Roon 1.8 (Build 748/756/763/764) Feedback

Seems to be slowly reimporting everything on one of my two USB drives (4TB) connected to ROCK. Audio is unplayable at the moment from that drive as a result (usual 'audio file is loading slowly network issue bla…bla error message). Will let it settle down for 24 hours before proceeding. Perhaps the database update erased the analysis files in the Roon DB?

I agree. Startup is way faster on my Windows PC. And so far, no “quotes” splash screen when starting up. Yay!

As I work with the new 1.8, I will report bugs and the things I likes as they occur to me… Here is a bug. I call up King Crimson to see which version I have in the system. I notice it’s the remaster 96/24 version… so I click on the three dot circle ICON to TAG it with my HI RES tag and click TAG, but the only drop down I get is my Playlists…and not my Tag list… IF i go top right and click the TAG icon… my TAG list is there…

I don’t need two options to do this within the same page and obviously, both options should at the very least give me the same result…

I still love the new interface though! good work.

This doesn’t look cool, does it?

This looks even uglier…

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Where did the Play Queue go for Roon Radio and other playlists?

How do I hide Recent Listening and What youve been listening to - sections?

Of course you are entitled to your opinion, and to be disappointed. My point is that reading through some of these comments, you would expect this release to be a total car crash - which it is not.

All I will say, is that it is not uncommon to reject what isn’t familiar. Adapting to a new ui and aesthetic often takes time. It’s not even been out 24h so let’s give it some time for us all to soak it in.

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Please give us the stars and rating where it used to be. Playing music is Nr. 1 job but finding new music is a very close Nr. 2 job for me using Roon.
RATINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS IS WHAT Makes Roon so fantastic.

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It’s meant to be run in a small window to the side. Granted, if you have a dedicated computer or something where you want to run it full screen, it would be nice to have a specific view for that.

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The good: it downloaded and booted no problem, which is the first time in a long time it did that (had backups at the ready). It’s snappy, and clean, and… well, unfortunately more than a bit off here and there.

  1. Wasted space. We don’t need personalization, a homily and our name in 48 pt type. Much rather have more album covers and tools. Roon doesn’t need to be homey and pretend nice - it needs to be functional and beautiful.

  2. Fonts. Oh boy… those album cover titles in serif, nice try but really doesn’t work. And the essay text should be in a more readable serif, a NYT type font. It’s ‘old fashioned’ for sure, but it works.

  3. Home. A train wreck of styles and functions imo. Everything is too big, the metadatics ugly and disturbing and not at all what I want to see right off the bat. Take me to some more music! And I have no idea what is going on with the new releases for you now. It always ends up back at 1) wasted space. More covers please!

  4. Navigation is still the same, if not more clicks. I hate having to constantly open ‘view more.’ Here’s an idea - how about adding more pages to the browser side menu. I would love a direct from there for recently played/added, and one for he new recommendations for you page, thereby bypassing the home page altogether.

  5. The initials in the missing pics artist bubbles are horrific and useless and confusing, and make it hard to read the already too small artist name in regards to their bubble pic. I don’t use artists page view often, but unfortunately they populate out to bios and recs etc. Just list the name with small pic in a square at the end of it. K.I.S.S.

  6. Bring back the stars! Perhaps they weren’t egalitarian enough, but they helped separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, esp when confronted with somebody’s huge discography. It would also be nice to be able to click on the artists name under the album title in the album view grid.

  7. Give me a book of Pantone colors, and I can pretty much guarantee I the last chosen colors would be purple and orange.

  8. The Roon Home screen on my Pixel 3 is an extra special disaster that seems to be entirely dedicated to data on my listening habits. Again, just give us albums! Lots of them, as many as can fit, right up front.

So, biggest takeaways: snappier, cleaner, but appears to be designed with little thought as to how the elements (screen space, fonts, colors, etc) fit into an overall picture of usability. Too much lipstick might make it seem different, but it doesn’t necessarily make it more beautiful.

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This is the way to do it ! Very smart and efficient.
Thanks a lot.
Dirk

@HWZ that’s an easy one. The & defines the line break :wink:

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Errors:

  • Roon Remote 1.8 crashes on iPadOS when trying to change settings when the operating system language is not English.

Features missing for years:

  • Still no support for AirPlay 2 devices (e.g. stereo pair of Apple HomePods)
  • Automatic switching from light to dark theme depending on the settings of the operating system (macOS)

Better than in version 1.7:

  • Portrait mode of user interface on iPad mini

Worse than in version 1.7:

  • No role-based display of album credits. At least this should be selectable.
  • Missing horizontal scrolling of artists on wide-screen displays.
  • The new user interface looks fresh, but it’s too spacious and text is harder to read, at least on macOS. It would be better if Roon were more oriented towards the user interface of the operating system. Too many different application designs are bad for the ergonomics of the overall system.
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That
's wh
at I thought
,too
.
:wink:

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This is what I miss the most. Bringing back the checkboxes, at the very least , would fix my biggest complaint so far.

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Sorry, but no amount of time will acclimate one to this design train wreck. I have graphic designer friends I would be embarrassed to show this too (esp the font usage). I have a lifetime sub, a Roon only Sonore streamer and new Matrix Roon certified DAC coming for the office, and so will use it nonetheless but it will be merely be an overly complex player for me - I’ll do my discovery outside of Roon as it’s just not the comfy sit down to explore that Roon was before. A real shame, but hopefully they’ll listen to the forum and make some changes. No idea what the beta testers were doing (did they just give industry pats on the back, or were they critical and not listened to?).

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Oh I agree some will feel aggrieved, like any change it takes time to adjust, initially we all notice what has moved or been lost for our individual use case, invariably but not always there is a different way to achieve the same result, again sometimes we create a fudge or workaround to achieve the result we want then when that unintended workaround is removed we see it as a function being taken away when in reality it was never intended to be there.
And finally yes there are bugs that need to be resolved by the Roon team and I am sure they will be.

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@brian The queue icon is a little small on a 10.5” iPad.

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Yeah, I’ve also found out this solution for me, but it can help only in some use cases. And you still have to manage children tags manually and unfortunately you can’t add to the tags such things as labels, for example.