Roon subscription lifetime or annual?

Never do any lifetime subs there is always issues
Just do year to year

It’s more a behavioral decision than a financial one.
If you are risk-averse or tend to be cynical, you’ll be happier with an annual subscription.
If you are optimistic, look for upsides or are comfortable with risk, you’ll want the annual.
Everyone will weigh the pros and cons differently, based on how they view the world.

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I’m in my first year, am more likely to renew for a second year than jump for a lifetime. Roon is the best option I have for sure, but there are many frustrations, especially with the search and focus and bookmarks - I miss J River for these things. But Roon gives me Qobuz integration, and good metadata, so I live with the other issues. But maybe Qobuz will up their game, maybe Amazon will upset the applecart, maybe Qobuz will go bust, who knows what the next few years will bring, so I’ll stick with renting for a bit. Plus I feel it gives me a tiny bit of leverage - if Roon want to keep getting my money they might want to address some of the shortcomings. Whereas if they’d already got my money why would they care?

No fly in the ointment. Lifetime subscribers are free advertisers and are most invested in making Roon a continuing useful product, as well as improving the product. Their loyalty can be leveraged in product expansion to other streaming and hardware resources.

I am 72 and happily into my third year of annual subscriptions. I firmly hope I live long enough to regret that decision.:grinning:

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On the other side of the coin, I guess there would be people that paid for a lifetime subscription and lost interest. Roon Labs obviously gains if someone payed for 4 years and stayed for 2 years (for example).

For someone people I wonder if how good something sounds is directly proportional to how much effort they had to put in to get the thing to play something in the first place. People get some satisfaction sometime from the little rituals of turning everything on, select a vinyl, cleaning it, carefully placing on the platter and carefully positioning and lowering the tone arm etc.

For others maybe the opposite is true - fiddling around just adds to stress that in turn impacts tiny muscles connected to the tiny bones in your ears and thus changes how you perceive the sound and thus reduces your enjoyment of it (by possibly reducing the perceived dynamics, detail etc).

Something to perhaps consider when evaluating different audio products and their usability and how they may apparently sound relative to one another.

For me - despite being a techie - I prefer easy unobtrusive usability, so Roon generally wins - IMHO whatever is the most easy and relaxing to use may actually seem to sound better for physiological reasons :slight_smile:

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Three and a half years in on the annual subscription and still debating the Lifetime, despite owning a Nucleus.
How many are in my situation I wonder?

So, I had intended to respond earlier, but work got in the way, now I see the post withdrawn.
I was not offended, but you had made assumptions, based of course on the limited data I supplied in my text.
I have subscribed annually all along, now I own a nucleus it’s under review.
I have option to sell on the nucleus and chop the subscription or chop the nucleus and revert to the Mac mini.
Like all audiophiles, I enjoy experimenting with kit, to be honest, like many, I have made mistakes.
I am leaning to lifetime subs because firstly I really enjoy using Roon and the nucleus is solid and dependable, despite being a one trick pony.
Though your post was condescending, I accept it, hopefully now you are clearer to comment fully.

Nope, it wasn’t meant at all to be condescending. But I do worry about that when a question is pointed.
I withdrew the post because I recognized I misunderstood how the lifetime conversion works. Within a year, you can convert over to lifetime, but being ‘in’ for three and a half years doesn’t allow you to fill out the extra six months and convert over. Passing up on that, of course, would be hard to understand. But I was wrong about that and withdrew the post.
I can totally understand going year by year. And although a person might wish they had bought lifetime after 3.5 years, they have no way of knowing that paying for a lifetime membership now will make any more sense than it did before. There is always that uncertainty, and for some people, the philosophical reasons for not wanting lifetime remain.
One reason I like this forum is that I recognize there are people who look at things really differently than I do, either by using the software or other situations (like using a NAS for Roon Core).

I bought a Nucleus six-months ago, and to my mind at least, a lifetime subscription (bought at the same time) was a no-brainer.
It’s just a shame that the Nucleus doesn’t come with a lifetime subscription bundled. For its high price, I personally think it should.

For me the fact that I could get away with this was what encouraged to originally trial it and eventually buy a sub and later upgrade to lifetime.

OK, so not everyone may already have all the required bits (NAS + RPI-touch + DAC) lying around and thus can get going with an extended Roon system for only the cost of the sub, but it definitely takes Roon away from being a high upfront and apparently risky investment into the realm of a casual curious investment (or no investment at all during the trial period) as well as letting you experience it in probably its best way that is similar to having an always available hardware streamer (which really is what you just turned your NAS into).

I am sure many people start this way (running it on a NAS) and through this quickly discover the benefits of running such a system without tying up one of their main computer systems that probably have other uses. From here it becomes a relatively small step to move to an intel NUC/ROCK based core and so be able to handle a much bigger library, more zones and/or make use of the DSP features etc.

OTOH for those starting with Roon self contained on a laptop/mini or whatever computer I wonder if the benefits of the overall Roon architecture become as obvious and how many persist with it and eventually make the transition to a full standalone core based setup (via MOCK/NUC ROCK, Nucleus or whatever).

A long time I tried to use iTunes in this way - iTunes on my mac via a DAC, the remote app on my iphone and ipad and of course the apple IR control.

The problem with this was I could never get away from the irritation of having start up the laptop and wait for it (OK, so its short wait on OSX), then start iTunes and leave the lid open to ensure it was adequately ventilated which of course is less of an issue with a mac mini.

Fundamentally I just did not like having a regular computer involved due to the additional fiddling needed to play anything despite that at the time, the all-in Apple way was probably as good as it could be at the time.

And I’ve come to appreciate that for a lot of people, a NAS is viewed as a multifunctional machine for a wide variety of their applications (Plex, Roon, Storage, etc.). My view had been, “why would I want to use my storage device as my music computer?”. When you look at it the other way around it makes perfect sense.

I always used mine as a media file server for DLNA or iTunes - that is a logical use for a home NAS and at the time fit in with my then somewhat enterprise driven view that storage is storage, end of :slight_smile:

But if you are already running a DLNA server on it, its a short jump to run plex, then other things (its a docker host now too) and eventually Roon.