Roon Through The Eyes of a Noob

Another strength of Roon is the ability to control which id tag takes precedence, yours or Roons. I bet you could have accomplished what you wanted. I did when at first my meta data wasn’t showing up in Roon. I changed some library settings, and viola, there it was. Then there is genre mapping.

Neither of these things are the key functionality of Roon for me. The thing that immediately grabbed me when I first used it, combined with Tidal, was the music browsing and discovery experience. Following band members, influences, performer relationships.

Yep fully agree on that one. After two years of using Roon this is one of my main critisism. I allready have my music organized in a way that makes sense to me. Adding new music to Roon ends op in a big pile. Not very handy, in fact utterly frustrating. I find the whole tagging system a hussle to be honoust.

Roon Through The Eyes of a Lifer

There are several issues that simply do not make sense to me either but at the end of the day the reasons I keep using Roon because the good out ways it’s shortcomings.

++ Plus for me

  • Networkable
  • Bit perfect
  • Upscaling
  • End Points
  • Multi Room
  • WAV Files
  • The Big and Main Reason - Sound Quality is 2nd to none.
  • Lifetime membership. I dislike annual or recurring fees even though this is where a lot of software is moving to.
  • Their involvement with their customers. They truly are engaged. It is very easy for anyone to get a response from multiple people in this organization at any given time.

– Minus for me

  • No Folder View
  • No CD Ripping
  • No Safe Mode for Alternate Profiles. Alternate Profiles should also be able to setup their own library and not have access at all to other librarys. Safe Mode means that they cannot delete any file however a separate DB should be setup for their own Tagging.
  • No direct playing from a CD or USB
  • Tagging. Just not simple enough and it is scattered to many different screens for editing.
  • Album Focused and not setup for individual tracks. Cannot edit individual album art for folders with nothing but singles.
  • Tidal integration. Although it has improved and the Roon team is serious about correcting it’s shortcomings, my overall view about the Tidal integration is I am usually more times than not frustrated and disappointed way more so than happy about it.

I know that there are probably more short comings that I am forgetting, but at the end of the day Roon just sounds so dog gone good. It is the best that I have come across. Once I select something to listen to, I really enjoy the quality of the music that it produces and it can produce it in multiple locations at the same time at the same quality. For that I give it a pass and wait for whatever improvements come along. In the last couple of years alone, there has been quite a bit of improvements and it is obvious that there is much more coming because of their continued involvement with their community.

–MD

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There seems to be two types of people in this discussion. People who are honest about some of the major flaws in the software, but still find it useful(yearly) and people who throw back every weakness I point out as actually being a strength, something that I just don’t understand because there are actually super convoluted work arounds for all of the deal breaker situations I ran into, or something that the programmers are still working on.(lifers) Looking around the forum I see that the issues I pointed out were just the tip of the iceberg.

Many people have pointed out that the main reason for sticking with Roon is the SQ. As I originally pointed out, Roon is SQ neutral (good, but not special or unique in any way) and can sound great or awful depending on what other software and hardware is being used.

Anyway. I’m happy that many of you are happy with this software. I assumed that for the price it would be the best around, but IMO there are cheaper and free alternatives that run circles around this. :sunglasses:

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And I find it exactly the opposite. I have been tagging my music fully and completely since MP3 (!) days, so Roon works perfectly for me; in fact, the idea of a folder driven interface makes no sense to me at all - I’d never be able to find anything :frowning:

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you’ve hit the nail on the head here.

the problem as i see from my perspective, is that there’s all this sort of flurry of lovely roony involvement and lots of discussion about this and that improvement, all very lovely and interesting, but very rarely does anything actually happen on the ergonomic front to improve stuff. And to make matters worse there’s a very severe luddite wing on these pages who just see any changes as sacrilege almost, so it seems to put a hold on the devs or steers the dev to hardware issues rather than really evolving Roon into something more than special.

I am really keen to see Roon develop in so many areas but it really may be a lifetime before we see significant changes. SInce I’ve had Roon (around 17months now?), flame me if I’m wrong, but i think there’s really only been some minor radio algorithm changes, one click play and… erm…that’s it, in terms of significant (or even any?) ergonomic changes.

As I say, I really like Roon and it’s still the best for me out there, but as for healthy and exciting discussion about future developments, it’s now on my life’s too short list.

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Another chirp about Classical fans, navigation sucks, how anyone can think a Composition search is the answer confuses me. I have over 1100 Bach works

How do I pick a piece to listen when I really want an album

Despite suggestions there has been no moves to help

Mike

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Your final sentence betrays you my friend. Roon has its shortcomings but all of them do. It is just that some can be lived with or adapted to, others cannot. And that seems to me to be a personal thing. I can absolutely assure you Roon isn’t just an expensive bit of audio jewellery to me. I have tried others and found them wanting. I just found Roon to be less so than others for what I do. Ultimately my epiphany came when I realised I didn’t have to look at desktops and folders. I didn’t have to maintain a temperamental operating system and I didn’t have to teach myself Linux. But before then I had two trials, the first was unimpressive, the second showed me enough to give Roon a year. Seven months in I paid for life membership.

Indeed, the claim for folder view seems technologically really progressive to me. :thinking:

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I’m afraid the adage, “sell the sizzle, not the steak” has taken hold at Roon. MQA sells subscriptions, ‘ergonomic changes’ don’t :neutral_face:

Yes, but by buying the sizzle, you still get the steak…

haha, but I’d love a bit of fillet mignon rather than rump now and again :slight_smile:

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What a confusing interface, I’ll keep Roon thanks, but to each his own.

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Let me add a third type to this discussion: I enjoy using Roon to collect and expose the treasures in my collection and enjoy listening to them, multi-room, without worrying about tagging, sorting and what-have-you. Hey, even my partner knows how to use it!

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Folder view is the last feature I would like to see in Roon…there are tons of “Android-like” players out there, please enjoy them.

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This topic has run its course and degenerated into debate about trolling. Mods have deleted posts that were about other posters.

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You don’t like what someone is saying, so you staple their mouth shut? That goes perfectly with my last paragraph. So much for free speech.
Last post. Just to offer apologies, clarification, and condolences.

Apologies to anyone that was offended, felt singled out, or personally attacked in any way. I still consider this “dummyware” and cannot see paying $20 for it, nevermind half a grand. If your goal is to actually pick out and listen to music in the most direct and hassle free way possible, Roon is probably not what you are looking for.

Clarification. Many of my points were taken out of context or twisted in a way to make it look like I didn’t know what I was doing. Here were my issues…

-Ropieee sounds flat and uninvolving to me. The simple fix was to use another DLNA capable program. At its core Roon is just a DLNA streamer anyway. J River even offers this functionality. J River is no better or worse than Roon. Just a different and cheaper brand of awful.

-Forced or at least very hard to avoid shuffle mode. Maybe there was a setting to neuter this feature, but the default option was death by shuffle.

-Forced or at least very hard to avoid radio mode. I actually liked the radio feature in theory. In practice having the radio feature forced on me after everything I choose to listen to made me hate the radio feature. I disabled it and it re-enabled its self the next time I played something. Maybe there is a way to permanently disable this feature, but the default option is be cloyed with carefully chosen music from my collection.

-No direct access to folders. The whole “adding this feature would run counter to the goals of Roon” and even having people say that they wouldn’t even know what to do with such a feature, along with the last two complaints feels very culty. Software is suppose to be written to allow end users with different preferences to be able to interact with hardware in a way that suits their needs. Having the designers vision unilaterally forced on all end users with no consideration for what they actually want is like living in a dictatorship. Paying $500 to live in a dictatorship is insanity.

Condolences to anyone who bought into this. I just don’t see any value here.