist photo available, the screen falls back to the next available item in the list…

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I was getting confused about where the lyrics box was being opened from.

The lyrics icon by a track listing will just open up a lyrics box for that track in both version 1.5 and 1.6.

In version 1.5, the old playing bar had the same lyrics icon, which if used, would open the lyrics box. The contents of this would change with the track.

The lyrics icon on the new Now Playing screen doesn’t open the lyrics box, but instead shows the lyrics as they are rendered in the Roon Display screen.

John, you might be better off posting these questions in the Roon Radio Feedback thread…

I want to Congratulate Roon team for this update. I may be the only one,:grinning: but I like the Now Playing and also Qobuz integration. Don’t be discouraged by some criticism. Thanks for all works.

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It is a pity that the face of Rachel Podger is not visible, it is pretty. :frowning:
Roon staff, when will you solve this problem?

See this post further up the thread:

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She’s reached the Netherlands…

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I never noticed it in 1.5…

A post was split to a new topic: Playback reliability Issues

It’s from Qobuz. But my previous screenshot from my local library in DSD.
She’s reached the Russia too …

On Tidal In the UK, it seems that album is only available in lossy aac.

A win for Qobuz there.

Would be nice to have an A…Z index bar to navigate quickly to artists, albums etc starting with a specific letter. Talking about the iPhone Version. I cannot really use it now because it takes forever to scroll through the library. Is there a fix for this?

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I first read this as “higher IQs” lol.

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My review is on line: https://youtu.be/pAnqo-bRdTw

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Thanks for requesting feedback. Here’s mine after a little use with the new version. I will edit/add to once I’ve spent some time with this.

It’s great to see a new release of my 2nd favourite evening companion (I’ll get kicked if I don’t put you guys 2nd) and when I became a lifer I hoped that the software would continue to develop and blossom as it surely doing. Anyway, here’s my 2c’s worth of armchair critiquing.

All testing done on big iPad Pro in dark mode:

  • Please bring back the static lyrics. The massive text is ok for karaoke time but I want to immerse myself in the poetry of some musician’s lyrics and seeing 2 lines at a time is no way to do that. It also hurts my eyes so for me has ruined a perfectly great feature (just wish more tracks had lyrics). Edit: OOH! I’ve just discovered that I can get to the ‘poetry format’ lyric sheet from the queue still, which is great. But why on earth that isn’t the default for the now playing screen I don’t know?
  • Please bring back the heart/love icon on the bottom bar. There was no reason to get rid of it and it was a great feature much used by myself.
  • The queue/now playing split is such a shame as the integration within the screen was fundamental to exploring what you are listening to. The simple ability to click between queue/nowplaying and whatever else you were looking at (by clicking the song title) was just brilliantly simple but now it doesn’t make sense to me. In fact, I’m not sure this would to anyone…why clicking the queue button should reveal the album that you happen to be browsing (but only sometimes) and then the rest of the time it alternates between queue and now playing screens. When the latter happen the only way that I have now to get back to say, the albums page, or whatever else I was navigation is to use the back key which is super-clunky when it’s right over the other side of the screen (yes I know…lazy…but hey, it’s a big iPad). OMG, the confusion is compounded because I now appear to be able to open up the album that is currently playing by clicking on the album art. This is a nice feature which may of course have been there for ages and I just never tried…but it looks very similar to the other screens which I’d been navigating through to try to find that next ‘ripper’ track to the queue…
  • Someone further up the thread suggested to integrate the queue into one of the now playing top-half…sounds like a top plan to me!
  • Really don’t like the ‘no picture’ placeholder (I mean for the content that just doesn’t have a picture, not just content that Roon hasn’t synched new images for)
  • Reading the reviews is annoying when there’s this block of ‘now playing stuff in the way. You used to be able to get rid of it and focus on the content.
  • The design of the bottom half of the now playing screen seems completely disconnected with the top half. Super-sterile/crisp navigation and fonts … easy to see at small sizes and to navigate by on the bottom … with the touchy feely serif fonts in larger sizes to read with. I’m not saying anything is inherently wrong with either of them but they do fight when seen together. Not as relaxing an experience anymore. OK, just read that some stuff is still in flux. OK, but my point remains, the bottom half is navigatory content whilst I want to enjoy and consume the content at the top…not great together.
  • Unfortunately it looks like the back button is going to become the ‘go to’ piece of navigation real estate in Roon which is a real shame as you managed to find a really elegant and delicate balance between listening to audio and researching and finding the next tracks - the latter of which is of course your USP and the reason I bought in….for me this now has been hamstrung.
  • Why can’t I swipe L-R between the ‘tabs’ of lyrics, reviews etc on the now playing screen? Also swiping down to dismiss the now playing screen would be a bonus.
  • The queue screen now looks like the history which was never my fave part of the Roon UI, but why make everything tiny. Understandable in the history but the queue is important and actively nurtured and curated as the evening develops.
  • I haven’t dwelled long on this but is the only way to see whether you are in shuffle now the tiny icon in the top-right of the queue. No…there’s an even smaller icon to the far-bottom-right of the bottom bar. Please bring it back to somewhere that is going to be spotted on screen so that users have a chance at understanding the idiosyncratic way that Roon treats add-next/add to queue depending upon the status of shuffle (sorry, a little personal bugbear here. Full details here: Orders of tracks in Queue Skewed - Follow up.
  • Not sure why the scrubber bar needed to be extended at the expense of making the transport buttons smaller but the text and icons for volume etc are super-crisp looking. I do feel that there has been something lost in this iteration of the bottom bar though. I know it sounds odd but the relationship between the artist and song title and the dynamic range display is now weaker as a result of the redesign. Although possibly to the benefit of making the scrubber more usable … as a scrubber if not to see the dynamic range of left/right…which was sometimes useful and more often interesting.
  • Why is it not possible to see the radio queue further ahead than just one song. It would be much more preferable to be able to see further ahead (even add tracks manually) and move stuff around. Queues could become a real collaboration between man and machine…
  • I know I cancelled my Tidal subscription and I’ve always sort of regretted it because it meant that Roon could play anything…but…it does seem a little harsh to publicly chastise my tightfistedness by saying “Roon Radio limited to Library”. Couldn’t we be a little more friendly and say something like “You are now listing to your Library”. It would make my library feel less limited. If you wanted to bring machine learning into it, you could of course say something like “Not long to ABBA as your library is so puny.”
  • I’ll have a play with search and comment more but initial thoughts after searching for one thing, there is a lot of scrolling for not much content and the space available across the screen is wasted too.
    • Nice to split out the top result as this can be album/artist/whatever but why take up vertical space but putting the text underneath? There is a black void to the right of the top result on my screen.
    • Not sure I understand the difference between compositions and tracks in the context of searching for Foo Fighters but then I’m sure there are those who would say that’s common amongst Foo Fighters fans. Foo Fighters, incidentally, didn’t have any tracks…only compositions. I just tried ACDC and they have one composition to their name and the rest are tracks.
  • I noticed that my sound quality went down when I had the “Automatically apply Settings” switch on in DSP? (I’ll get my hat!)

Cheers,
Crom

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A nice video from Hans Beekhuyzeen about Roon 1.6 where again he states at the end that he is independent.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: 1.6 Crashing On Windows 10