I’m smelling legal requirements. It would be good to know if I can survive a, say, 24 hour outage (not unheard of) but I guess I will find out the next time Vodafone craps out 
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Are you at liberty to tell us why this change is necessary?
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Probably for licensing checks in order to clamp down on the piracy of Roon and other such things.
There are many reasons… Some are not immediately obvious.
This is one of those many reasons: we used to have two search algorithms. One ran locally and one ran remotely. The local one was quite poor because it lacked the infrastructure to keep a good search engine operational. But because of offline support, we needed to keep both functional. The online one keeps getting better but the one that lives in the Core hasn’t been improving at the same pace. Search is a major pain point for many of our users and it’s a shame because many of those same users are using the local engine often. On top of that, being, consistency is extremely frustrating. With 2.0 we killed the local engine. So now all search requests go through a single unified engine that will continue to improve. But if we advertise offline support, then search has to work offline, which has been problematic.
This is one of the reasons, but this is an architectural shift that allows us to make improvements and shed some of the limitations that we’ve been constrained by in the past.
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This will be a deal breaker for me if you maintain this position. My internet is generally reliable, but when it does go down it can be for an extended period. For instance, after hurricane Sandy it was down for 2 weeks. It seems preposterous that I would not be able to play my own local files in this situation. I wouldn’t care about search functionality under those circumstances.
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Hi Danny. Can you confirm that Roon 2.0 will still play in the home without Internet access? I’m sure you’ve taken into consideration that when the Internet goes down home users will still want to play music off their local Roon core, especially if sources of streaming content is nil due to not having internet access. For playlists, albums at least etc… maybe not using the search function… could you please clarify. Cutting off access to playback of local files would appear to be extreme. Thx.
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So the local database is not searchable locally?
I read Roon 2.0 requires continuous access to the internet.
What happens if there’s a drop in service? Occasionally that happens to the best of services.
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This is an absolutely terrible decision. I shouldn’t need internet access to play back my 300k song library I’ve spent decades building. If my internet goes out I shouldn’t have my listening interrupted.
To think that’s acceptable misses the mark in a major way. Ok so search is all online? Fine, search doesn’t need to work without Internet. Limit us in that way. Just about everything else including filtering will work. But the idea you crush the app from being a music player without Internet access is revolting.
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Could not agree more.
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I cannot believe that Roon was crippled so that it can no longer work without an internet connection in exchange for remote access which I already got with PlexAmp. And no Apple music, or bandcamp, or apple tv display. I will be staying with the old version for now.
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This is absurd!
Everyone’s internet goes down at some point. Roon has always been resilient with internet outages, and now it is fragile and unreliable?
This degradation of service and abuse of users is disgusting.
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My internet connection is reliable but it does fail. It does not make sense that I cannot get access to my music in my house if the internet goes down for x/y reason.
Please, reconsider this restriction.
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Are you finding it to be fragile and unreliable?
Possibly fragile and unreliable as in the decisions made for the bigger updates, not necessarily the software itself.
How do I downgrade my NUC ROCK to 1.8?
Also, don’t be cheeky, it’s not cute… this is not an unrealistic scenario at all.
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Then just give us the option to use Roon without search when the internet is down.
A static index of albums and artists on the local library is more than sufficient to play music. Having search is fine when the internet is available but not at all necessary.
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You have to be kidding? Our internet goes out regularly where we live. Are you seriously telling me we no longer have the ability to play music when this occurs? If so this is a complete mess and a poke in the eye of all users who mainly play local files. Roon has done some very annoying stuff over the years but this will be the worst and most catastrophic if fully implemented! Does this apply if I continue to use 1.8?
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It does not. If you require the old offline access period, stick to 1.8 Legacy.
You can also get offline access via ARC with 2.0, but the Core must be online.
It was not my intention to be cheeky. I’m trying to understand if people are complaining about something that already happened or something that has yet to happen. You can surely understand there is a difference.