Early Access is a great idea for a wide beta testing. I’ve found it easy to switch between Early Access and Stable Release. One thing Early Access (from B1159 onwards) has shown is that album and artist information is going into the cloud, away from local database. This is consistent with Roon’s reasoning for moving away from offline availability.
That raises an interesting question that can easily be tested. If my Internet is down, can I still start 1.8 Legacy and is it still able to see my Roon 2.0 core on my LAN such that I can switch my license. If not, then there goes that scenario.
It would be good to test.
But my guess is it won’t work. I have two roon licenses in different buildings - and when I log in Roon checks centrally and if both are being used - tells me where. So that login process is clearly checking with a cloud server.
And I should add: There are programming paradigms to avoid this issue while relying on cloud-only functionality. For example, make the API make a local call with handling of no internet connectivity. But you have to make these design decisions early on or you’ll be in a world of hurt later.
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I seem to recall reading something along the lines that the Roon team were surprised there was less pushback on this than they were expecting. I interpret this to mean that they did predict this was going to get a negative reaction from customers, yet chose to do it anyway.
I hope that interpretation is wrong. If true, that honestly makes me more disillusioned than the loss of functionality itself.
I also hope my interpretation is wrong as it would further imply that there are no plans to fix this, as it was a deliberate design choice and not an oversight.
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 didn’t know. My guess is that there’s more users then forum members. But that’s 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.
It’s an appliance until it isn’t.
@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, I’d like to know that.
The forum has 60108 registered users at the moment (use the “hamburger” menu top right and choose “Users”). @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 “not on the roadmap”. 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 @Danny’s comment on why they removed local search is insightful, it doesn’t 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 I’d 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. It’s not broken.
But if your TV HDMIs went out if the internet was out… 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 “users”. About +/- 650 posted at least once in the last week. My guess is the vast majority that posted once or twice were support calls. “Active” 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 user’s 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.