I just wanted to share my thoughts on Roon after several months of usage. I am using it only for streaming my RIPped 300+ CDs collection. I have installed Core on NUC8i3 in fanless case (Akasa Turing). My endpoints are all RPi4s with HiFiBerry Digi+ Pro in nice looking steel case. As they pass bit perfect test, I see no reason to go with more expensive solutions.
Biggest advantage of Roon is that it simply works. All my files are properly tagged and my goal was to have a software that uses those tags. I wasted months on solving issues with DLNA solutions like Twonky, Emby, Servioo and Plex. DLNA servers ignore part of tags and use directory structure to recognize albums. This leads to following disasters:
Duplicated songs when I have multiple album versions (e.g. 1977 original and 2010 remaster)
Wrong artist photos if album was produced with other artist (e.g. when Queen album contains a song that was performed with Elton John, I end up with Queen image titled Elton John in artist list)
Wrong album sorting. Queen would be after The Police while P is before Q and The should be skipped. I don’t want to remember which artists are prefixed with The during alphabetical search.
Randomly switched album covers. No idea why.
Finally, after all those terrible months with DLNA, I have found Roon on some YT channel where some guy says he does not like it. It was the day when all my problems were gone. All above works flawlessly. While in DLNA one server does something right and something else not, Roon manages all of it properly. Finally no mess in my audio library. This is fantastic! I also appreciate how easy it is to override Roon tagging to my own wish. Lastly, I had a good experience with tech support.
There are some things that I did not expect to have but over time I couldn’t live without them. My favourite one is volume leveling via ReplaGain. It a life saver when I listen to playlists composed of old and new CDs. Crossfeed is very good as well. Parametric EQ is really powerful and useful. Audio zones work nicely. Last cool thing is ease of migration to another PC. When I go on holidays, I upload all my music together with backup to my USB stick and I have core running on my MacBook in a few minutes. Brilliant!
naturally, there are some things that I would like to see improved. Biggest issue is Android support. Roon made me sell my iBasso DX160 which I liked a lot. It did not work over Wi-Fi. No playback at all. I have heard that FiiO works better. I am going to give it a try. Second bad thing is no possibility to sort playlist by artist or album in mobile app. It is one click in desktop app while I see no such option in mobile app. Manual sorting of big playlists song by song is terrible. And lastly, I would love to be able to customize Albums view sorting. Apart from RIPped CDs I own downloaded music like games soundtracks. I would like to put them in the end of list (e.g. by filling albumsort or albumartistsort tags)
My personal thought is that price is close to a pain point for a consumer software. It is fantastic, no doubt. But still expensive. $120 per year sounds fair while $700 for the lifetime license is quite a lot. Especially when you are from Eastern Europe. It is particularly unfair for people who found Roon just after 2019 price rise.
I don’t think there is anything unfair about the lifetime price at all. It is the price. If someone feels it is too high, they don’t have to buy it. That is exactly why it is that high.
I said that annual price is fine (for me) and unfair is significant lifetime license price rise for people who joined Roon a month or two after that. And of course I agree that if someone doesn’t like the price - they don’t have to buy it. On the other hand price reactions is crucial info for any business. Thus I share my thought. Not everyone must agree with it. Anyway, they certainly do a lot of such analysis. They could price Roon at one million as noone has to buy it. But there is a reason they don’t.
My personal feeling is that difference between annual and lifetime license is too big. It returns after almost six years. It is very long time investment. I think that optimal would be 3 years. That’s my thought and I share it. Not every one must agree with it. Oh, and solution is pretty easy - just rise the annual fee.
Roon is not looking for more lifetime subscriptions. That is why they raised the price. If anyone wants one, they should probably grab it while they still can. Personally, I paid $500 and probably would not pay $700.
I tend to disagree here…it all depends on the user uptake. Perhaps Roon does not have significantly more users due to the price (both subscription & lifetime purchase)? Further, one must also factor in the requirement to have the hardware required to run Roon, which other software does not specifically require.
Without wanting to have a price discussion vs the alternatives, it is well understood that Roon is the most expensive.
Thanks for the comprehensive feedback. I hope the things you’d like improved get some attention. Make sure to start a Feature Request thread if there isn’t an existing one to cover what you would like to see.
I agree that Roon simply works. For me I’ll add that it simply works better than the other choices that I’ve tried. If I wanted to minimize costs then I’d be quite happy with LMS and Squeezelite or JRiver. The LMS route is free if you’re okay with being a cheapskate by not financially contributing to those free efforts and JRiver is pretty inexpensive.
All three of these (Roon, LMS, and JRiver) can do bit perfect playback and various forms of preprocessing. All can do room correction convolutions and all can manage a media library. For me though it’s really easy to do these things in Roon compared to the others.
Library management is much better in Roon. With the others I have a lot of duplicates that clutter the navigation. Roon’s integration with Tidal and Qobuz makes it seamless to add albums to my collection and manage them under a single UI.
Roon’s Convolution capabilities coupled and the Room EQ guide written by Magnus elsewhere on this site made a huge difference in my listening enjoyment. Absolutely the best improvement I’ve ever made to my system. Sure I can use the same .wav filters in JRiver or PiCorePlayer or LMS but its so easy in Roon.
For me the lifetime membership was a pretty easy decision. I feel confident that I’ll be using this software for many years and it was a reasonable tradeoff to not have to worry about monthly/annual subscription rate hikes. I hope that the Roon team keeps innovating. I’m really happy so far.
It was the day when all my problems were gone. All above works flawlessly. While in DLNA one server does something right and something else not, Roon manages all of it properly. Finally no mess in my audio library. This is fantastic! I also appreciate how easy it is to override Roon tagging to my own wish. Lastly, I had a good experience with tech support.
But there is a reason they don’t.