Roon and internet radio: disappointing

Copy the link that appears under “Other”: http://thisstrangeradio.com/listen.m3u
This works with Roon.

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I get it now, that’s simple enough and works great. Thank you.

NT. I just found the answer I was looking for in another thread :wink:

Guys - Love Roon with a passion but as an integrator desperately trying to get clients to come on board the stumbling block is radio. My clients need something simple like Tunein and their nature means that doing via url’s simply doesn’t cut it. I could sell Roon to most everyone if you had this, but at he moment it almost kills all attempts to get clients on board. What chance?

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@Ian_Bolt an (and others)

I find it surprising why the internet radio function of Roon appears to have had little of any updates over the last couple of years (the last main update I believe was with Roon 1.2, but I may be mistaken here). Appreciate there’s a vast amount of other projects/features that the Roon team have/are working on, but I’m like you Ian and find it difficult to understand the lack of any visible work being carried out on this by Roon.

@brian Not asking you to spill all the beans, but is there any work planned, or being carried out now, for future improvements to the Internet Radio function of Roon? I find it a valuable function of Roon, and like Ian above feel it could be a big positive to potential customers (Roon, may have stats that suggest otherwise).

I know timelines are not a thing Roon discuss on here, and I’m not asking for that, but would be nice to know if there are current plans for a ‘robust’ update to the Internet radio function.

Any info would be appreciated :+1:

Cheers
John

Yes, we are building an internet radio directory. It’s in active development right now.

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@brian

Appreciate the feedback :+1:

I suppose another benefit (and I assume this is the case), if the radio station is within the Roon directory then it’s been tested to work, and possibly will have a way to automatically update in the background if the link changes. Also it will automatically link to the highest resolution source for that particular station (or may be compromises if the highest bitrate is not consistent with good playback and may be a lower resolution with best playback).

Not trying to push you in any particular direction (and this may be part of a large GUI update in the future), but would be good to have a refresh of the way the stations are presented. At present a very large logo with additional info, whereas if it was a larger list of the subscribed radio stations, and then an option to access additional info via a right click or other means.

Appreciate timelines are along the lines of ‘how long is a piece of string’ :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:, but good to hear work is continuing in the background with a directory

Cheers
John

Yeah, the entire user experience for radio has been redesigned from scratch. It’s nothing like what is there now.

Yes to your two points–stations from the directory will be automatically updated as new streams appear (or are retired). Yes, the plan includes reliability testing–which will incorporate both feedback from successful/failed plays within Roon as well as some kind of more explicit testing from our servers.

The stations will be drawn from a few sources, including stations that have been entered into the current radio interface (obviously this requires a bit of data mining/cleaning/grooming/deduping/etc to make it nice).

We’re going to make a moderation interface (website, outside of app) available too, so people from the community (including end users, partner companies, dealers, etc–remember lots of languages + regions of radio to cover, and plenty of interested stakeholders tied to those markets) can help keep things clean and organized and complete–very much like the system we built for creating/maintaining translations of the Roon interface.

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This ticks a lot of boxes and I’m very much looking forward to it.

A few suggestions if I may:

The current Internet Radio Play icons are a bit small to hit with a finger on a tablet or phone (Maybe I’m just fat fingered …). This may already be fixed in the redesign.

I’d like to be able to queue an Internet Radio station in the Queue, so that after a selection of Albums or Tracks have played an Internet Radio station will start instead of Roon Radio.

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In the new design, radio stations have details screens like albums/artists/etc, so the play button follows that treatment.

Queueing radio…that is not part of the plan as of today, but it’s worth some discussion.

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This is welcome news.
I wonder if a facility to download and play Podcasts is planned?

I hope for BBC on demand material one day. Biggest feature I miss from LMS.

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That is great news! Approximately when is the new design planned for launch?

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Did you get an update on the planned launch date?

Roon doesn’t announce dates for future releases for a number of reasons.

Firstly testing is iterative, as bugs or reversions are discovered new builds are developed and tested until a robust release candidate build eventually emerges. That process is necessarily indeterminate. Roon prefers to release when ready rather than when an arbitrary estimate was given.

Secondly, once the devs create expectations about release dates those expectations may need to be managed precisely at the time when resources are best devoted to getting a robust release build out the door. Countdown threads develop, people become frustrated and short tempered. It’s not an enjoyable experience for the devs or users and is, in my view, entirely artificial, unnecessary and avoidable.

On a number of occasions the devs have indicated that they would prefer to release projects incrementally as they are completed, rather than in larger multi-project mega-releases. At the moment, however, there has been a lot of banging and hammering going on behind the curtains in a number of different directions and I’ve got a feeling that it’s going to be a busy time in the next few months.

There is no reason for that (except maybe some poor resources management). It’s just attitude and not necessarily a good one. Imagine how frustrated developers (or anybody at ROON for that matter) will be if the customers will have the possibility to pay when they want without an announced date…

Again, it’s just attitude. I assume that the developers get their paycheck at a precisely time, but how frustrated and short tempered will they be if that time will be, well, sometime in the future, maybe.

When people are asking about release dates is because they’re just eager for something they want and bring them joy or they want to do some educated decisions, not because they want to sue the company if the promised release date is overdue. @Nikhil_Nayak was just asking for an approximately time frame here for example…

Luleanu

Hope you never decide to buy a Devialet product - if you genuinely think Roon are bad then don’t ever look at getting a Phantom or Expert :grimacing:

I don’t think that ROON are bad (or good for that matter). They are what they are, at the level of expectations for some and disappointing for others, nothing extraordinary in the software world today. But considering some of their answers here i believe that they have a bad attitude for someone to base its future audio system development on them.

I’m not in the market for anything that advertise with “The best…” or “The most…” or whatever. :grinning:

I have a meaningful reply. I will post it sometime in the future.

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I’d also love to see integration with SiriusXM… No idea if they’d play along, though…

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