Roon alternatives

Again opening up the topic of Roon Alternatives.
Suggestions welcome. I live in a studio apartment so only 1 streaming location. My network streamer is a SOtM SM200 Ultra and currently using Intel NUC as a roon server.

Suggestions welcome.

Audirvana is a great program. Nowhere near as comprehensive as Roon, but very functional. I use it from time to time at my computer.

Is most of listening via your personal collection? Streaming? or both…

Plex.

Right now, it’s $89 lifetime with a coupon, does the surface part of the metadata thing including reviews and lyrics, has working streaming and syncing to mobile devices, folder browsing, and Tidal integration. It appears to want to lean towards local libraries more than being interested in cloud services.

It does not have signal path stuff, the album grouping / parsing is far from being as good, the metadata isn’t interconnected in the way Roon’s is, the streaming protocol is, well, DLNA, the data-gathering is questionable in my mind (in the sense that I absolutely wouldn’t trust them to even try to do the right thing in the way I trust RoonLabs), the devs seem to live in an ivory tower, and it is emphatically not as nice a day-to-day experience for playing music as Roon is.

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Wouldn’t you get a wider response on computer audiophile or similar?

THank you.

@Robert . I have about 250 albums in flac format. Everything else is streaming. Tidal and Qobuz.

Audirvana would certainly work for you. $75…Using it with an ipad requires a separate A+ app (cost $10 when I pulled it from the App store).

Here are the common ones that are popular:

There are also streaming services’ apps, but they won’t support your local files, and most won’t support your SM200.

I’ve made note which are free as well. While there is a cost in time/effort to try them out, it costs you no $$$ to give it a shot. You could even use them in conjunction with Roon for no added fee.

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JRiverMedia Center used to be a go to program for me for many years. Roon just keeps getting better and better, and as such, I quit renewing my JRMC master license at version 25. Every year there’s a new JRMC fee (with an updated version) to stay current. Still have Audirvana as a backup. Keep up the good work Roon Labs.

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https://www.orastream.com/ Is another. I tried Audirvana and it ran like a pig with 250k+ track local NAS library on a 2014 i5 macmini. I might try it on my i7-7700 W10 system but was more interested in if it showed any audio quality improvement. I have jriver too plus JRemote and have probably spent a fair bit on jr 18-26 master lic fees adding it all up.

Roon is my daily driver though and I bought the lifetime over 3 years ago in my first week of trial.

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I assume it was posted to illustrate that Roon is the best user experience available in this space, as a reaction to certain posters threatening to look at alternatives. Many of us have “evolved” to Roon via those cheaper software packages, and reverting to any of them would be painful.

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Thanks for all the alternative solutions folks. Kevin from customer service convinced me to stay with Roon! The COO should give him a raise

Amazon’s does. Not very well, but it does.

In a few days my subscription ends and I’m searching for alternatives. Unfortunately I can’t find a proper one. The most complete is plex but it does not support high resolution files. It downsamples them. Jriver, foobar are compatible with my files but no streaming. Audirvana is very slow. I don’t know why but slow.

Of course I’m perfectly happy with Roon. But it’s so good that I don’t care about my files. In a few months I have many new ones and are in a horrible state. I have to search for them in case I want to listen on an other program. So I want a break to fix my music and continue.

Before I switched to Roon I was using Daphile. It’s a bit finicky to get up and running but works like a charm and has streaming support through LMS.

But it requires a separate device. I want it to run locally with windows. Now I’m listening from foobar2000 and it feels so old. Of course it’s a powerful program that is always ready and updated for use. But old.

Yesterday in the other hand I searched through Roon + tidal and found some electronic music from Greece. So simple.

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