I suggest these predictions of Roon quickly coming down in some fashion are inaccurate even in the most pessimistic scenarios. The only thing that will change in the short term is likely to be trajectory - i.e. we are going to see Roon’s resources allocated towards hardware integration rather than further developing Roon as we know it.
I suggest it’s going to be at least a year before we see any changes from the status quo.
The lifers are a double edged sword here - in one sense they represent a commitment on Roon’s part to remain active in its current form (more or less) which may mean that periodic subscribers will also have a more or less indefinite opportunity to keep using Roon as-is, but on the other hand the lifers don’t have to pay for new developments “within Roon” which may keep Harman from rolling out major improvements within the base Roon product as we think of it now. This will be an interesting balance to watch.
That said, I am certainly dusting off the alternatives. This was my beef with Roon from the beginning, that its methods of tagging and organization are within the Roon database rather than embedded metadata in the files, meaning that much of my organizing work will be lost if I stop using Roon. However, that is not as big of a deal as it was to me in 2017 when I started with Roon because, well, streaming titles don’t have my embedded metadata either. So I probably am pretty committed to trying to use Roon or its derivative in some form if at all possible. So let’s hope that Harman decides even if it branches off development from “our Roon” that it makes it possible to bridge “our Roon” to Harman’s products.
You hear that Harman? We’re small but we’re LOUD!