You understand the root cause, but then start talking about one minute drop outs. Obviously during that one minute things could stop working, but the likelihood is that they won’t. Roon clearly isn’t “phoning home” quite as often as that!
The vast majority of users will experience little or no disruption. For those who do, there’s 1.8 Legacy or back up contingencies. Things change, we move on.
In The Netherlands we have 17.696.940 soccer experts who know what we should have done when we loose the next game from Argentina next friday
For me Roon is a blackbox as long as the source code is not free and/or I am not a member of the design team, how about you?
It then seems that Roon could set it to continue to function without breaking anything.
–MD
This was discussed earlier in the thread. 2.0 is designed to work with an continuous internet connection. It just so happens that it should/could/might work (for basic playback only) for an unspecified period of time when your internet is down. At some point Roon attempts to “phone home” and then playback stops. Whatever reason it needs to “phone home” it would appear that it be bypassed in the new architecture, not without a complete re-write. This re-write in not on the roadmap.
Roon’s “phone home” to validate a license is a NON ISSUE. This zero-time guaranteed has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. Jeezus.
Roon is calling functions that only exist in the cloud. It has no way to avoid them and it has no way to recover from an error should they time out. You never know when these functions will be called, although you do know they will be called when you search. Even if you knew they are only called on search, it would be an annoying thing to remember not to ever touch the search bar. Again, this is unacceptable fault intolerance.
I wasn’t talking about the licence check, I was talking about what you referred to as Roon “(hitting) a cloud-only API call”
And yet each and every time I’ve actually used Roon 2.0 offline, attempting to search has NOT resulted in playback stopping. It just presents a zero return.
What you’re saying seems to be all theory and no practice. Have you got an actual real world use example of Roon’s fault intolerance stopping offline playback? Playback does stop but I, and others, have got more than enough tolerance to last short internet outages.
Don’t you mean, “Hey, Zeus!”? 
It isn’t actually. Roon has stopped working in all cases after some time. You are correct that the probability of a 1-minute blackout resulting in a failure is low, but it should be zero.
Particularly when it still performs very poorly on the latest build “with internet search”. Still regularly finds things I’m not looking for, and not what I am. Comes up with some truly mad results sometimes and more often just places more obvious results lower down the results list.
If you’re really intent on removing what many see as fundamental functionality (offline playback) at least actually improve the stated goal of doing so. At the moment, this is lose-lose from my end.
internet went out last night, thought alright, that’s fine. I need some wind down time anyway.
Got a bottle of whiskey, situated my self in my reclining sofa and boot up Roon.
Except Roon 2.0 didn’t boot up. Because it needs the internet access.
Looks like I am going to need install another backup software in case of internet issues.
JRiver, we meet again, old friend.
Requiring an Internet connection to listen to local files is totally unacceptable.
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Which goes to show what many here have pointed out - many users only discover this functionality is missing when they actually run into internet downtime. So we cannot assume that the number of voices here represent all those who would actually want this restored.
Agree. My provider, dropped internet on Christmas. I am a lifetime member. What was surprise that roon stopped working with local files. I have mobile internet for phone, but can’t set up it for roon core.
Would be nice to have this feature
This always required internet is the reason I’ve just cancelled my trial and won’t be purchasing a lifetime license or subscribing to roon.
I think the always on internet connection and roon not functioning without it needs to be made clearer on the pricing page, not tucked away on the hardware requirements in the faq links.
With Roon 2.0 I think less emphasis should be made about being able to play local music files and more about it being a subscription cloud service to enhance metadata, search and music recommendation.
I have made conscious decisions when adding automation and smart capabilities to my home to choose products that operate fully, locally without needing internet connections and cloud services.
I have no problems with buying subscriptions to streaming/cloud services when I consider them non-essential, eg video on demand, streaming music, but in the same way I’m not putting the ability to control my heating, lighting in the hands of a server on the other end of an internet connection, I’m not willing to put control of being able to play my local music collection in my own home at the mercy of an internet connection and cloud service I don’t control.
I understand the benefits of central cloud search algorithms on aggregated listening data and simplifying license enforcement, but without graceful fallback to allow me to keep running my local server, including restarts, with reduced features so I can play my local music files without internet, then roon is no different to any other cloud only smart device/online service and should be advertised that way, because it isn’t really a local music server anymore. It’s a cloud service that happens to have a server/gateway component locally.
Well said. It took a u-turn somewhere and put local stuff on the back burner. Which is ok I guess, but in the process local tasks which should not be slow, have slowed and become dependent on an internet connection which shouldn’t be required when all the files, content and caches needed for local tasks are a few folders away on the same hard drive as the core.
It appears the new implementation of search has more negatives than positives from the perspective of a non streaming service user.
I’m coming very late to this party. Thing is, I hadn’t realised Roon 2.0 needed internet connection until, well, pretty much 30 minutes ago. And I should have, because I experienced the drawback as early as last October.
We were in our home in France when we got hit by a long internet cut - they were doing some work on the line at the time. With no internet, it felt like a good time to just put some music on and read a book. I tried to turn on Roon, but it asked me for my login. It made me a bit mad at the time, what with my music being unavailable - or at least more difficult to access - when I really needed it, but thought it was because I just hadn’t connected for too long or something like that.
Got another cut today, and same result, which is when I came to check if something had changed. Imagine my surprise…
Not sure what I can say. Obviously, I’m angry, but pleading for a reversal won’t change anything: Roon devs have been going in a certain direction that fits less and less with my listening habits and “workflow”, and unless a large majority of users are like me - with a large offline collection, only mild streaming habits and living in a rural area - that’s not gonna change. I’m just not the target customer anymore, so my voice has no weight.
I would say one thing to the Roon people, though: you have never been transparent about upcoming changes and how they might affect your existing user base. Each and every time, it’s the update, then some people finding out how it makes their use of Roon more difficult. I understand why you make the choices you make - well, most of the time, sometimes it just seems silly - but I wish you were a lot more open about your future plans. ARC was a requested feature, and it was great to see it implemented, and so were better searches. But I don’t think many of us thought it would come with always-online as a cherry on top.
I joined back in 2017 with a lifetime subscription, but ever since the emergence of Tidal and Qobuz, you’ve been focusing on that while the simple stuff I care about is still not fixed. Do I still have to click like a madman to reorder tracks on a poorly identified album - rather than say, being able to do a simple drag? Why yes, I think I do. Not having an ongoing subscription means I can’t really slam the door, but believe you me, I wish I could.
Where I get stuck is finding a reasonably equivalent competitor, with similar functionality that’s not tied to a hardware platform. For instance the Innuos Statement and the Sense app are a compelling option. But, it’s a $16K USD option that’s based on an expensive piece of H/W. With Roon lifetime, my cost is relatively confined based in my decision on how far I want to take the server and music storage. If I could build my own Statement-like server and license Innuos/Sense, I would most likely already have a demo setup and being tested.
This is what it feels like …
Woke up today with the forum down and offline.
When this forum was down today is what it is like when then internet goes down for Roon 2.0.
Frustrating isn’t it. While I can understand the many reason for where Roon 2.0 and beyound wants to go, it makes absoulutly no sense to require their program to have internet just to play our local content. While I get that ARC is awesome, it cannot justify the few it pertains to just to have the rest of us be downgraded.
Imagine if Roon from the beginning always required internet for local content, then this would be a Feature Request for offline play just like the offsite remote access was requested. I also do not believe that their user base would have grown as fast as it did with a always on requirement.
How long is it going to take for someone with Roon to realize that it can be both ways going forward?
–MD