OK, probably no need to speculate. We’ll find out soon enough.
Here’s to hoping that this is good for everyone. Given all the potential parent companies in the audio business, they picked a good one (Samsung aside; I’ve mixed feelings about them). Roon deserves a good source of funding and promotion. Here’s to many years to come.
Hmm knew something was going on, with everything going to pot over recent months. Now we know why. Congratulations on making the deal. Not sure how I feel about it. Will let you know around renewal time.
Sometime since posting in the forum… As lifetime subscriber I almost went down when saw the announcement in Darko’s site.
Hope this remain true to lifetime subscribers as Danny said.
Terrible news. Someone might as well start coding an independent replacement now.
Congrats Roon Team! As a lifetime subscriber (this year, no less), I do hope that it continues to be honored by Harman, as they say.
Excited for the future!!!
Samsung devices don’t play Apple Music, @Mediahound?
Super news Team Roon.
Onwards and upwards with years of success to follow.
Ah. My mistake. I was sure I read KKBOX and South Korea somewhere. Must have been all the K’s
Regarding changes. Way to early to be negative IMHO.
BMW own Mini. Minis are still Minis and have possibly benefited from it.
Roon can grow more comfortably now and breathe at the same time.
I think this is great news. Think of the good and possibilities that’ll come from this.
Korea has a big and growing hifi market. I hope to see that this will add Korean streaming services, such as Melon and Bugs, available on Roon. I’m a lifetimer for 8 years already so I got my money’s worth. I sure hope it will continue but if it goes bust, oh well, it’s not the end of the world for me.
Very good news. Happy for the Roon owners, should be a great payoff for their hard work. Hoping that the lifetime subscriptions Rooners won’t be negatively affected.
Peace,
Tony
Yeah, there are constructive and well managed acquisitions as well as destructive ones. It depends on many factors, and lots we never hear about go well. I trust that the Roon founders looked for a company with an interest in the whole product and not just to gut for some part of technology.
Where I work was bought out too. The whole tech team stayed in place and we got help where we needed it like sales, product direction, marketing, and people. Nothing much changed for developers and other tech. Sure there is pressure because the owner eventually wants a return on investment, but we’re also growing stronger than ever.
We will see.
I wish Roon founders and employees the very best of luck. I knew something like this would be the eventual outcome, and that my lifetime membership was essentially a “kickstarter” contribution for a start up company. I’m very fond of Roon and look forward to many years of use and improvements.
My initial thoughts were Squeezeboxes and Logitech purchase in 2006. I was a major user of squeezeboxes before Logitech, and enjoyed seeing answers in their forum from Sean and Dean (two of the founders). Logitech bought them and for a while there were some great improvements (the Boom, the Touch, and the Radio were fantastic). And the software continued to improve.
As things do, that all came to an end. Logitech was a hardware company and the actual value of the product was in the software. Logitech discontinued squeezeboxes. It was sad for a while. But it turns out that squeezeboxes are doing better than ever. Now there is no hardware, but the software has improved immensely, via volunteer programmers. So “logitech media server” has lived on as a community project and is more active than ever (see forums.slimdevices.com forum). Even the hardware is back. Many commercial products support squeezelite and LMS. And for the DIY crowd one can create a replacement TOUCH with an rPi, piCorePlayer software, and various small touch screens. All works well…even better than at the time Logitech shut it all down.
Not as happy a story for Harmony remotes. People loved Harmony remotes. Logitech bought them and eventually discontinued. As far as I’m aware, there is no DIY group that has taken over the Harmony remote.
But all-in-all, this was bound to happen, just a question of which company bought them. I remain optimistic, and hope for a best case, of improvement by Harman, or next best case (or maybe even best case), Roon continues as “community developed” (although that’s harder if one is mostly tied to Tidal and Quboz, although Squeezeboxes and LMS still work with both those streamers).
Onward and upward. But I truly congratulate the founders of Roon for this sale. Start up companies almost all have to move in this direction or die. And the Roon founders have built an impressive package.
Perhaps we’ll see Harmon products such as Caaresys integrated into Roon Ready, so we get a wake up tone if we drop off whilst listening to our audio device .
Call me a cynic, but as a Roon Lifer, this acquisition makes me somewhat uncomfortable. I can see Samsung honoring our lifetime membership but eventually charging for updates and new features.
Congrats, hope you guys made lots of money and will be fulfilling to see the legacy continue. I look forward to see what you do next.
Now Harman, we need VST plugin capability, integration with visual streaming services - netflix, disney etc, dirac extension etc… lol
Trying not to be too gloomy, but I remember Cool Edit Pro. It was a $79 miracle piece of software. Adobe bought it, renamed it Audition, prettied up the interface and now it’s $30 a month. When you could buy it outright it was part of a suite that was upwards of $1K.
Time will tell. Color me ambivalent. I’ve got a life-time subscription, but… if I have to pay more, I might default to BlueOS. Stay tuned.
This is good news for the leading team - but on the other hand also a certain responsibility to existing customers and what they have developed with the company.
I think that was even necessary to not just come up with new features in Roon or ARC but also scale the software into a stable and reliable future.
Very much hope it’s not going like Devialet who got bought by LVMH and then over time just solely focused on mainstream and revenue.
So this is a turning point - which has great potential but also risks. Let’s hope for the best.