Roon Beta 1.8 A Practical suggestion to Roon Labs developers

[BelsizeEye (Nigel)]

This is a practical suggestion to development team at Roon Labs. As you no doubt will have have been reading in these community pages since the launch of Roon 1.8 (stable 756). There has been much debate created on the community of your 100K+ users.

First I would like say that the new release is very interesting and offers much improvement on an already excellent concept. Personally, if offered 1.8 as beta I probably would run it on one of my servers and 1.7 on the other. When 1.8 is rock solid and stable all my servers.

But for the many people out there not quite ready to try the new way, the new look of 1.8 and not interested in bug hunting and losing the traditional Roon top bill feature called stable, I think you should offer easy downgrade to all your customers to 1.7 stable so that people can get back if they wish it to a stable platform again.

This could easily be achieved by your own Roon core software by issuing a new version variant that would be 1.7 like and in the case of Android and iOS again a new version that offers the original look and behaviour.

Then continue over the coming months to develop refine the 1.8 beta until it is rock solid and then release as 1.8 Stable xxx when ready. But this way you give choice to your paying customers (those that pay your wages) to keep listening to music with no frustrations due to unforeseen technical release issues with 1.8 beta.

Hope this helps

[rrwwss52 (Robert)]

Roon has never rolled out a beta version en masse. Doubt they’ll start now.

[BelsizeEye (Nigel)]

That’s unfortunate as a large beta release would really make for a well tested and perfected release candidate. I would go further and suggest to Roon Developers who may stumble on my posting that you do what Adobe does which is update everyone BUT retain option to download previous releases. iOS and Android a little more tricky but the way it would be achieved is to actively maintain a iOS and Android version Current and new Current + 1 release like many other successful iOS apps out there.

This would return control to the user if they are adversely affected by for example the Roon 1.8 disappearing Audio Zones bug. All the user would have to do is download previous server Roon in this case 1.7 and likewise the iOS or Android 1.7 version, restore database files and voila all sorted.