Roon’s handling of 1.6 Feedback

All of this resulted from buggy software. Software that was not adequately tested prior to release. Software that was not Ready for Prime Time.

It turns out that your sharpest critics were spot on. Including those who said you should roll back to version 1.5 until you had your act together on version 1.6. Including those who said you had a “Disastrous UI” in version 1.6.

They all called it right.

Next time, fully test your product. You would save yourself – and all of us – a considerable amount of time.

And read the posts. You should have responded to Tony two full days ago. His posts spotlighted the bug two days ago.

Instead of asking for more examples, and then not liking the response.

3 Likes

Well said Tom, a bit of perspective. I’ve had my own run ins with @brian but as you say where else would you even have the opportunity to have such a run in?

Roon Radio and Qobuz support have enhanced Roon exponentially, the UI will be sorted, some of us are guilty of being a bit precious I feel.

.sjb

7 Likes

A bug that shows up in a part of the software that was not explicitly changed in 1.6 and only occurs after some specific actions have been taken has been replicated and will be fixed. That is good news and the users who have kept the issue alive are owed thanks by all.

Obviously it would have been preferable for the bug to have been found in testing. But what sort of testing would have found it ? It sounds like the very definition of a bug that might slip through the most rigorous testing program.

Fortunately, no one has lost data or suffered an interruption to listening. Eventually the scars of seeing some stretched Artist images will heal.

13 Likes

@allan2,

As a life-long executive in the software industry, I can assure you there is no such thing as bug-free software. Only software with undiscovered bugs. In my several years of being a Roon subscriber, I’ve found the team there to be thoughtful, responsive, and following the best practices when it comes to software development, testing, and engagement with the customer base.

I have supreme confidence that Roon will continue to incorporate feedback they receive with their own considerable expertise in the space to produce a product we all love. I also appreciate their willingness to embrace such a fast release cycle given a comparatively small team. I would rather have them maintain the pace of releases (and resulting rapid feedback on new features - the very definition of agile development), risking a test-escape on something like a photo display, than perform the kind of testing one might apply to embedded software in something like a medical device where the cost of a malfunction is so much higher.

I for one, while equally passionate about my music listening experience, do not share your anger.

Best.

35 Likes

I found it, as did others, by simply clicking on the artist name several times in different windows. Not at all difficult to find. A blatantly obvious bug – the results of which have been reported over and over and over for the last two weeks.

John, I agree both with your general observation, as well as your comments about the Roon executives, notwithstanding my disagreement with them today.

My only complaint was that they saw examples of this bug numerous times over the last two weeks and ignored the posted examples. They saw the examples on this thread two days ago and ignored it. Then they asked for more examples, so I responded and described it for what it is – just plain ugly.

All I did at that point, to clarify what the bug does, is ask if the butt ugly examples I posted of Stan Getz, Wayne Shorter and Randy Sandke were a result of the bug. What I received was a condescending response that it took too much time to answer a simple question, based on the examples I posted – examples that Brian ASKED for.

When a company rep would rather take the time to write and post a long and condescending response, instead of just answering the question, it makes me wonder what other unpleasant surprises await us.

Final comment. Many of the problems that they are now addressing are not – emphatically not – bugs. They were incredibly dumb design decisions, like static lyrics so big that the guy who designed it must have severe cataracts. Like having nothing but a black screen above any music for which there is neither an album cover or a photo. Like the search results screen filled with itty bitty circles and huge white space. Like eliminating album covers entirely.

And that doesn’t even cover the more serious problems that have been reported related to slow operation, etc.

I was sympathetic despite really dumb design decisions. I am less sympathetic today.

Then I get a condescending response

2 Likes

The open 1.6 feedback thread / forum is really not the appropriate place to complain about things like membership and demands of a refund. The snarky comments won’t get you much either. Constructive discussion about bugs you encounter, and things like that make good sense, but you carrying on in repeated posts is turning the thread into a total whine-fest. Rest assured the Roon people are doing their very best to address problems that arise. You are not the only user of the program.

12 Likes

Well a lot of us were clamoring for a new Roon release. They may regret having done so and perhaps we’ll only see releases every 2 years.

But I do agree that some of the design choices are head scratchers. For the most part if they are not functional issues I don’t care much but the elimination of any large album cover art is not what you’d expect from music library software. Trite or not.

3 Likes

Tony,

If Brian had actually read and responded to your original post from 2 or 3 days ago, instead of ignoring it, the bug would have been discovered then. Let alone 2 weeks ago when this was first reported. Everyone, myself included, would not have wasted so much time on this.

I note again that my first post this morning was done at Brian’s specific request, and all he provided was a sarcastic response that my comments were wrong because they were all based on the buggy software that he provided. That is what I would call the Software Engineer’s Ultimate Oxymoron. Don’t blame us for the problems you encountered, because the problems are not real, because the problems are based on a bug that we failed to tell you about.

Sigh.

The Roon guys have said you’ll be able to have a now-playing screen that displays album art, so all will be well in the fullness of time.

The brouhaha over album art led me to contemplate the place of album art in the age of streaming and digital downloads. My conclusion is that an image associated with a track or group of tracks still has value, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to have a 1:1 aspect ratio.

A little more respect to a member who is giving u great input should be expected from Roon personal. Roon started the community to get free feedback and support from the beginning.
RESPECT THE COMMUNITY

2 Likes

Thank you very much.

Respect should come from both sides…

I’ve been following this thread from the beginning. Brian has been calm, polite and transparent from the get go and also willing to change stuff due to feedback. What more can you ask?

Asking again and again and again and again and again with different words, different arguments for something that’s clearly been answered as a negative with clear and valid reasons seems a bit childish to me. The answer is no…deal with it…move on…

This reply is generic and in no way directed at you personally…just this thread has gotten a bit ugly at times.

We’re all adults here, let’s act like it.

16 Likes

Sorry but this is not the case. OP came at the issue from many points and obviously spent a lot of his FREE time to help and was dismissed by Brian…almost like he knew there are issues, maybe assumptions and decisions with 1.6 he might have been opposed to or otherwise and they were now his problem and he has to deal with.
Telling a Community member to stop, enough, go away is what seems childish to me…
He’s been pretty quite lately, no?

Anyway lets just move along on this

I wasn’t replying to some specific thing here…my reaction was in general in regards to this thread and some of the reactions in it. I even put that in my reply.

As a whole most of us trust that things we all seem to dislike will be fixed or made optional.

But Roon can’t please everyone and from experience I can tell you that no piece of software is free of bugs.

Brian only said he was finished with the discussion and would act upon the things that were actable upon. I don’t think Brian can spend as much time here as some of us seem to do. And realistically you can’t expect them to read everything. Maybe the reason for Brian being quiet is that there is not much more to add here. Everything has been said and rehashed once or twice over. They are aware of the issues and maybe, just maybe have gone to work on them…

I asked for upnp support a while ago…Brian said NO to me! A paying customer and he dared tell me NO! I cried for a bit, dried my tears, sulked for a day or two, eventually after getting over the initial shock I sucked it up and just moved on…

As I told Brian then, I might not agree, but I’d rather hear a clear NO and make my decisions based on that.

Some of us here seem to think our wish is roons command and they should change it NOW. Software development doesn’t work that way sadly…it needs to be thought about, functional and technical designs need to be made, these need to be signed off on by architects, developers have to make stuff…and -oh dear- these people make mistakes… testers need to test…retest…retest…retest… integration tests, functional tests, regression tests…and I’ve not even mentioned beta testing yet…

It’s a miracle sometimes that stuff gets done at all at any pace. :slight_smile:

Imagine working on something for months and being proud of what you’ve done and achieved. You show it to the world and people start pissing on it…you won’t be happy, but it’s the risk of any company designing software. What you need to do is get the expectations clear upfront and give 80% of the users a good looking functional product that’s easy to use. The 20% that isn’t happy can do one of 3 things. Shut up and just accept it, which most do. Be vocal about it and complain and after that accept it or leave. Basically that’s it as far as options go. Roon is not our product… it’s theirs and because they’ve made something we like we choose to use it at a price. If they want to make roon purple with yellow and pink and popups all over the place and buttons that don’t work as they should it’s their choice and our choice would then be to stop using roon and they’d be out of business in a year or two. So it’s basically a balance that’s respected. Roon moves forward as 80% likes to see it. 20% isn’t happy with this, about 5% actually leave and because of new and better things 80 out of 100 new people like Roon and maybe 20% of those people will actually start using it. That’s how it works and how a business grows. Not by doing all they can to keep those 5 people from leaving, they do all they can to keep most of their users happy and attract new users along the way.

You can’t please everyone all the time…

19 Likes

Absolutely brilliant post @Michael_van_der_Wal

1 Like

Thank you. Some of the responses above, and defenses of Roon, border on works of fiction.

It should be noted that I am the person who once defended Roon in an all-out fashion, with a thread that I titled “Why Roon is fabulous with or without Tidal”

To several others who posted above, please actually read the posts of the last several days. The narrative speaks for itself.

G997 is correct, I took the time to clearly identify the problem and describe it. The management of Roon finally admitted that they have a serious bug, and only because of my repeated posts – and the time that I took to do so. A point that is now ignored.

Over a week ago examples were posted in a different thread that demonstrated the bug.

The management of Roon ignored the posts and did not respond.

Subsequently, and two days before all of this, more examples were posted in this thread, and not by me. Those were actual reproductions of what we were seeing. Very large and dramatic examples.

The management of Roon ignored the posts and did not respond.

G997 is again correct, as I again responded to those examples, not the management of Roon, and described the incredibly poor design of 1.6 based upon what we were all seeing.

Finally, Brian then ASKED for examples. So I posted examples and described the ugly results we were looking at. Clearly Brian did not like those accurate descriptions, but it FINALLY got the attention of the management, and they FINALLY – after several weeks of posts on this subject – responded.

It speaks poorly of the management of Roon that it took repeated posts, and an accurate description of the butchered crops and results that we were looking at, to finally force a response.

Brian’s response could be summarized as: don’t blame us for the problems you encountered, because the problems are not real, because the problems are based on a bug that we failed to tell you about.

What should have gotten the attention of everyone was this statement by Brian:

So I asked: were the incredibly ugly examples I posted of text behind the photos a part of the deliberate design, since Brian said “we have always had text behind artist photos?” Or were they a result of the bug, meaning that they would disappear once the bug is corrected?

Brian flatly, and in a condescending tone, refused to answer that simple question. When a serious problem is identified, and a simple question is posed – are the examples that were posted a deliberate part of the design or an unintended result of bug – and the management flatly refuses to respond, it strongly suggests it is the former and not the latter.

Otherwise, why not answer a simple question?

Several of you responded to that question, but since you are not the management of Roon, your responses are your best guesses. But I appreciate the fact that you at least responded, when the management of Roon did not.

We still don’t have a response, so we will have to see the next iteration. Hopefully it will be better tested, and the basic design elements better conceived.

One point is crystal clear. If the management of Roon had responded to the posts on this issue almost two weeks ago, all of this would have been avoided.

It should not have been necessary for me to repeatedly describe what we were looking at, and for a number of us to express repeated concerns – to finally get an answer from management.

And even then, the answer that we received deliberately failed and explicitly refused to answer a remarkably simply question: of the examples with text behind the photos, that were posted at YOUR request, are they a deliberate part of the design, or an unintended result of the bug?

If you think that constitutes an acceptable way to respond to questions in a forum, we will just have to agree to disagree.

To those who criticize me for taking a very large amount of my own time to finally force the management of Roon to admit that there is a serious bug, you are welcome.

In the future, I will leave it to others to come to defense of Roon, and describe it as fabulous, after this demoralizing experience and encounter with management.

@allan2

It would seem that you want to keep reliving this over and over and over again. I, for one, am tired of it. Maybe Roon isn’t for you if you actually get “demoralized” over Internet forum interactions with the Roon CTO. I understand your frustration but you are overdoing the reaction. Make your point, once, and move on.

16 Likes

Scott, I completely agree with you. I regret the last post because I largely repeated myself. I did, for whatever it’s worth, force the management to acknowledge a serious bug that they had ignored for two full weeks despite numerous examples and very sharp commentary. We will all benefit from that.

This is my final post and comment until the next release comes out. It will be interesting to see how they handle artist photographs and text in the artist detail page. I hope for the best. But the specific refusal by Roon management to respond to my questions about the extraordinarily ugly examples I posted strongly implies that those butt ugly examples are part of the deliberate design, and not a result of the bug. For that reason, I fear for the worst.

I sincerely hope that I am proven wrong.

1 Like

Gosh, this thread is a bit meta.

What’s next, “Feedback on the feedback of Roon’s handling of artist images?”

1 Like

To tell you the truth, in all this excitement, the mods have kind of lost track of Brian’s posts. Did he post 6 times or only 5… Kinda makes this thread difficult to folllow.

Edit: found them. They’re still in the main feedback thread. :grinning: