Roon and internet radio: disappointing

I’m just starting to enjoy internet radio via Roon, but I don’t understand why the station icons are so big that I only see 6 to a page on my iPad and yet I have to hit a tiny play arrow to listen to them. Why don’t they behave like album artwork icons, where hitting the image calls up the play dialog?

5 Likes

I’ve pretty much concluded that for Squeezebox users, for now, you are better off sticking with LMS 7.9 and iPeng. Which is a shame, because I really wanted to give Roon a good long run.

But other than cataloging the artists and albums better, and in a much more attractive way (and Roon looks to be the best in the biz at that), LMS still does nearly everything else better with a SB front end. And the plethora of outstanding community apps and plug ins let you do an amazing range of other things. Chromecast, Airplay, free lyrics support, amazing Internet radio capability, clean 24/192 pass-through: it is all there with LMS 7.9. It only lacks SiriusXM support, and I can’t blame the now volunteer LMS developers for that. LMS sounds just as good as Roon feeding a Transporter. And the best part is it’s FREE. iPeng and Orange Squeeze are very acceptable pad-based browsing interfaces, if not quite in Roon’s league of information display.

Having a Roon developer tell me how hard it was just to display text on a Transporter was not encouraging. But if Roon 1.5 or better starts integrating these well-established features, I’ll be back.

1 Like

Seems “Room Correction” which normally has to be done with measuring the room response is way more important than this. Ask for basics and Roon gets disappointing, ask for very fancy and “cool” stuff and it will happen :slight_smile:

I am lucky I use Cambridge Audio CXN which gives radio dead easy shame about having to use Airplay and no hi def until I buy hardware :weary:

It is very disappointing that for internet radio LMS is miles ahead of Roon and there seems to be little interest from Roon in changing that.

Radio Paradise flac on the SBT sounds fantastic and it would be great if roon put in some effort for these features.

Just seems to me that legacy Meridian is dominating any thought processes here with room correction and MQA etc being the priorities.

2 Likes

I can’t agree with that. The thing is that Roon is a big project and it can’t all be done at once. It is evolving and Radio will improve. That’s just how I see it.

2 Likes

It has never improved, I’ve used roon from the start and bar a few cosmetic changes the radio interface functionality has never been added to.

MQA is just a fad and I couldn’t care less about room correction, I want a product that makes finding and listening to music easier.

A post was split to a new topic: Internet Radio - I can’t figure out why some URLs work and others do not

Probably this would “ruin” Roon as a product like browsing by folder structure :wink:

Why hear the community? Service seems obsolete sometimes or people pretend to be deaf here at Roon.

Seems sometimes they forget where their money comes from :frowning:

No one regards the current implementation of Internet Radio as the final word. It’s shortcomings are well known to the devs and they are actively looking at alternatives or improvements.

Comments supporting a change in general or asking that this feature be given a higher priority are fine, but what is most helpful to the devs are descriptions of what it is about the current functionality/UI that you want to see changed and why.

Obviously everyone wants discovery changed from having to manually enter a URL. Personally I would like to see a managed thread on this Forum where users could press a button and add a Station to Roon. I don’t know how feasible it is to do that or what might be involved in vetting and maintaining crowdsourced Station links, but I am more interested in what my fellow Roon users recommend, than huge lists of Internet Stations.

So far as the UI is concerned, I don’t like the little play button under each station. It seems unnecessary as there is no other option but to Play a Station, it can’t be Queued or Added Next. I’d like to either have those options or have a left click on the whole Station icon play that Station.

In relation to functionality, I would like to see Roon use any metadata accompanying the Radio stream (such as Artist/Album etc.) to (optionally) add to History and enable links to the local Library and Tidal.

8 Likes

Andybob

1a. Good choice, and agree it’s extremely useful to see other users recommendations.
1b. I would still like to a see an easier implementation of radio station URL’s into the player, e.g. Roon itself can search via internet and links back to add a new station (does this make sense :crazy_face:)

2a. Small play button is just - too small (yes, stating the obvious).
2b. Having the option to add a Radio Station into the next, end of queue, etc., would be extremely useful.
.
3. This could be a hard one to implement, and would look at this for the 2nd update of Internet Radio function. Not all radio stations give any metadata info, and it could leave large gaps of no info in the history if listening to these stations.
.
4. Change the name of Radio (the Roon version of Radio). Not sure how imbedded the name is within the actual functioning/coding of Roon, but would love Radio to mean Radio the way everyone else in the world understands what the word ‘Radio’ means. Not having a go here at the Roon developers, but it really is very confusing even for people who have used Roon.

I believe it was called Swim in Sooloos and was changed to Radio before a decision was made to implement Internet Radio in Roon. As I understand it the argument for the name change was that Radio had acquired a distinctive meaning in connection with other streaming services. Personally I think it’s confusing, particularly for those old enough to treat Radio as synonymous with Wireless.

Maybe Roon should really throw the digital Wi-Fi cat amongst the retro hipster pigeons and rename Internet Radio as Wireless !

I think we’re both showing our ages, as I call it wireless also. Wi-Fi didn’t exist in the old days so no confusion, but nowadays it could be an issues for the ‘young one’s’ :crazy_face:

I think you just need to look at Sonos – they’ve got great radio integration. I can’t imagine they did something that was so unique that it couldn’t be used as an approach.

1 Like

I agree with every point Andrew made, but would also like to add that as a new user of Roon coming from Sonos I am quite pleased first of all that I can add Radio stations of my own choosing (hugely important) and that my chosen ones also show what is being played, something Sonos does not do!

I would like smaller square buttons with at least the ability to add an image of one’s own (even better would be adding the logo of the station automatically).

1 Like

Yet another request/need that could be approached with letting 3rd party apps play through Roon. Many 3rd party apps that do internet radio well. Playing through Roon would preserve DSP/Zones, etc.

Implementing Roon as an output seems like it could help with internet radio, browsing by folder, and any number of other functions that would be handled by other apps or newly written extensions.

In my experience, the station’s image is frequently added automatically. But you can still add your own images. Take another look at it. I’m not where my Roon is right now so can’t give the steps.

BluOs plays nice with roon.
Their radio implementation is excellent.
Roon radio is very very bad and has been since fhe beginning. Luckily I don’t need to use it at all thanks to the bluOs integration.

Logos are added automatically if you use a TuneIn page. You can add your own image by right clicking on the Station and choosing Edit in the Selection menu. I often load the TuneIn page first and then change the URL to the highest res direct feed.

Thanks, that is good to know. I just added the URLs manually, bypassing TuneIn completely. Do you mean by using a TuneIn page the URL to the station as offered by TuneIn?