Dear Roon Team
Many things have been said about Roon 1.8 by now. I expressed my own views in a separate post. I don’t know if you are interacting with the community here (if you are not I am not judging, I just simply don’t know) as I do not have lot of experience with your community pages. But I am sure you read these
For me Roon was a major discovery a few months ago. The audio quality is just amazing. The flexibility is top notch. So I am 100% pro Roon. However…
You need to consider that for most - if not all - of us Roon is more than just an annual subscription. It is also hardware investment. A major commitment with a number of pieces, and some of them are not cheap at all.
I can see the intentions behind 1.8. Major redesign, streamlining, optimizing, etc. But you need to acknowledge that as part of this redesign you severely degraded the user experience when it comes to managing tags and playlists. I know that there are lots of praising words out there who simply do not take this into account. And that is OK. I accept that not everyone uses these features. Fine. And honestly in the grand scheme of things I love what you did in 1.8. I really do. But…Tagging and playlist. A major pain!
Should you bring back 1.7 style tagging and playlist management, those who are not using this feature will not suffer a bit. Your new design does not have to suffer. But if you decide to leave things as they are now that will be a major blow to all of us (LOT of users!!!) who do use tags and playlists. So why would you not bring back those features?
This brings me to my point. Please make it clear what are your intentions. Do you plan to bring those features back or not. In case you already did this please just point me there, I am not aware of it. Again I understand that you have limited resources. Resources often times collide with priorities. But that should not mean that you need to make major changes that removes something in such a dramatic way. I am not talking about some cosmetic degradation where I would prefer font X instead of font Y. I am talking about user experience. Usability and user experience are organic part of what we get for our money.
Because if things will stay as they are, I will most definitely consider alternatives. The alternatives are not overly promising and they all come with major compromises, but Roon 1.8 introduced a major compromise as well. I see absolutely no reason why you would not bring back 1.7 style tagging and playlist management. And I do not see why you could not align those with the new 1.8 style. It is really up to you and you priorities. If you decide not to, it will be very unfortunate.
Because what good is a fancy top notch audio streaming platform if managing my growing audio library is now a major pain? Yes tagging and playlists still work, but how? It is a lot more complicated in 1.8 and as we all know some important aspects of tags and playlist have been removed completely.
As a passionate Roon user, I would like to know your intentions with regards to where Roon is going. And most importantly what are the immediate next steps. Are you planning to reintroduce a 1.7 style taging and playlist management or not.
I am happy to wait, but I just need to know if there is anything to wait for!
Thank you