It’s too expensive, I’m embarrassed to tell friends what it costs, and then as a recurring subscription? A hard sell for all but the dedicated audiophile. Everyone wants to sell you a subscription these days 
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Roon costs 10$ per month, there’s nothing to be “embarrassed” with. I find that there are plenty of subscriptions (World of Warcraft, Microsoft 365, Tidal and other music services, Netflix and other video services, etc) that cost even more than that.
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Wrong! You need to pay yearly in advance! It’s $120 USD upfront, EPIC FAIL!
Roon should try charging per month not annually… I’ve often thought about giving Roon another try for a month or so and then cancelling if I can’t stand it any longer, then I remember, oh it’s $120 upfront.
Greed! Sorry Roon…
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It’s worse than almost every other subscription, because you pay yearly, there’s no monthly subscription!
Ofc maybe Roon recently changed the subscription model to allow monthly subscriptions and ability to cancel anytime? But I doubt it…
Well, Microsoft 365 like others is an annual subscription too, so I understand that you’re upset because you can’t have a monthly subscription with Roon ?
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It sounds odd to hold out the lifetime licence for USD $700 as an alternative to the annual subscription of USD $120, but anyone who thinks they are likely to use Roon for 6 years or more really should consider it. Roon have already increased the lifetime fee without notice and have made it clear that the lifetime option may be removed without notice at any time.
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@andybob I am surprised that Roon has a lifetime licence, as this is very uncommon practice in the software industry. The common practice is either yearly subscription or an edition price.
I really don’t think we can compare Roon to Microsoft 365.
Roon is a niche product & in terms of the competition is by far the most expensive (at least that I’m aware). Microsoft Office is an essential tool for just about anybody in business, education and most other industries. Further, for those in business, I would imagine that yearly subscription is tax deductible something that Roon is not for the vast majoirty of its users.
However, if you were to ask me is the Roon annual subscription a reasonable price, I would perhaps consider it acceptable for those in the US or elsewhere with a stronger exchange rate. The issue of differential pricing I believe is real and something many other software makers adopt accordingly.
That, however, has nothing to do with Roon’s UI or the thread here itself. I would not want a moderator to split or remove comments accordingly.
Please remain on topic as per title of this thread. That is Roon’s UI - thank you! 
Well, I was talking about MS 365 as a personal (family) subscription, not as a professional tool.
Or, perhaps, you consider that nobody pays personal licences to Microsoft and they pretend using their professional profile at home ?
I was alluding to the fact that Office is a business/educational tool, if it’s used otherwise so be it. However, there are perfectly good free examples to be had for families who don’t use it professionally.
Notwithstanding, Roon is niche and Office is not.
Alas, I did not say that, nor did I allude to that to be clear. How one choose to use any Microsoft tools/software or any of the alternatives is completely up to them.
Cheers. 
If you are not even subscribing and using Roon, why are you even here? You clearly made a decision to leave as Roon does not meet your standards. That’s ok. Do you post in all the other forms who create software you are not happy with?
A philosophical point. Nothing is perfect, if you look hard enough you can and will find fault in anything. So, the question is; are you looking for faults or exploring solutions?
Exploring solutions can be done so much more constructively by being polite and well mannered. Also consider that so many users are not having the issues you experienced, which may indicate there are other factors outside Roon at play here.
Roon’s pricing policy and their reasons behind it have been published clearly and in detail on this very forum.
Just my thoughts…
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Yeah thanks… but I did subscribe in the past and hope springs eternal that things will change… Oh I get monthly forum summaries… So that’s why I’m here today.
What on earth does this mean? is what a complete sentence? I assume English is your first language, but the reply above is nonsensical.
OK I got the reply to you mixed up, it was Outlay in Canada, so sorry, it was midnight here and I lost focus…
However the fact remains that if you had originally posted something like " hey, I personally have issues with the UI and believe it could be improved to make Roon better. I have posted feature requests in the past regarding the UI but they have not resulted in any change. How about… and then your suggestion…
Then you would probably got a good deal of support and encouragement from others.
Instead it seems you posted looking for a fight and childishly continue to be rude. Pity, because your open API for 3rd Party UI changes idea is potentially quite a good one.
Fairwell, I hope the rest of your life is a happy one without Roon.
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Typed in “$120 USD = $170 AUD.” and the forum software was not happy, wouldn’t let me post and told me “Body seems unclear, is it a complete sentence?”.
As if… They’re not wasting any time on an API it’s just a pipe dream, and anyway Roon takes no notice, never responds, ever… they can’t even get the subscription model right. There is NO MONTHLY SUBSCRIPTION… It’s a yearly subscription “Billed Yearly” with some bs about it being $9.99/month.
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For goodness sake!
The OP of this thread was hardly “slightly critical” in his post! - just *$%$"£% rude!
For what my opinion is worth, the Roon UI is pretty damn good. If the OP genuinely wants to provide suggestions to improve his experience with the product, then that is absolutely fine. However, given the tone of his post at the top of this thread there is no evidence of this, and he would probably be better off looking elsewhere for a UI to use with his system.
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A bit off topic but in response to a comment here:
I managed to sign up for Qobuz USA without living in a Qobuz country. Once you sign up and pay (and they pay royalties acc’d to the signup country), they don’t care where you are in the world, you can use the service. You can travel and move countries, it’s irrelevant.
I don’t see why Roon would have any reason or interest in dealing with any of that. It’s not their issue or business.
As far as the OP issues: I’m not in the US or Europe and have none of those issues. I don’t have super high speed internet, either. I even get good results if I work behind a VPN that seriously slows down my internet speed.
So I don’t think several of your issues have anything at all to do with Roon itself. Maybe your ISP or home networking issues. Just because you assume you setup and network are working optimally, it doesn’t mean they are.
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I still fail to see why you don’t complain to Tidal rather than Roon? Or are there differences between how the Tidal application works compared to Tidal through Roons GUI?
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Tidal (for mobile) allows offline downloads, unfortunately the Windows version doesn’t.
But guess what Spotify for Windows does allow downloads, go figure!
Anyway…for $120 a year Roon should be able to better buffer the playing track, I’m sure that wouldn’t invalidate their Tidal licencing.
I don’t mind waiting say 30 seconds for buffering at the very start of the album if it means absolutely no stutters during the playing of the album. I think the longest stutter I get is about 10 seconds, so a 30 second buffer should fix that. Ofc it could be an “opt-in” for people with issues like me, so those not affected by stutters don’t wait at all.
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Hi Danny,
Yes, I did say there were workarounds or vpn opportunities to get around the terms of service and restrictions that exist outside Qobuz supported countries.
In so far as Roon is concerned and it being none of their business that’s likely true. However, what I may not have made clear, I’ve not read back up, was that I meant if there was an issue with Qobuz and a Roon user who was not legally/technically allowed to use the service, perhaps Roon would not be able to provide the support they would as they do otherwise. (Perhaps I’m wrong).
Cheers.
If the UI is the only consideration, I’d say Roon is better than the other music application software I’ve tried in the past two years or so (including Audirvana, Tidal, Bluesound, iTunes, and the Matrix Audio player), in terms of overall ease-of-use, data management, hardware integration and control, reliability, and user support (considered all together, not necessarily in every individual feature). For any support request, I usually get a forum response (often from a technical expert if not a Roon staff member) within hours. I don’t think any other application comes close in that regard.
There are always issues with any software this complex. As for price, I agree that $120/year seems rather high, especially when you also add monthly fees for a Tidal/Qobuz subscription. But then, it is not a mass market product but more of a niche product for a small, relatively affluent user-base. My cable TV subscription costs about the same per month as Roon does per year (and almost all I ever watch is news, aside from streaming content like Netflix/Hulu/Amazon with additional subscription costs). With Roon + Tidal/Qobuz, one can access nearly all the world’s music (in high res formats) for about $1 daily. What other major, high quality media service is cheaper? My Sunday newspaper costs $3.50/week.