Such unwarranted generalizations! Quite a few people here have pretty high-end gear and have listened to and compared many different systems and sources. If you can only get high quality with CDs, your digital sources are badly chosen or badly configured. I’ve compared Roon vs various UPnP servers (including Minim), with a variety of digital sources with a wide range of prices, and Roon with good Ethernet sources, streamers, and DACs sounds as well or better than anything else I’ve tried. As they say, bad workmen blame their tools.
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Good for you!
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My trial is ending tomorrow and I will probably subscribe in the course of next week, but…
Roon is indeed excruciatingly poor in many ways. The UI beats all other UIs hands down, but that is the only reason for which I will be subscribing. Integration with Bluesound is flawless, the lack of upnp is disgraceful.
I plan on posting an in depth review/user experience report as soon as I find a free hour to writing it up. In the mean time, I concur that the metadata issues are very annoying indeed. I don’t expect nor appreciate jingly-jangly electropop out of Tidal’s nether regions when focusing on say singer-songwriter. The fabled discovery feature is more miss-than-hit and so on. More commentary to follow in a new post.
Interesting conversation. I agree the metadata is a real problem. The lack of meaningful standards, no good history for multiple album releases, and a crap ton of technical debt make it a challenge.
However, I think small number (less than 10) of really skilled and knowledgeable metadata librarians working against clearly defined standards with the right tools and right decent candidate data could get it cleaned up. There would always be those who disagree with the standards, but that’s a different problem.
It would have to involve crowd sourcing for accuracy, but not for corrections or data. Master data management works best when data stewardship is clear and narrow.
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You might want to read in the forums why Roon Labs has deliberately not supported UPnP, but developed a network protocol (RAAT) that is far better. There was a time when I thought UPnP was essential, but no longer. Yes, there’s a lot of UPnP implementations out there, but there was a time when there were equally a lot of horse-drawn carriages as well.
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I have quite a bit of experience in overseeing (meta)data annotation efforts, and I have close professional connections to other such efforts, including for music. First of all, coming up with “clearly defined standards” is really hard because of the multitude of tail cases. Focusing on music, my most recent Bandcamp purchase is a jazz album called “Looks of a Lot.” The cover credits it to “Jason Moran and the Bandwagon” together with several other individual and ensemble performers. The credits in the Bandcamp website do not mention “Bandwagon,” and instead credit also Matus Mateen and Nasheet Waits. Now, those of us who follow Jason Moran happen to know that he has used “The Bandwagon” as the name of his trio with Mateen and Waits since 2003, but that’s not explicitly stated anywhere, but implicit in reviews. What should be the “Album Artist” for “Looks of a Lot”? And the “Track Artists”?
Second, developing “clearly defined standards” and implementing them with skilled staff and tools costs quite a bit. I know from securing and managing very substantial budgets for such work. Who do you suggest should fund your proposal? Roon is clearly too small for the task, my recurring estimate for of what you propose is likely higher than their whole engineering budget. Large companies that distribute digital music could do it, of course, but somehow they have not been driven to do it, which indicates they don’t see enough return on that potential investment. So, who pays?
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I’m not specifically suggesting who should fund the exercise, just that it isn’t an enormous undertaking.
I’d like to see some real stats but id venture to say that the top 1000000 albums constitute 99.9% of user library membership. So get those 1 million (or whatever the number is) right and you are well on your way.
It’s hard to get a standard for sure, but you can declare one that works pretty well (or a few by genre) and go from there. It’s not a complicated model. The trick is getting agreement /acceptance.
With a model in hand, assuring candidate data maps into the model consistently is the important part.
If you expect crowd-sourcing to be some kind of panacea, then be ready to be very very disappointed.
dBPoweramp takes a nice approach to tagging accurately by aggregating multiple dBs (FreeDB, GD3, MusicBrainz, Sonata and Discogs). Not only does it make a good stab of selecting the correct tag for each field based on the input from the five databases, but also the editing screen for manual override based on user preferences is also quick and easy.
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I use dbPoweramp myself. It gets pretty good candidate data most of the time - exceptions are almost always new releases.
Crowd sourcing the data won’t work - I agree. Maybe crowd funding…
I wouldn’t want an arbitrary crowd making data quality decisions. However, the crowd should be able to submit candidate data (mostly edits), along with evidence for the suggestion. A small group of librarians then make the final determination. This model would solve Fernando’s Bandwagon problem easily. It’s not a question of whether there is a model that can support the kinds of rich data, it is what is the right data, with sources as appropriate.
I’m not so much concerned with esoteric tail cases where data might conflict or is somehow missing, as this will always be the case. I’m more concerned with data that is incorrect even though there is a clear, undisputed source (like liner notes). Rovi doesn’t even get these cases right sometimes.
That problem seems immanently solveable.
Linn system ? have been using CD players on resolving systems for years (30+) and I have Roon/HQplayer now with a Neutron Star USB DAC on an even more resolving system. On the same perfectly memorized CD tracks I get sound that is altogether more stable, more fluid, more expressive and articulate and more resolved than even cost-no-object players I tested in the past. Rhythm could challenge an LP12… Assuming you compare to CD on same system, if you do not reach CD quality and beyond you should seriously question one or several of those :
- ground leakages and poor power quality on the digital setup
- HF noise from computer power supply etc…
- poor or excessively long digital interconnect to DAC
- incorrect software settings
- insufficient clock quality
- poor wifi
- Computer hardware with internal noise issues. The easiest way out is Apple laptops on battery for listening. There are certainly other ways but I cite what I know and works.
Roon native it should be already better than all CD players, but you should try Roon with HQplayer once you reach a higher quality without.
I have read this in the forums and I deem Roon Labs position invalid. For the moment I am using a Roon Ready Device (Bluesound Node 2) and I hear no difference whatsoever in sound quality between streaming directly through the Bluesound Node 2 and streaming through Roon, so I am not entering into a debate about perceived sound quality.
The Bluesound Node does not support UPnP either and that is not the reason why I bought this component.
Roon itself however, is a different proposal entirely. It is not an audio component as far as I am concerned and the idea of using a PC or Mac or any non-dedicated audio component for digital-to-analog conversion does not interest me for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that these devices were not conceived as audio components.
So hooking up a computer to a DAC (separate or integrated, whatever) through a less than ideal transport system (HDMI) is something I am not prepared to do.
Therefore my only interest in Roon is that it is a way to catalog my music collection (so-so results), browse it (not even so-so results), search for music - preferably separate tracks (awful results) and get my music to play by navigating a workable interface (good results).
UPnP would allow me to use Roon on many more networked dedicated audio devices without having to invest in “Roon Ready” devices or without having to use less than adequate devices like PC’s to have my music played on devices that only support UPnP as a local data transport protocol.
As I mentioned before, I have much more to say about Roon, but I will dedicate a separate thread to this.
I can’t wait, should make for entertaining reading seeing as your knowledge is second to none.
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Yes, and half of those would have egregious problems like failure to do gapless play reliably. UPnP is a poster child for why design-by-industry-committee is so often mediocre. UPnP is poorly specified, and as a results its implementations have a multitude of hacks, misfeatures, and proprietary crutches. I started my foray into digital music with UPnP, wasted much time and money dealing with incompatibilities, couldn’t run away fast enough when I found Roon.
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Very entertaining remark. Please enlighten me on why my knowledge should be considered so highly. I do not think it so.
On the other hand, this forum does tend to get hostile towards dissenters very fast, doesn’t it?
I agree on the technical problems surrounding UPnP, but those apply to HDMI as well (poorly documented, poorly implemented on many, many devices).
I just find the lack of this feature somewhat annoying as it would open up Roon to a larger user base. That is all.
Why would the size of the user base annoy you. What’s annoying you is you can’t leverage upnp
Nope, many users here have strong views, they just posit them more respectfully.
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Indeed. Which is why there’s no HDMI here except between my Oppo BDP103 and Sony video projector, and a short run to carry I2S from a Singxer SU-1 DDC to a Holo Spring DAC. But I don’t know why HDMI would be relevant to Roon. From many discussions in this forum and elsewhere, it’s pretty clear how to get a high-quality digital setup, for a relatively modest investment, without involving HDMI.
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Nope, I have no interest in leveraging UPnP support. I just state the lack of a feature. If Roon Labs isn’t interested in expanding it’s user base, I wonder why they keep developing. It’s just simple economics, that is all.
And I fail to see the lack of respect. I do however suspect some kind of chip on shoulder situation, though I fail to see why.
As for myself: I just state my conclusions based on a month’s trial. I am very sorry if it annoys you that I am not gushing about the product, but that’s just the way it is.
I should have included other connections such as USB and TOSlink. My point is just that - for me - the ability to use a “household” device as an audio source is not a feature I am looking for specifically. Roon doesn’t support UPnP, so that’s it. End of story.
That doesn’t mean I am not allowed to find this somewhat of an annoyance because - again for me - it limits Roons usability somewhat.
But the lack of UPnP support isn’t my main gripe. The lack of promises honoured (“Roon understands your content”, “Roon plays with your gear”) is more annoying than just the lack of UPnP support (enough about this already).
I am willing to continue giving Roon a chance, but that certainly does not mean I won’t indicate what bugs me (pun intended).