There are no plans to fix this because there is nothing broken. Roon has explained this already.
It would be interesting to know the percentage of Roon users actively using the forum vs not using it. It would also be interesting to know how many users know that the internet is now mandatory.
Did any of you receive and email from Roon explaining that internet is now required?
I asked a local Roon dealer, and they didnāt know. My guess is that thereās more users then forum members. But thatās just as guess. I have no data to confirm. A lot of support for any of these types of appliances often fall on the local dealers first. Two local dealers I know have told me that since streaming became popular, 50% or so of their service calls are now end-user network related and have nothing to do with the product they sold. In some cases the first or even second service call is free since the dealers want to maintain relationships. One dealer I know stopped selling Roon. The hassle factor was just too high.
Itās an appliance until it isnāt.
@Jim_F - can you point to where Roon has stated this? Nothing broken perhaps, but a substantial customer reaction and high vote count in feature suggestions should mean something to them. But if they have explicitly stated that they have no plans to fix this, Iād like to know that.
The forum has 60108 registered users at the moment (use the āhamburgerā menu top right and choose āUsersā). @danny said at the beginning of the year that they were reaching the 250,000 mark of Roon users, if I recall correctly.
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Offline functionality is explicitly stated as being ānot on the roadmapā. See this Feature Suggestions topic with this stated in the title (despite this having votes):
I presume Roon added the [not on the roadmap] qualifier? Of course, that was before all the votes poured in. And while @Dannyās comment on why they removed local search is insightful, it doesnāt really speak to the loss of local playback when the internet is offline and whether that capability will remain off the roadmap.
There may be no going back and I can certainly live with that. But Iād sure like to hear what the bright minds at Roon say about possible suggestions or workarounds (e.g. can I crank up 1.8 Legacy and switch my license to it when my internet is offline?)
So, we are looking at ~200K users who may not know.
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Nothing is broken until your internet connection is down. Then EVERYTHING is broken.
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My TV goes out when the power is out. Itās not broken.
But if your TV HDMIs went out if the internet was outā¦ That would feel broken to me.
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I would say it is tiny. You can get some basic stats from the three bars menu at the top and then click āusersā. About +/- 650 posted at least once in the last week. My guess is the vast majority that posted once or twice were support calls. āActiveā users are a few dozen at most. The forum does not appear to be at all representative unless you subscribe to the view that is the tip of an iceberg of roon subscriber opinion.
80 years ago this would be a reasonable equivalency. Today it is not.
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Yes, and not all that 60k userās follow the forum regularly. In fact, most I see are the regular faces. So maybe not even 10% of the registered community members are active.
I have IPTV, so if the internet goes out, so does my TV. I just find something else to do.
But if you had a collection of BluRay discs and you could not play them when the internet is out, would that be unacceptable?
I have a turntable and play records all the time. That is besides the point.
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My point is, and has been, make other arrangements. I purchased Audirvana Studio for when the internet goes out. I use Verizon data to stream from Tidal and Qobuz. Roon is not going to change their minds on this, so complaining is not going to solve this issue.
Dear Miguel, I think that we are all spoiled by Roon: in all our rooms we can choose music from local discs and (for example ) Tidal with one Roon interface on all kind of different machines. Some of us try to extend this dream with other equipment like record players and fancy controllers. Thinking about that I realized that I already have that functionality in the music hardware that I bought. In the room with my (old) records and record player I have a BluOS system with that functionality built in, and I even can train an old tv-controller to handle the play actions, which stay working in Roon. The fun of playing old records is removing them from the cover, clean them and put them on the record player and listen to the static electricity and scratches while reading the cover text, not sending the Sound to another roomā¦
When I moved to my new smaller apartment in Amsterdam I gave lots of my old hifi equipment to my children, so ended up even without a decent cd-player. For my work/guest room I bought therefore in a sale a simple Marantz m-cr612 with a cd-player and airplay for the guest, but it is also a simple useful Roon endpoint for myself when I am not sitting at my kitchen table with Ropiee on a raspberry pi endpoint
And now we have also Arc! I cannot wait to go to that fancy record shop in Florence and look in my arc catalogue if I have already that disc in the shop from that special label.
having no internet for longer then an hour (or hot water - as last week happened) is an exception.
Last night was a hilarious item on the Dutch journal: a Dutch general (or so) said that under the threat of cyberattacks we must be prepared to be able to survive at least 48 hours without internet, so buy crackers, a transistor radio on batteries, a flashlight, some bottles with water and a Swiss knife(seriously? I have a kitchen drawers full of knifes and screwdrivers)
Now Miguel, to the observation I made, inspired by your Don Quichot endeavor:
- I disconnect my internet and I switch Roon on (works)
- I go to the artist overview page
- I click on an album picture without a Tidal icon
- I get the message that the track is not available
- I try several times that album and get several error messages, but thenā¦
- I see the graphical analysis on the bottom and the album starts to play
- When I switch to other albums without tidal tag, they play right away and I see the graphical analysis on the bottom of the page. (No not a cache, I choose albums I never play)
- If I try a tidal album, the problems under 5 and 6 appear again, but after several attempts on a not tidal album the non tidal album starts to play.
- Only draw back: I have to clear the picture cache in Roon, to remove the blank album pictures in the overview pages
- I am not interested in how long I can go on this way without internet because bluos can see my local Roon albums, without the Roon-tidal extensions
But maybe an idea for people with bad internet to do this test over a longer time period.
(Of course it would be handy to have the no internet fall-back modus built-in, but all the cries here I see as proof how spoiled we Roon users are)
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And my point is: why should I? This issue could have been easily avoided by more careful design while retaining all of the design paradigms of cloud-based APIs.
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Dear Jim,
You have stated previously that you have almost/virtually no local files and you do almost of all your digital music listening via streaming, in which case when your Internet is out you basically have no digital music regardless what software you use.
There many people who are in the opposite spectrum, people who have significant local files or people who donāt use Tidal or Qobuz. I am in that category. No Tidal nor Qobuz available where I live and I have significant collection which I have collected for more than 3 decades since my high school years. Plus, my Internet have problems quite often. Why shouldnāt I be able to listen to my own files which are all local?
You assume that your situation, your proposes solution would be applicable to everybody. No, absolutely not. So, please stop preaching your non-pragmatic minimalism. It does not work for everybody.
Thank you.