I did run my roon trial some years ago, and I am disappointed by how little things seem to have improved. There may be some means to make most of your own music collection work nicely with roon, but I honestly think roonlabs is asking their users too much.
When I started my own trial, I had an expectation that I could make some effort and roon could work for me. During my trial I was mostly disappointed by the fact that there was no easy way to find and listen some particular cd I had ripped into my collection. At that time I did not find any easy to follow instructions on how to make roon work with my collection. At the end of my trial I had no idea if any amount of tinkering and troubleshooting would allow me to access everything I wanted. I didn’t know if the problem was with me, or if roon was still too immature for classical collectors. I think roon might benefit from a separate classical collection inspector utility, which should guide new users step-by-step in correcting a potential mountain of ”issues” with their own collection.
Not finding a performance that you know you have is a serious problem with otherwise easy to use application like roon. Not finding your music could be considered in my opinion even the mother of all dealbreakers with any sort of music consumption application. I can understand frustrated people vent out when roon doesn’t help them in listening to music they ripped maybe one or two decades ago. There is still room for improvement, a lot… I’m still uncertain if roon is completely ready to be marketed as a finished product to collectors of classical music.
A question to those who defend roon. Do you expect you can find all performances or cd’s in your own collection easily with roon, with no tinkering or troubleshooting? If that is an unreasonable expectation, how much difficulties you would expect new users to put up with?
I am not “defending” Roon. All things said and done it remains an excellent solution.
Some albums not being identified automatically is not a problem at all for me. Most are found by the manual identification process.
The much bigger issue is the extremely cumbersome process to retrieve canonical tag data to populate the WORK and PART tags in cases where the works are not identified correctly.
What continues to puzzle me is why Roon goes 80% of the way by introducing WORK and PART tags, but does not provide the final step, which is an easy way to retrieve the information that goes into those two tags.
Hi Rudi, for me, there are four things I want to do with music. Roon does three of the four and does not address portability. Of those three, it is utterly superb (IMO) at one - moving music around my house, and good/very good (classical) to excellent (jazz/rock) in helping me discover new music. I love it for those. For me, for my experience, it ranges from really bad to acceptable at giving me access to my own music. So I have developed workarounds, clunky but they work much of the time. That failing is bizarre since it seems the easiest of the tasks - build a part of Roon (call it Troglodyte) taking in a user’s library that assumes all the information is there and exactly right, just don’t touch it. i.e. give users access to their own libraries w/i Roon, and as they curate their own libraries, it is reflected in the Tg part of Roon. (Insert much more discussion here.) It will be impossible for people who have put effort into organizing their own music (and big typically classical sometimes jazz libraries) not to be frustrated with Roon. 'cause they are right.
So I too am with Roon, but can not yet call it an excellent solution. If at some point I effectively lose connection to my library I cannot stick with Roon. That would be a sad day.
I guess I am a Roon defender. I acknowledge that it is weaker in classical music than other types. If you prefer other systems to Roon for classical (or other music types), I don’t really have a problem with that. I have non-classical music that I have had issues with. I don’t expect Roon to be perfect but what I think is acceptable really should not impact you. Vote with your wallet and enjoy whatever playback system you ultimately choose.
I don’t agree with the wallet-voting philosophy at all. We have a forum for exchanging views - otherwise, how would Roon ever know what their users like or dislike? I concur with some of the quips aired here but not all, and certainly not the aggressive tone it sometimes takes on (although much more rarely here than in other fora).
Now, I rarely make public assertations (as the end of this sentence should be an indication of) but if I were to make one anyway, it would be that discussions are not battles to be won or lost, but something to lend insight and learn from. Agree to disagree, if you will, and be a wiser person.
Alas; I am moving away from Roon anyway, for something else which isn’t entirely clear yet. There is no product quite like Roon, and I absolutely love it and the solidity of it. The shortcomings, however, are unacceptable at this price point. I really don’t want to hijack this thread, so I will elaborate in another one in a weeks time.
Hi Thomas, feel free to ping me once you know what you will use. Mind you, no rush, I have just ended the first month of my first (and likely last) year of subscription.
Aah, but search must return the universe, prioritised on community picks, not the search string you entered. Surely you know that Roon knows better than you what you are searching for.
It would be funny if it wasn’t so absolutely awful. Before anyone suggests using the composition, this is what happens when I do and look at the 1493 possibilities that Roon finds from Qobuz. The first 600 or so … yes six hundred … are of the same single movement lasting 9:01 played by Kemp’s and the BPO on an almost infinite variety of labels I have never heard of like “Cookout music, Classical Music dreams”. Honest. Here’s the first and last of the 600 or so …
Well I can’t make the same 600 trash entries appear in Qobuz, so once again I would settle for the fall-back option of passing a search through to Qobuz. What is so sad is that Roon have done a lot of work trying to understand what a composition is, and that’s great, but then all that work is wasted when it comes to results like this. Why?
Feel sorry for the problems of the OP. I’m a new-ish Roon user with over 2000 classical CDs now mostly imported. I’ve used a few interfaces eg bluesound, Naim app, tidal app etc, but never took to them. I’m not sure there’s a better interface for classical for me than Roon. Yeah there are issues, but for me they do not diminish the enjoyment today of using Roon for classical.
I would observe though that Roon needs to keep pushing the boundaries of its interface and data quality because it’s connecting information that I feel is at the heart of its brand (just my opinion not a fact). The trouble is everyone wants an interface that matches their own unique needs.
Well, I agree, that there are many curious things for classic music in roon, but is by far not unusable for classical collectors.
I’m a user of roon since December '19. My previous software was the JRiver Mediacenter. There I worked hard to get my library with about 4000 albums in a useable form. The first look of what made roon out of my library was rather frustrating, because roon added numberless non-classical composers from the jazz and pop/rock genres.
Hi @Walter_Horn, Thats a mild description for what I felt after importing my stuff into Roon . Hours and hours of corrective action and workaround-stuff as you describe got it into a basically acceptable state. Then the fine tuning takes more time: Fixing wrong record labels, Lyricists listed as composers. Artists duplicated and triplicated, you name it.
All that shouldn’t be necessary if Roon would work as advertised. I think I quoted their marketing gizmo earlier-on in this thread. Good they travel well below the radar of the big law firms, otherwise class action would be all over them
I got my composers now showing “the Roon way”. But I have them also still in my tags exactly the way you are showing in your screenprint, so I can switch around if I want lateron. Thanks for the hint with the ROONALBUMTAG, I am sure I will find a good use for that. Haven’t played much yet with Bookmarking, Roon ‘Tag’ etc. Main focus still cleanup…
I once used JRiver as well in. Must be around 12 years+ ago when I switched to UPNP Server based Apps. Time is running.
NB: I recognise quite a number of records in your screenprint
Excuse my sarcasm, but who would be to blame? As a user, do I see where the metadata originates from? Is there a contact given to complain at the source? Can I even switch off metadata completely? No?
That‘s why you keep seeing people complaining about it here…
