Roon 1.8 will be Live on ….?

Roon Software Discussion
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I would suggest it has zero to do with multiple language support. English is entirely sufficient for 99.9% of Roon’s customers around the world. Music lovers and audiophiles with audio systems and music libraries that would merit or require using Roon most assuredly all have a sufficient command of English to use Roon. Even the support group here doesn’t include Swahili or Serbo-Croatian. Plus, whatever translations they need have been in-house for a very long time now, unless they’re spending months adding some tribal dialects from Papua New Guinea.

The delay is technical on the level of functionality and subsequent beta-testing and debugging. Roon is making a massive communication mistake by coyly remaining mysteriously silent on a future release date. Nearly 100% of all software / application developers atleast give an anticipated or a planned release date. Not Roon. They are just increasing customer expectations and exigence by refusing to communicate openly and transparently.

This will most certainly translate into a very painful level of mass disappointment with their customer base as all indications seem to point to a 1.8 which will simply be a repackaged 1.7 with, hopefully, a minimum level of bug fixes that have been infuriating everyone for long enough now. At this stage, I’ll happily settle for that and nothing more.

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Some while back @danny commented that it was “the biggest yet” I believe – We can hope

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Firstly, you make a big (99.9%?) assumptions about the language people comfortably read and speak. When you write down lines like these like facts, you should at least present it with some proof. Or it might as well contribute 0.1% to this discussion.

Regarding giving a date, the problem is that a promise is a promise, regardless of the state of the software that’s to be shipped. Maybe you have read about the **** storm that computer game Cyberpunk 2077 got when the management decided to ship before Christmas when the game wasn’t finished at all. That kind of decisions will bite you in the ass. Roon is mostly celebrated to be a stable product, not for shipping ASAP.

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Translations in the major languages are already pretty good, and if memory serves, some have an interesting history (I think @danny mentioned that users of bootlegged copies of Roon in lower-income countries had done some of the work…).

As far as I can tell, the real problem is non-english metadata sources. Maybe @Craig_Palmer would be kind enough to opine on this, and maybe share with us which languages would have the type of spread and depth that’d make integration with Roon worthwhile.

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Ah, there we go. 'Twas credit card fraud in Brazil and Russia, not piracy.

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I hope Danny was not talking about memory footprint/usage.

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You have several things perfectly wrong.

Allow me to rectify the 99.9% to 100% of Roon users have proficient English to use the software. A very large cross-section of music is performed or sung in the English language. People around the world learn English by listening to music and attempting to sing along, among other methods.

The Roon website and landing page is in English. First you discover what Roon is somewhere and then you access their site to learn more and you read about it in English.

Using and implementing Roon requires a minimum of PC/Mac computer knowledge. The IT field is notoriously guilty of using the English language as an international communication tool, just like the rest of the world, independently of the fact that you may or may not like that. Therefore, discovering Roon, implementing and tweaking Roon is simply not possible by using Swahili or Serbo-Croation alone. There will be a required usage and understanding of English.

Do Amazon HD, Deezer, Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz all have dozens of multi-language versions so the “billions and billions” of non-English speaking customers can use their services?

This is obviously neither a problem nor a real issue. As previously mentioned, anyone who has a high interest in music and stereo reproduction material, and enough disposable income to spend money on this, AND WHO DECIDES TO USE ROON, is most probably proficient in English.

Therefore, the silly excuse that the Roon team is “probably working on language translations” is patently false and is used to justify the absence of the 1.8 update and any and all communication about a forthcoming release date.

Finally, your comment about priority being about “stable product”… This would indeed be nice but we have seen that this is STILL NOT THE CASE for release 1.7. Yes, it works, most of the time but many users are regularly experiencing inexplicable bugs and dysfunctions with the latest version. I agree that they should work on this. If 1.8 is NOTHING BUT A STABLE 1.7 then that would be tremendous.

Please note that as a non-native English speaker, I wrote this reponse in spite of my first instinct to use my maternal language which isn’t English. Miraculously, I can still use Roon.

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This is true.

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I think that this is both European/US biased and contains a self fulfilling element. I know plenty of good developers who speak little or no English, particularly in Eastern Europe and Asia. Discovering and installing Roon for a Swahili speaker with no English speaking skills would be far easier if the right resources were available in their native language.

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You thought the Spotify integration requests were fun ? You’re going to love the JioSaavn or QQ flamewars.

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I don’t want to jump in the middle of your fray, but most global technology (consumer facing) products have multi-lingual support, so the answer to your question is Yes, they do.

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Hmm. As far as non English metadata for albums, I’ll ignore the idea of translating English releases into non English. This will never happen. So the question is coverage for non English releases in their native language. Once you get beyond the languages in major western countries and Japan it gets very hard very fast. There just aren’t many, or in many cases any sources of good metadata. All Music does very little here and never will invest. MusicBrainz relies on submissions so of course will have will have some non English coverage but it will still be very very spotty because it takes people and focus to go deep here. When I ran Gracenote a decade ago we were integrated into the major computer music players so we knew what was being played and thus what was popular in almost every language and had staff focused on cleaning up the metadata for the top music based on popularity for 15 or so languages (I have no idea if they’ve continued this). But even this effort didn’t include deep credits, just the basic metadata and it was very hard and expensive. Neither All Music or MusicBrainz has this kind of capability or focus to the best of my knowledge and because these are Roon’s sources of data I wouldn’t expect much…

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I think we’re getting close. I shuffle my entire library everyday and I swear it’s a better shuffle today. I think they flip a switch somewhere.

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Yeah, that, or English releases in non-English languages. There’s at least one French database that feeds Qobuz (and Deezer), there’s got to be equivalents for the Indian and Chinese markets, and going down the commonly-used languages list, I’d be surprised if Spanish wasn’t on the list…

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“English releases in non-English languages?” WUT?
Have we not lost all contact with some form of reality?

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Sure. Microsoft is an example. But your certainty that the above-mentioned music-streaming services each offer no less than 24 languages (dozens) is a massive leap of faith and personally I do not believe it. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.

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We were talking about metadata and Roon adding languages, so it seemed implicit that this was referring to metadata describing releases in English, but in non-English languages.

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Just because they have multi-language support for the menus in the application, which I agree all major music services do, that is completely separate from a question of how much local language coverage there is for the metadata in the music releases. No one translates non local language metadata to local language. You may see a major release from a non local country in the local language because it was also released locally in the native language but no one is translating if there was no local release. So you have to separate a global statement on language support to that of the application and the metadata.

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Yes Microsoft, probably OT. I send an invite for Teams to an international board and the member in Australia can not connect, because my invitation has been sent from Teams configured in German. When I change in settings to English and resend the invitation, the Aussie can join. His server has problems with the German invite.

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And more on topic, ROCK cannot handle German Umlauts in folder names. Won’t play tracks in these folders.