Hi all!
First, we just want to thank everyone for all the interest in Roon 1.8!
We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response we’ve heard from thousands of you, and we’ve also been intently reading everyone’s suggestions for how we can improve Roon in the future.
Wide-ranging design changes to an application like Roon can be extremely complex, and our design team and developers spent countless hours working to ensure the changes didn’t affect critical functionality, or overwhelm the music that makes up your library.
We know in certain cases these changes did affect the way some users interact with Roon, and we’ve been carefully working through everyone’s comments and suggestions, designing and implementing changes based on everyone’s feedback.
Our Customer Success team (@support) has also been putting in serious hours capturing information about bugs and working with our QA team to get issues resolved, and today we’re happy to be releasing a number of fixes and improvements based on what we’ve heard over the last 2 weeks from Roon users.
What’s Changed
Tags
We’ve heard loud and clear from many of you how important tags are to you, and how the changes in 1.8 impacted your ability to organize your library. This release includes a number of changes based on the feedback we’ve heard including:
- Tag links on the album page - By popular request, this feature is back. Head over to the General tab of Settings and, once “Show track tags on album page” is enabled, tags will appear as they did in past versions of Roon.
- Add/remove Tags - we’ve also restored the tag management functionality many of you have requested from past versions of Roon. When tagging content, you’ll now get checkboxes that indicate which content was previously tagged, and you’ll be able to add or remove multiple tags at once
Shuffle Play
This was another piece of feedback we heard from many of you. While the changes in 1.8 were intended to make the album browser’s play options more consistent with other screens, we know that shuffle was not actually selecting content from across your entire library.
This has now been resolved, and it’s once again easy to play a completely random selection of music from your library.
Star Ratings & MQA Badge
Many of you have told us how important ratings are as you’re browsing. Roon 1.8 includes expanded options for choosing which album-level information you want displayed, including the ability to toggle badges for Picks, Favorites, Live, and more, as well as information like album version, format, or dynamic range.
We’ve now added the ability to toggle stars as part of the album info, and we’ve also made sure that this information is displayed more consistently, including on the TIDAL and Qobuz pages. You can enable star ratings from the General tab of Settings, under “Customize Album Display”.
We’ve also added the MQA badge to the list, which you can enable if you’d like an easy way to differentiate MQA content across the app.
Playlist Links
This is another request we’ve heard from many of you – if you’d like to see links on the album screen to the playlists you’ve created, this can also be enabled from the General tab of Settings.
Other improvements and bug fixes
This release also addresses a number of bugs we’ve heard about over the last 2 weeks, including issues related to audio devices not appearing in the zone picker, and some cases where the “View More” link in Focus wouldn’t be available.
The full list of changes is below.
Thanks everyone!
The Team At Roon Labs
Roon 1.8 (Build 763) Release Notes
Roon Build 763 is now rolling out for macOS, Windows, Windows (64 Bit), Roon OS, and Linux.
Updated versions of Roon for Android and iOS have been submitted to their respective App Stores and will be available soon. There is no update for Roon Bridge at this time.
All platforms and apps should update automatically.
Improvements and Bug Fixes for Build 763:
- Fixed missing audio zones in some conditions
- Add/Remove Tag functionality restored
- Playlist and Tag links available on Album screen (enable on Settings > General)
- Shuffle playback in browsers selects from your entire library
- New “Customize Album Display” options:
- Star rating
- MQA badge
- Album display settings now used across the app including TIDAL, Qobuz, Genre pages, etc
- ‘Export’ option restored to Playlists when applicable
- Focus: fixed some cases where ‘View More’ wouldn’t be shown
- Updated treatment of ‘In library’ button on Search results
- Bigger “hit areas” for touch:
- Queue button in footer
- Scrollbars on iOS
- Playlist item drag handles
- Now Playing:
- Fixed spacing and layout of Star rating and streaming services badges
- Removed UI artifact when Now Playing is empty on mobile
- Album screen includes clearer treatment when navigating to “focused” track list from Credits tab
- Fixed icon alignment for tracks on many screens
- Fixed overlapping scrollbars in some dialogs
- Fixed failure to load content after clicking link in reviews and bios
- Fixed crash opening artist browser when malformed unicode is present
- Fixed a bug where different ‘Member of’ links would redirect to the same person
- Fixed absence of hamburger menu on large-format tablets
- Updated treatment for tags on Composition screen
- Fixed issue with multiple external source controls on Volume popup
What’s Next
We’re still reading everyone’s feedback and looking forward to releasing additional changes over the next few weeks, including options to display larger text, and expanding Focus to support powerful, customizable filtering including AND/OR options.
Once these changes are implemented, any bookmarks that predate Roon 1.8 should work as they did before, so thanks for everyone’s patience on this!