I asked for on the road experiences with Roon recently. You and others gave me the bad news, which I took to heart. So, when we took our trip I used the >500 M4A files on my phone’s SD card and using USB Audio Player Pro app I could access Qobuz, Tidal, and TuneIn radio stations. I could then Bluetooth to the Bluesound Pulse 2i (or stream directly to it with BluOS) or hard wire into the RV’s sound system.
This doesn’t answer the question about “mobile Roon” but it made it irrelevant since we enjoyed all of our music on the road.
You got the first part right, in a wrong way: they are unique, but not in a good way (software development wise for example, since OT is a feature request).
Multi room capability is not unique to roon, others have that too (long before roon even existed).
What other software that has Roon’s library management capabilities also has multi-room? Heck, what other software has the capability for library management that Roon has?
Tend to agree.
Away from home, I am not listening on an expensive amp and speaker set up.
In the car, on holiday in a hotel, headphones when out and about, I can just stream from Tidal, Qobuz or Amazon HD.
If I really want a track from my collection I can just download it from my home network.
Maybe I just can’t see a common use case here?
Don’t go there. There are a lot of feature request that are of absolutely no use for me for example (remote access included), but others want them, so let them be. I also want some things that others don’t give a ■■■■ about it. Now, it’s very true with roon that neither of us will ever see live some of these request, but just let that to be on roon and not on one user disregarding what other happens to want.
Just giving my view. Not trying to belittle anyone’s ideas or feature requests. Sometimes something that seems like it might be niche, when explained, turns out to be more of a common need, hence the question. Maybe there is a common use case that I am unaware of. Who knows.
Though what ones understands by and does with the library management can be very subjective, the library management is one of the weakest aspects of roon (beside searching, roon radio, any kind of boolean logic, networking and other things).
They genially implemented the raat part, hence the flawless (for the most of it) multiroom functionality, but then again raat’s proprietary and nobody else has the chance to implement it. Given the chance, somebody somewhere may do a better job in that aspect too. Till then, one big point (maybe the most important) for roon.
So, for the seek of argument:
if you consider being able to see, navigate, filter, update and so on in any possible way using any possible filters (including user created ones) in any given combination, as library management, then jRiver is one century ahead of roon (or anybody else for that mater).
if you consider swiping thumbnails over the tablet’s screen as library management, then yes roon is a fancy toy to play with. And even in doing just that you can find a lot of issues, just search the forum.
In all fairness, another genial thing that roon has (and should be considered as a library management function), is the versioning. But it’s just a baby step on the way to become a real library management tool. And by the way, bad news, it will never be, as the roon team stated several times (again search the forum), because it’s simply not what they want from the product.
Though started as a reply to your post, my view is general and is based on a larger experience across several feature requests I followed here (until i finally and definitely gave up).
But I strongly believe that things like “that should not be implemented because I’m not using it” aren’t productive at all (remember tags, boolean logic and 1.8 when roon decided that nobody uses them) and should not be encouraged. It is very possible that i may overreacted relating this to your post, but was not in my intention to “attack” your point of view.
Fair enough fella. Yeah, definitely not in the ‘don’t implement this feature’ camp. Pretty sure the Roon guys will just go ahead and enhance based on what they think is the best combination of ease of implementation and user requirements.
Roon’s library management puts all others to shame, imho, be it JRiver, Audirvana, Apple, and everything else I have tested. Roon is magnitudes better than any of them. Now, my experience is dictated by a local library of 300k+ tracks. Possibly on much smaller libraries, one of the others might be okay, for my library, JRiver and Audirvanna were totally unusable. And, it is easy for me to find what I’m looking for, be it local or Qobuz. I guess your expectations and usage are totally different than mine, and that’s okay. God made us all different for a reason! I respect your views, even when out of kilter with mine, and hope everyone else does the same, and hope Roon listens to both of us equally! Best of listening to you, and everyone else.
I had to search for this one, thanks for that! (I’m not being sarcastic, I am not a native English speaker and I really didn’t know what kilter means).
Roon owes it to every subscriber to listen and evaluate to every suggestion they make. Obviously, they must then consider how to implement the suggestion, and it’s priority to everything else that they want to do. But they, and all community members, should not consider any suggestion trivial. I wish @danny had a magic wand so Roon could make all feature requests seamlessly come true, (bet Danny wishes he had that wand, too)
You see, that’s the thing: he doesn’t really want that! And he stated that several times (that they made roon as they wanted to be, not as the users want or request or whatever, sorry i do not have the reference to that post(s)). Now, there is nothing wrong with that as long as it’s out in the wild and everybody knows where anybody stands, but then again, one have to curbe his enthusiasm in order to take that. Which it’s a sad thing since most of us here are enthusiasts about all things audio, roon included.
I remember that post, and my take on it was that as they could not satisfy all subscribers that they would build it the way they want it. I could be wrong, but if Roon could do it, and do it right, I bet Danny would do that. But, it would have to work inside of what he considers the “ideal Roon” framework.
Would you be surprised if we had to wait until 2025 ?
Anyway, tanks for confirming that you guys like to do this.
I can’t imagine the work involved or complexity.
Maybe it’s an idea to just crate a roadmap tread with some indication of priorities and what’s likely to happen or not. ( or depending on others). The tread is not possible to post in. Only edited by Roon team on a 3 or 6 months interval. So it’s a summary of feature request.
oh my, that’s a lifetime away. it will not take anywhere near that long, now that the work is in progress. It is a huge project though because we have so many situations to deal with.
This would be an error in business acumen, given the number of companies trying to mimic us nowadays.
Maybe you started a complicated path to implement remote playback. I would have guessed that Roon has already 95% of the ingredients. At least for those that subscribe one or both of the two services (Qobuz or Tidal). In my case (180k tracks) probably 95% have under versions listed that it is available in Qobuz. So Roon already knows where to find the online version. Now it only needs to play it from there. Right issues solved. No upload to cloud needed. Only the Roon database needs to be made cloud access. But probably I’m too ‘green’ as you described you were 5 years ago.
Sure, and what about DSP that the core performs? and local libraries without streaming subscription? Roon users would expect all of that, and then some.
