For a couple of days now, since I had to experience the missing track tagging and playlist features on 1.8 – which are really necessary for me to make productive use of my music library –, I was trying and tinkering with restoring all my systems via backups to states pre February 9th, 2021 and just now, after maybe 20 hours of trying and failing and trying again, I finally succeeded to have Roon 1.7 back and running again on all my devices 
(I have a Macbook, an iPad and an iPhone I use with Roon).
I actually don’t know why it didn’t work out in the beginning and then did in the end. Restoring on macOS was pretty straightforward, since I only had to grab the 1.7 version of the macOS app from a backup, rename the Roon folder in ~/Library like the Roon team told me once when I had a broken system after an update (I’m pretty sure you can delete that renamed folder if the restoring process went well), start the 1.7 Roon app (which creates a new Roon folder in ~/Library) and restore from a Roon database backup pre February 9th, 2021.
Getting the Roon 1.7 app back on my iOS devices didn’t work that smoothly because in the beginning iOS always seemed to download the most recent Roon version. So even when restoring a pre February 9th backup on my phone, I would end up with the 1.8 version installed. Maybe I did something different in the end than in the beginning. Maybe in the beginning I didn’t always immediately turn off auto updates in the App Store settings and didn’t have my devices connect to the internet only after that (and denying every connection attempt of Apple’s restoring dialogue). The thing is, iOS always seems to restore apps from the Apple servers because it makes the backup smaller if it doesn’t have to contain every application’s code. So there still must be a 1.7 version lying around on Apple’s servers. I always have to allow a connection to the internet for restoring the Roon app on iOS, without internet it just won’t restore.
But yay, finally it all worked out and I honestly wouldn’t want to go through that again (I did countless restore tries with iMazing and they always took at least half an hour). I’m so glad to have a usable and running Roon 1.7 system back again on all my devices.
I was even surprised to find that the old design all of a sudden looked pretty modern to me and also pretty pretty. Really well balanced in colors, font sizes and font weights. Maybe it’s the contrast but I didn’t feel that so strongly before.
In the end all this silence from Roon about the tagging and playlist issues in 1.8 really made me feel stuck in the middle of nowhere and I felt like I had to do something about it. I’m glad I could.
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For some the following might look cluttered. For me it’s really essential being able to quickly get a rough idea of how a track sounds without having to listen to it again.
