What’s new in this release?
Hello everyone,
We are excited to begin rolling out a significant software optimization on Windows and macOS! This update will be made available to all users over the next week so please read on for all the details.
Roon software optimization delivers the best Windows/Mac experience.
Our team is always working to improve Roon. Alongside new features and functionality, there’s a continual stream of work aimed at advancing the performance of Roon regardless of platform, configuration, or library, reflecting our commitment to continuously improve our product.
Today’s release includes performance improvements that benefit all Roon users, alongside some notable architectural changes for users who run their Core on Windows or macOS. While these changes won’t fundamentally change how the product works or how you access your music, they will improve Roon’s performance across the board.
About Availability
Note that this release will also be “staged,” meaning that it will be released incrementally, and not all users will immediately have an update available to download.
If you check for updates and don’t yet see the new version available, please be patient as we roll these changes out to the entire user base over the coming days.
Best Roon experience, activate!
The upgrade won’t change how you use Roon day-to-day, and all your current settings and preferences will stay the same. But moving forward, you’ll enjoy a smoother, more responsive, high-performance Roon experience if your Core is on Windows or Mac.
To achieve that, we’ve detached the Roon Core from the Roon interface, restructuring both to run as independent processes.
If you run your Core on another device – Nucleus, ROCK, Linux, or otherwise, these changes won’t affect you, but those of you who run your Core on Windows or macOS will now see Roon Server running as a separate process from the Roon app.
This new architecture mirrors our recommended Roon configuration - running Roon Server and Roon separately - but requires no extra work from you.
Going forward, we will no longer offer Roon Server as a stand-alone installer for Windows and Mac. On these platforms, there will be a single Roon installer which will include the Roon application (for selecting music and configuring Roon) and Roon Server, for users that run their Core on Windows or macOS.
In these setups Roon Server continues to run in the background when you close Roon. If you’d like to shut down Roon Server on these platforms you can do that from the System Tray or menu bar.
How do I upgrade?
As mentioned above, this release will be rolled out incrementally, so not every user will immediately have access to the update. Please be patient as we roll out this change to everyone over the next few days.
For most users, Mac and Windows Cores will automatically be upgraded to our recommended software configuration once the update is made available to your account - all you have to do is update Roon as you usually do.
Note that we are aware that a small subset of users (less than .05%) may encounter unavoidable technical issues updating to this release. If you have been notified in-app about a pending update but you are having trouble installing the latest version, please see troubleshooting steps posted here, or get in touch with our support team.
Why change?
Roon was designed from the beginning to be completely modular, giving users total flexibility on where they run their Core, and how they connect a virtually unlimited number of remotes and audio devices.
Running Roon Server as its own application has long been our recommended configuration, allowing for improved performance and UI responsiveness, and ensuring that background work, signal processing, and other tasks can continue even when the Roon interface is closed.
Isolating Roon’s principal processing and background duties from the user interface functions creates more predictable performance from both, reducing contention for computing resources. It’s the same separation of functions that premium audio manufacturers utilize for optimizing music playback.
Historically, these benefits have only been enjoyed by Windows and Mac users who studied Roon’s architecture and then downloaded and configured multiple packages. This release ensures that all users will enjoy the best Roon experience moving forward.
This change will also make it as easy as possible for new and existing users to configure the optimal Roon setup on Windows and Mac. We’ve found that our longstanding download options are overwhelming for many users, and the complexity of these options discouraged many Roon users (especially new users) from configuring the best possible setup.
Going forward, Windows and Mac users will always just download Roon, without having to weigh various download options and grapple with the complexity of downloading and configuring multiple software packages.
Change requires change, AKA “Roon Core” is dead - long live Roon Server.
Yes, you read that correctly. As part of these changes, we’ve decided to retire the term Roon Core in favor of wording that more accurately reflects the key aspects of our Windows/Mac software optimization changes.
The old all-in-one nature of Roon Core is no more. Roon’s control functions and Roon Server may still be bundled together in a single install, but they now function independently. Roon Server runs as a separate background process and continues to run when you close Roon.
As of today, no matter where you run Roon: macOS, Windows, Linux, or Roon OS (on Nucleus or ROCK), the core software piece driving your system is Roon Server. With that, we’d like to thank Roon Core for its long-standing and loyal service - and reintroduce it anew as Roon Server. Hail, hail, Roon Server!
You can read more about these changes on our blog.
Thank you for reading and for your continued support,
The Team at Roon Labs
Build Numbers
| Application | Version |
|---|---|
| Roon / RoonServer | 2.0 (build 1353) production |
| Roon Remote (Android / iOS) | 2.0 (build 1352) production |
Updated versions for Android and iOS have been submitted to their respective App Stores and will be available soon.
Changes
- Fixed a bug that would cause performance degradation when multiple album details screens were open
- Fixed a memory leak which impacted Roon servers running on Ubuntu Linux
- Fixed an issue which would cause severely degraded Roon server performance after interacting with ARC
- Several other fixes and enhancements
Installation
Cores, remotes, and ARC installations already running Roon 2.0 Production should update automatically. If you need to reinstall, the latest builds can always be found on the downloads page.
Additional Notes
There is no new ARC release with this update. The latest ARC version remains at build 177 for production.