And Danny is the owner of the company???
Indeed. Iāll post this, but we must accept the fact that it isnāt going to change.
Quote:
The architecture of Roon has been holding back the product in various ways for a while. Weāve used this release as an opportunity to begin fixing that, so that Roon can have a future.
Our users are increasingly expecting things from us that can only be delivered with the help of cloud services, large scale databases, machine learning, etc. We read and understand what you guys are (collectively) asking for, and itās not possible for us to get there with the current architecture.
The products that our users compare us to constantly are often accomplishing what they do without the limitations of having to run inside of the userās home, on a computer with unpredictable performance.
One example is search. Roonās search engine gets a lot of complaints that can be basically summed up as āitās not as smart as Xā where X is a service with a cloud-based search engine. Doing search well in the cloud is relatively straightforward. Reinventing decades of search technology from scratch in a way that lets us shoehorn it into a userās machineāwhich may already be right on the edge in terms of resource consumptionāis not a practical endeavor.
The same goes for many other aspects of the product. Roon does not have a modern playlist product or reasonable sharing features because of the way our architecture is.We also receive tons of feedback complaining about how heavy the core software is, how much compute power it requires, power consumption, resource requirements, etc.
People donāt like that we have a large stateful database that requires backups because the norm today with most products is for a cloud service to manage data integrity for you.We cannot begin to chip away at these problems and modernize the product if we are stuck in the old way of doing things, so we made a change.
If that doesnāt work for you or you donāt agree with our decision, feel free to use Roon 1.8 Legacy. In seven plus years we have never accommodated downgrades, but we did a bunch of work to make it practical and safe it this time because we know that some people wonāt be able to live with this change
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I realize not everyone will have this option since it depends on your hardware, but Iām currently playing 48 kHz 24 bits over Bluetooth from my Android phone using Roon ARC (downloaded album) to my Naim Atom. ARC is doing some conversions, but it shows as a high quality signal path.
When I look at the Bluetooth setting for the Atom on my phone, it shows a toggle for HD audio: Qualcomm aptX HD audio - which I have turned on. The screen of the Atom also indicates Qualcomm aptX HD is in use.
Looking at the specs for aptX HD, it supports 24 bit up to 48kHZ.
(Your hardware will need to support this.)
[Edit: After further investigation it appears some compression is used, even at 24 bit 48kHZ.]
Just sharing in case this helps a few people play their local files when internet is out, and the quality is sufficient.
Conceptually, I agree Roon 2.0 should allow local playback without internet. However, practically it doesnāt matter much to me since if I donāt have internet, I likely donāt have power as well. In the cases I do lose only internet, downloaded tracks/albums to ARC and Bluetooth Qualcomm aptX HD will get me by.
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Isnāt this what I would call āengineering maffiaā talk?
Roonlabs can be in denial or not, until 2.0 they had the hidden but extremely welcome āundocumentedā feature that offline music could still be played during reasonably short internet dropouts. No internet, get a book and retreat in the listening room. Do they think only idiots want to do that???i
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Thanks. Where is this from please?
Yes, 1/3 I think.
@danny Not really aligned to the ālifetimeā license i purchased. This being a significant element of the main use case of a local file based software application. E.g. at home usage indepenent of internet connectivity.
How am i supposed to demo systems at shows now or use my core at work where i canāt put it on the local network?
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30 days with no internet check-in, and more if you have extenuating circumstances or ask in advance.
Now I notice there is no Shuffle command where that command always used to be. Could it be that all the internet connection crap could not identify specific albums if the play order is/was shuffled?
I wish I had been told about the new internet requirement, I would never upgraded to ARCā¦
You should downgrade to Roon 1.8 Legacy in that case.
Perhaps just a natural response. Just a analogy, Isnāt Roon his baby, and then some of the Roon Family are telling him how ugly it isā¦
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Jim, thanks for the ideaā¦Iām not sure of the steps to pull that offā¦I do have a external 1Gig SSD that I always back up to at years endā¦so my last B/U was Dec ā21ā¦ā¦Could you point me in the right direction?
Iāll look for the instructions for going to Roon 1.8 Legacy, but in the mean time, I suggest you do a backup now. I donāt think you want to lose any thing you have done since 12/31/21. If necessary, you can restore your Roon data backup from one version of Roon to another. That doesnāt matter.
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Looks a little complicated. According to this, the window to downgrade from Roon 2.0 to Roon 1.8 Legacy will be open for six weeks, so there is no big rush for you to do it. You might want to stay with Roon 2.0 for while and give it a fair trial.
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I doubt you can move an authorization over if you have no internetā¦so that blows this idea out of the water.
I can maybe point my Lumin to my 300k+ library but that doesnāt get me to the other non Lumin devices on my network.
I do it all the time. I use my iPhone hotspot with my Dell to authorize the Dell and unauthorize my Nucleus. Youāre not connecting to your other device, it connects to Roon. Then I use hotspot data for a week or two with my Dell to use Roon when out of town and stream from Tidal and Qobuz.
This is just an idea I had to be able to have Roon ARC (with Roon 2.0) and play your local music files when your internet is down (with Roon 1.8). My other idea is to subscribe to Audirvana Origin lifetime for $120.
Iām not trying to figure out what Roon needs to do, thatās up to them. Iām figuring out what I would do if I had a bunch of local music files, which I donāt. I always try to be proactive and solve problems.
I could have done this yesterday in 30 seconds by switching from my Nucleus on 2.0 to my Dell on 1.8. My Dell can connect to my endpoints via RAAT. Now that I have switched the Dell to Roon 2.0 this idea would not work for me unless I switched back to Roon 1.8 Legacy.
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Still a massive kludge. Roon needs to get a grip on this before it kills the whole fan base. Clearly not everyone as users is connected to the community regularly and many will only find out about this when itās broken and too late.
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This depends on circumstance. Such as, when was the 1.8 Core last authenticated? And itād better be on constantly as Auth seems an essential step in start up.
Just out of curiosity, i have a secondary Core running 1.8 in my listening space. It carries a similar local library as my main 2.0 Core and was authenticated upon itās ādowngradeā from 2.0.
On my main iPad and iPhone i have downloaded the 1.8 Remote.
When finished with the setup, checking connectivity and playback, i cut the 1.8 Core from internet access.
Then i switched the Core to the internet enabled 2.0, and when it was authenticated properly, it is working fine.
So basically i have two system running at this time. And no, this is not a violation of my license as both systems play to the very same endpoint, i.e. not concurrently. Iām just ducking the auth mechanism.
But, i assume that i need to reauthorize my 1.8 Core every few weeks. I donāt mind that, itās less hassle than the weekly updates on the main Coreā¦
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Whilst I would prefer the ability to use Roon without internet access, mainly in the event of internet outage rather than me taking my core to a location without internet access, itās now apparent that this isnāt going to happen as Roon moves forwards.
Danny, and others, have made it clear that a cloud based approach is the way forwards and I think for good reason. One of the constant criticism of Roon (on this forum) is that it is very hardware dependent. Everybodyās hardware set up is different and this causes a huge problem for Roon. How many times have we read ācanāt use Qobuz/Tidal on Roon but can on their native appsā¦ā? Itās clear that Roon wants to bypass some of these problems by moving things to the cloud. This allows a far great uniformity of provision and access.
Itās clear that Roon has foreseen that this, along with the issue of no longer supporting older hardware, will cause significant problems for some - hence the provision of 1.8 Legacy. 1.8 Legacy provides a solution for those users who donāt want mobile access, but do want to use Roon offline. It also provides a solution for those who dread āupdate timeā!
Now, the big issue is how long Roon will support 1.8 Legacy. This clearly depends on the number of Legacy users (see this post). If you want to use Roon as it is then, the more people that download and use Legacy, the more likely it is to be supported further into the future. But, as with all things Roon, Roon provide and support what they want to provide and support - it has ever been thus!
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Could Roon team give an idea of the proportion of their customers with a local library that they care for ? I assume that proportion gives a good estimation of the percentage of Roon customers willing to remain able to access it even if Internet should drop. Plus, these customers are likely their earlier ones and would remain potentially quite faithful, provided that their owner access to playing Ā« their local music Ā» via Roon is respected. And lifetime subscribersā¦
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