Same from Berlin 
This confused the **** out of me for a minuteâŚ
Iowa City by Keb Mo?
Where do the Children Play by Eleni Mandell?
Chasing Cars by Cat Stevens?
Aaaah, obviously not. Just that some clown put the dividing line in the wrong place.
6 Likes
Flagging a small papercut with iOS navigation!
Making a selection on the âTracks | Info | Credits | Versionâ menu scrolls the page back to the top, making one have to scroll down again to view the new info. Iâve tried to capture it in a gif here. Would be nice if this wasnât connected to the pageâs position 
2 Likes
This also happens in the album view with ipad. But in artist view overview/discography/compositions menu behaves normal. Another inconsistency accross different views. @support
Agreed update is buggy. And a big meh.
Star ratings put back onto the main discography page would be great. A very valuable guide for discovering new albums and new artists.
4 Likes
Please find below my updated feedback comment:
On my iPhone, the âAppearances In My Libraryâ widget on an artistâs Overview page does not always match up with what is shown in âAppearancesâ on the Discography page (when turning the âmy libraryâ filter on). When there is a mismatch, the Discography page always shows more âappearancesâ than the Overview page. Seems like it must be a bug, unless there is some sort of hard limit for the number of albums shown in the âAppearances In My Libraryâ - in which case it seems like that section should be renamed to âSome Appearances In My Library.â
I havenât seen any comments about the new transport button position. Having used v1.8 for a few days, I definitely preferred them over on the left - which also left room for a large and useful waveform display.
3 Likes
Two more comments based on usage:
-
The bottom panel with the playback functions, etc:
Itâs much harder to use on a touchscreen - even a decent sized one - than in 1.7:
The queue and signal path donât need to be next to the play buttons. Move them out to the sides more. Itâs too easy to tap the wrong one.
The progress bar: being shorter, itâs much harder by touch to be exact. If I want to get to a specific point in a track, itâs a lot more difficult. -
Shuffle: can you put in an option for a âradioâ type function: I really like being able to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down, as opposed to a giant list being created.
2 Likes
Hi!
As requested, here is âsomeâ feedback on version 1.8. Though Iâve tried to limit it to features that I use almost on a daily basis (comparisons to 1.7 would be difficult otherwise), this will be a long one. These are my views only, and I donât claim them to be relevant to anyone else but me. To understand what these changes mean to me, Iâll provide background and context, which will, unfortunately, make this even longer.
For some 20 odd years, Iâve been using an open source software that allows me to play local music files in a random manner, with an option to control the bias for how likely a song is to play, based on criteria like how much I like the song, when it played last, has other songs by that artist played recently, etc. I consider that approach to be perfect for my needs, except for the fact that it was limited to local files. With a CD collection of ca. 1000 albums, it had sufficient variety and quality. Since it was open source, I also modified it heavily for my needs ⌠and then lost the source code. Donât ask.
When Spotify came along, I got an invite, and ended up using it for discovery for years. Find stuff on Spotify, buy album, add to local radio, enjoy. Eventually, Spotifyâs role grew larger, until I hit their 10,000 likes limit (which no longer exists). I dropped them for a year or so, until I started to miss the discovery of new stuff.
I figured out ways to work around their limits, only to discover that their random play on Chromecast was completely broken (confirmed by them on their test environment). Essentially, the playlist shuffle would pick about the first 80 or so songs from a playlist (of up to 10k), shuffle those, and play them. This was a deal breaker for me, and so I left again. They have not fixed that in the past 3 years, as far as I know.
Eventually, I found Google Play Music, which allowed me to like an unlimited number of songs and play them in random order, uninterrupted over Chromecast. What a delight! As a bonus, songs from my collection that were not available in any streaming services were now part of the mix, too. And I could listen to them anywhere! Perfect. It took me about 6-10 months to setup my likes, playlists, and processes properly for long term enjoyment (eg. mitigations for their ârandomnessâ). It was liberating, and my likes grew from ~13k to about ~25k.
Google being Google, the fun did not last. They introduced YouTube Music and I transferred, only to find out likes were limited to 5k, they could not transfer my 25k likes to YTM in any useful way, shape or form. So, that dream died.
Then, a good friend suggested Roon, as he had done several times prior, but I was happy with Google, at the time. No more limits on likes, actual random play of liked songs, have local music as part of the mix, integration to high quality audio streaming service, and streaming to Chromecast devices (with a caveat). I was sold as soon as I saw the potential of the concept for my needs!
During the past 6 months or so, Iâve been âinitializingâ Tidal and Roon, so that eventually I could start listening to music normally with Roon. This includes playing each song in the library (~56k now) in random order (as I intend to utilize âlast playedâ as a focus criteria), tagging each track. After 5-6 months, Iâve done maybe 25-30% of the queue. Which brings us to this day and Roon 1.8 update.
The main issues I had with version 1.7 were fairly limited and minor:
- no enjoying Roon over a VPN when not at home
(also required changes to the home network) - features are very hard to discover from the UI
- there was no portrait mode for Roon Remote on Android
- there is no widget for controls on Android
(nor any other quick & easy way to check what is playing without opening the Remote) - Roon Radio would play songs not in my library when the exact same song was also in the library
(for me, it should always prefer the library version) - recommendations were not hitting the spot
(which I attributed to Roon not yet having a good base for estimates) - no way to focus on blocked or non-liked tracks
Overall, the above were almost meaningless to my normal use cases. There was only one major issue (apart from content discovery not yet providing good hits): tagging a track would start slowing down after restarting the service. In a day or two, it would start taking minutes(!) to get the tag dialog, leading me to eventually restart the service. As I was tagging every song in my library that I listened to, the problem for me was front and center. (As far as I can tell, 1.8 has not improved this).
Android portrait mode:
First observation: I no longer need to physically rotate the Android tablet I use as a Roon Remote. A fairly quick second observation: the queue view (which is the view I use while listening & tagging) in portrait mode does not show the length of the track or the heart icon, both of which are important for my track tagging process. So, I end up physically rotating the tablet to get to the landscape view with relevant information (to me).
Eventually, I noticed that the portrait mode of the queue has a tendency to loose almost all controls: no burger menu or left arrow in top left corner, no NOW PLAYING or QUEUE at the top. I have great difficulty in figuring out when those show up and when they donât. Furthermore, the portrait mode of the queue view has no player controls either (except for one hard to find view). One can only escape from that view by selecting a track, which gives the album view with top left main menu, etc. I think there are multiple bugs in the portrait layout and transitions from one portrait view to another.
I often do something other than stare the Roon Remoteâs queue view. When I switch back to the Roon Remote, the song has changed and so I need to scroll back a track or two to be able to tag previously played tracks. More often than not, that scroll on the tablet becomes a âpage upâ or âpage downâ, ie. instead of gently scrolling the screen, it jumps by a screenful of tracks. This is quite disorienting, but luckily âjump to playingâ and another attempt helps.
Mostly, it jumps too far back, but occasionally it jumps forward. Iâm guessing that this is an erroneous state of the queue being painted and/or incorrect touch interpretation. I never experienced this with 1.7, and Iâm not sure if it happens exclusively with 1.8 in portrait mode.
Portrait queue always shows the Roon Radio control at the bottom (âstart roon radio after last song, yes/noâ), which is weird because that means it is considered more relevant to me than the actual player controls. Whatever. It wastes a bit of space that could be used for another track entry, but overall itâs a minor annoyance. I prefer function over form, so wasted space and hidden information is an irritating combo, though I wouldnât want things to get crowded, either. I guess, overall, there is too much unused space in 1.8 Remote on Android.
On the top of the portrait queue view it sometimes shows track count and total queue duration, but at times only the duration. The track count seems to be wondering independently from the number of songs Iâve played. A typical shuffle starts with âshuffling 5000 tracksâ, but after listening to 6 tracks it showed 4979 tracks still in queue. That offset of ~15 tracks seemed to fluxtuate, so the difference did not stay at 15. Maybe it is removing unavailable tracks from the queue, I donât know, but the numbers donât match, and with a ~5000 track queue I donât care to troubleshoot further.
On the positive side, I absolutely love the portrait modeâs NOW PLAYING view with the album cover art in as glorious detail as possible. It makes the older album art view look ugly. Apparently, the only way to get to that view is to be in My Tracks in portrait mode so that yet another, clean and simple player control appears in the bottom (there would be room for more than just Pause), and then click the track info next to the Pause icon. I do like that clean look of the control(s) at the bottom, with a single colored line as a progress bar.
Focus & Shuffle:
Two of the most important features to me in Roon (along with unlimited likes) are the ability to make a (possibly dynamic) selection of tracks, and then play songs randomly from that selection. These features affect each other, especially in version 1.8.
The shuffle is no longer a âpick a song at random, play it, pick another, play, âŚâ but rather a âpick a maximum of 5000 tracks, shuffle them, queue them, play the queue, stopâ (although I have not tested whether it would stop or continue automatically with another shuffle). I think they both have their uses, but for me that is a superficial difference. What is crucial, however, is that the selection of those 5000 tracks be random instead of picking the first 5000 based on some ordering of the current focus. Unfortunately, it appears to be the latter, biased method. It is as close to a deal breaker for me as anything can be.
Fortunately, I think that is an oversight and will be fixed, and in any case one could try to work around it by always focusing to a selection of less than 5000 tracks. Unfortunately, none of my views on the Roon Remote on Android show the size of my focus. I have no idea if there are 10, 1000, or 10000 tracks that I might want to shuffle. As a side note, 1.8 seems to quite often lose the header with column names, that also allows for sorting the track listing, making the focus even more limited and uninformative.
It took me some time to realize that there are numbers in the focus criteria selection dialogue. Great! So, pick a criteria with mutually exclusive options, and sum up the numbers, like this: sample rate 44.1khz8(4118) + sample rate 48khz(323) = 4441. Or bit depth 16bit(3439) + bit depth 24bit(351) = 3790. Or channel layout stereo(4466) + other(80) = 4546. The last one was the correct number, so I could have also used tidal(4043) + mp3(503) = 4546. Or I could just shuffle and see if it says âshuffling 5000â in which case I stop that and try to focus more.
Since controlling the amount of tracks focused is now critical, at least until some fixes are implemented, the controls for focus need to be fine grained. Unfortunately, I can no longer focus on eg. albums from a specific time range like 2016-2018, but have to settle for pre-defined decades. (Or, again, the UI makes it too difficult to discover how that can be done). I still canât focus on track duration, so no change from 1.7 there.
With version 1.7 I used to manually control the queue length when I knew that I had to stop listening after a while. Iâd queue up, say, 30 minutes worth of tracks, and then cancel the shuffle. Silence was my reminder, and that worked quite nicely, with the added benefit that I didnât have to cleanup in Roon. Version 1.8 with âshuffle & queueâ no longer allows for that, but thatâs not a major issue for me. Just one more of those minor changes that force me to adapt to the tool, instead of having a tool I can adapt to my needs.
Also, I was still considering how to incorporate introducing new additions in the library into my listening habits. Having each random play evaluate the focus selection would have provided for a very dynamic response in changes in the library, tags, etc. Now, with 1.8 I need to consider more âbatchâ based approaches, which is not especially good or bad, just different. Luckily, I had not settled down on any specific approach.
I have no idea if the logical grouping of the focus criteria has changed or not, as I did not do comprehensive testing in 1.7, but 1.8 has some weird âlogicâ to it: individual criteria are logically ANDâed, but focused tags are logically ORâed (between themselves). This does have implications on how I approach normal listening selections. If the logic did change, then a lot of other peopleâs bookmarks are likely broken.
Tagging:
Originally, I thought I would not need any tags, but because I canât focus on blocked or non-liked tracks, I decided to start utilizing tags as they are quite powerful. I still donât have a âBlockedâ tag, but will likely have one eventually, if focus does not allow for it. Maybe I want to specifically listen to a bunch of my oldest blocked tracks (selectively unblocking them first), to give them a second chance.
Anyway, I have some tags for special purposes, that have little relevance to normal listening, but would come handy in rare occasions. Some of these are quite subjective and could change on every listen. Therefore, it is important for me to be able to quickly check the tags of a track when I hear it and think of those marginal use cases.
Version 1.7 had a great solution (for me), as a single Tags option in the track context menu allowed me to check, set, and remove tags as needed. Since the use case is relatively rare, I wouldnât mind jumping through extra hoops as long as I ended up in a similarly useful checkbox view of the trackâs tags as in 1.7.
Unfortunately, 1.8 has no such view, and checking multiple tags for a track using focus is way too cumbersome. This has already left me wondering about tags of a song that is playing. Instead of encouraging me to take advantage of the feature, it is now discouraging me.
Removal of tags is hidden so well, as to be generally considered non-existent. Logically, it should be in the context menu of the track, but one needs to go to My Tags (instead of focusing on tracks with that tag), and in the tag specific view, and only there, select the track to get the selection (basket?) context menu where one can find the action. One should be able to remove a tag relatively as easily as one can accidentally set it. Iâm assuming one should not ever remove tags, based on how difficult and hidden it is. Maybe add a confirmation dialogue: âYou are trying to remove a tag. Are you sure?â ?
Miscellaneous:
Currently, Roon 1.8 recommends to me artists already in my library, artists that Iâve marked as liked in my library, and artists from whom I have multiple albums per artist in my library. Iâm not sure what to think of such recommendations. Certainly, they are correct in that I would probably be interested in them. Overall, they are not the reason I started using Roon, they wonât be the reason Iâd leave Roon, and in their current form they wonât be able to hold on to me, either.
At the same time it consistently fails to recommend new releases from artists whose prior releases have already found their way into my library. I guess the assumption is that I can track my favorite 1000+ artists on my own. Again, it is good for both Roon and me that the feature is not my reason for paying for the service.
I accidentally stumbled on a new(?) recommendation feature under the Artist page: new releases for fans of this artist. Fantastic! Iâve already started checking that on artist pages for the tracks that play. Though Iâm a fan of many artists, there seemed to be releases that were never recommended to me. I guess I need to fan harder. Even with my limited sampling, Iâve also found several artists whose fans seem to be going through a dry spell with no interesting new releases. Hang in there!
I feel (not having used them much, yet, with 1.7) that the artist page is now richer with more useful ways to approach theirs and related content. This, in turn, encourages me to check the artist pages more often, when I have the time for discovery.
Finally, it seems that there is now a substantial delay between the time the âstill working on itâ animated icon disappears and content appears on screen, at least on Roon Remote on Android. It is hard to know whether the result is an empty set, or simply not on screen, yet.
Overall, the way expectations were mismanaged, changes not properly communicated, and reasons behind changes unexplained left many understandably frustrated. A good tool liberates instead of restricting. It guides and communicates clearly instead of confusing. It leads to growth instead of decline.
Roon 1.8 may have been that to many, or even most, but it is far from that for me. I feel like a victim of bait & switch even though I understand perfectly well that it was in no way intended (and just saw in the forums how most of the more critical issues have been confirmed to be unintended and will be fixed).
I can see a technical reason behind most of the changes, typically reducing the load of backend database services, and hopefully, that has a long-term benefit to the user, application, company and the community. Unfortunately, it still hurts, right now.
Many of the problems Iâve encountered are likely minor mistakes (already confirmed, even) in the Android remote, and will be fixed, either soon or eventually. But, if Roon does not provide useful ways to properly randomize the playing of thousands of liked tracks, then it is not for me. My use case of âlike lots of tracks, play them randomlyâ should be the easiest for any and all streaming services, yet they are all actively avoiding it. The only reason a company actively moves away from a trivial customer need towards a more complex solution is that it is more beneficial to them to do so. (Yes, I am oversimplifying, but the concept stands).
Phew! Thanks for reading! This was meant as feedback and not as a conversation starter, so I likely wonât be checking regularly, if anybody has asked or suggested something. Sorry.
Hopefully, this wall of text explains why some (like me) have viewed Roon 1.8 in a rather negative light, despite there being good efforts to improve the overall experience. I can only imagine it getting even better over time.
Sincerely,
Arto Selonen
19 Likes
What @Acidtest inicated is clearly a bug. When you play an album you see the âspectrum analyzerâ. When add it to your library (while listening) , from then on the âspectrum analyzerâ is not anymore shown. This for all consecutive tracks that are still in the queue. Itâs happening to me on a IPad with latest iOS installed. I hope it will be fixed soon.
There was always a different app for iPad, more like desktop version. So I mean only mobile version. And I think there was âforwardâ button on iPhone before.
Wow, I didnât know that. I wish someday Tidal will also cancel this limit.
Are you getting the jittery scrolling too? On iPad and to a lesser extend iphone.
2 Likes
I havenât been home the last few days, so I came a bit late to the party and had quite a smooth 1.8 experience so far, with some of the initial bugs / instabilities removed.
Iâm a big fan of the new layout, and most importantly, within the few hours I used the new Roon, I found music I actually wanted to listen to much easier than before.
The one thing I miss at the moment are the AMG star ratings on overview pages, I hope they could be turned back on, since they were quite useful discovering music not yet in my library. Interestingly, when browsing the Tidal pages in Roon, the star rating is visible againâŚ
All in all ⌠strong update and happy with it!
2 Likes
Wow. Your use case is quite similar to mine. For existing file collections there is a perfect solution for your random listening/rating behaviour: JRiver Media Center. It provides bit perfect sound quality, too. Unfortunately they wonât integrate streaming services. Therefore I decided to use ROON and JRiver in parallel. Both apps look at the same music folder (250.000 Tracks). The unbelievable feature rich JRiver is my library/smart playlist manager, ROON is used as discovery tool. If I like a new album, I download or purchase/rip it and add it to my collection wirh JRiver. In ROON it immediately appears, but there I have not to care about inferior tagging/playlist functionality.
2 Likes
I have no idea what was changed under the hood. But with the update I have massive network problems. With the Safari browser I am on Tidal, but Roon 1.8 does not make it. Again and again connection errorr. Then I abort and then also the connection to the core (MBAir) is lost? Crazy
Problem solved
Caching and cable problemes her
1 Like
Same here at iPad11 Pro