I’m wondering, if I’m forced to have an active internet connection for Roon to playback my music on a local drive, perhaps I should just succumb to Apple Music anyway. I keep hearing it’s the future.
If you’re all worried, I would suggest to downgrade to 1.8 (Legacy) now, while you can. We only have around 6 weeks, after this, you will no longer be able to downgrade. If ARC is important to you, upgrade. You can have all your offline local files stored on the ARC app which has a 14 day offline limit.
That’s not a long term solution, even 1.8 will only work until Dec or something (can’t be bothered to find the quote, but its out there).
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I don’t think a firm end-date for support has been given. The migration FAQ says:
For how long can I use 1.8?
Roon will provide ongoing support for 1.8 installation for some time after the release of 2.0, depending on the Roon 2.0 adoption rates. However, if you are more comfortable using Roon 1.8, you can always continue to run it on your own after the official support period ends.
Edit: and now I see that @mike has stated that support will continue “at least” until the end of December 2022.
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Of course it is not. Hence the rest of my post. However, 1.8 (Legacy) won’t stop working. It just won’t receive updates after Dec ‘22.
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Not sure what Roon means to do in the future, but you seem to be conflating two things, Roon as a cloud based service and a service that streams music that they have licensed. I very much doubt that Roon believes it can compete with Tidal, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple, or Spotify as a licenser.
Doesn’t matter to your argument, but Roon has at last count over 250k subscribers.
I agree that forcing users to have an internet connection, for whatever reason, is an unfortunate turn of events.
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I noticed something different at the bottom of this post, have a timer icon with text
“Please wait 30 minutes between posts in this topic”. Seem to be some kind of throttle is engaged.
That’s correct - but the timer shouldn’t cause the thread from appearing in the list of topics…
Have you voted here? It might help.
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/make-roon-play-local-music-files-w-o-internet-access/214998/46
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Yes, without Roon you won’t have the best interface out there, but it isn’t the end of the world.
JShiver doesn’t believe that streaming has a future, so no internet needed.
Ditto.
An important consideration that had not previously occurred to me.
Very ditto.
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Then you should definitely go to the Feature Suggestion topic on this and vote to restore that local access!
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/make-roon-play-local-music-files-w-o-internet-access/214998/51
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I hadn’t looked at this from a business plan point of view versus a technical architecture aspect. I wonder if Roon is realizing that they need to steer towards an exit, and that they need a totally cloud offering to be able to do that. It’s obvious there are not enough true audio freaks with local collections to create that 9 or 10 figure exit…but at the same time, if that shift excludes the local collection users, their access to recurring revenue would greatly suffer.
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By now everything has been said, so I’ll not add anything new except my opinion which reflects that of many.
I don’t use streaming services and i’m not interested in using them (it’s not a question of being a “dinosaur”, but i firmly believe that if you love music you need to give artists the right compensation for their work. And this happens by buying the music. I’m also one of those who like to have the physical edition in hand), so everything i listen to is locally. I am very happy with the release of ARC because it completes my listening modes by allowing me to have a single synchronized library.
This internet problem, however, makes me think …
I’m lucky. I live in an area where internet outages are resolved in a few hours and are few during the year, but that’s not the point.
The point is, i shouldn’t have any limitations if my only need is to play local files. This is a change of philosophy that puzzles me.
Legacy 1.8 cannot be the solution. It’s a static release that at some point will not receive further updates (including any security fixes).
I believe no one here is asking for a 100% Roon if there is no internet. What is asked here is the possibility of continuing to play music even in situations of short or long internet interruptions. If Roon creates a library database on the machine where the core resides, why shouldn’t it continue reading this database even when there is no network? I understand that some features may be limited or absent (research? radio?..) but many things reside locally in the database: cover art, pdf, tags, bookmarks, playlists, audio analysis, metadata present in the files if compiled and, of course, local music.
All of this should work offline as well. Maybe Roon won’t do the “magic” he does when he’s 100%, but none of us expect that.
Many in this post have supported Roon’s philosophy from the beginning with a lifetime solution because they believed (and still believe) in that philosophy.
This choice, however, changes that mission statement and i understand that many may feel betrayed and unprotected and raises many questions in which direction Roon is going.
However, i believe that a solution (not 1.8 legacy) that can satisfy those who want to maintain access even in the absence of the internet without compromising future software developments can be found.
We all care about Roon and the number of posts here shows that our desire is to continue using it without having to fall back on alternative solutions (definitive or “backup”).
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Accessing your local music without perpetual Internet is the mark of a backwards Luddite! Everyone must embrace our glorious future where every single interaction with your own property is mediated by the Cloud!
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There are JRiver, Foobar 2k, Daphile, LMS, WTFplayer,
And LMS handles multi room synched players, and can do a basic integration of spotify, tidal, and Qobuz with your local music files if you wish. LMS has become a community sourced sever since Logitech abandoned the Squeezebox players maybe a decade ago.
This is true, and the advice that’s been officially provided, but also strikes me as circular. Remove offline grace period in 2.0 → add something similar back in ARC, but on a phone, moving functionality to the mobile device. I’ve voted on the feature suggestion thread.
Some users have massive offline libraries, so it doesn’t make sense to me to have them sitting on a hard drive and a phone. Heck, my offline library is meager, just FLAC rips from a few CDs and it’s 10 GB. As I understand it, a key point of ARC was to avoid playing the game of picking and choosing which albums you have access to when you’re on the go and inevitably missing something. That just seems destined to happen when there’s lots of phones with 128/256GB of storage against a much bigger library. Further, not everyone is going to be setup to listen to HiFi from a phone. Even if they can Bluetooth to their stereo, that’s probably a big quality stepdown compared to the lossless path usually afforded by Roon.
As an aside, I’ll also plug the Strawberry music player as a simple, local, offline option, particularly good on Linux. Not sure it supports DSD. Arguably more helpful if you have a monitor and keyboard hooked up to your machine, or can remotely connect. https://www.strawberrymusicplayer.org/
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Of course! How else would we properly gather advertising data!
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Thank you, Danielle, for your contribution to this discussion. It put’s things well in perspective.
Personally I’m connected to a glass fibre-internet-network. And that is becoming the standard in our country (NL) at the moment. Downtime is therefore very rare.
But I’m well aware that in many parts of the world internet connection still can be unreliable and vulnerable due to local circumstances (like storms as some Roon-users stated here). So I can relate to the concerns of many here. And I agree that it’s therefore probably not in the interest of a number of Roon-users to make Roon 2.0 completely internet-dependent.
I think this point has been made very loudly here. However I think the way some people express their concerns here is in many cases exaggerated, rude, aggressive and insulting,
The Roon-staff has built wonderful software for us all. I’m glad to be part of this Roon community. And I trust the Roon-staff to consider other options (there are many useful suggestions made in this conversation).
IMHO it’s necessary to find a way to change Roon 2.0 to enable it to play our local music even if the internet is down. The point of all these contributions here is clear: this is essential for too many Roon-users at this time.
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