Roon Update 1.8 - WHY AT ALL?

Roon Software Discussion
41

I agree - at the time I started using Roon in 2015 they advertised it in a kind of nostalgic way, reminding people of how cool the times were when you had big LP’s with nice artwork and texts.

The way to present your library in a magazine-style follows this logic. However, what they can’t? or won’t? be offering is a way to make Roon YOUR personal magazine.
I am reminded of my very first days as a teenage collector, when I met with a much older guy who proudly showed me his gear and LP collection, while pulling out a photo album out of the cupboard, where he had collected pictures and made collages of LP catalog cutouts, together with cut-out reviews for his albums. He would sit in his listening chair and browse through these albums, revisiting memories and getting inspired to put on other records that he owned.

If Roon could do this for me, I think I would be very happy. To enable me to create my own personal magazine, merging 3rd party content with my own collected reviews, artwork and my personal cross-references. I would love that.

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42

I have to agree, so many long-standing feature requests ignored. But it still looks to me like there has been a lot of change under the hood to support search and discovery of streaming accounts. There is a fundamentally different presentation problem to solve when your search on Beethoven’s 5th on Qobuz returns 3,000 hits whilst your search on a local library returns 3 hits. Personally I am ok with the change of focus, but its obviously going to upset a few.

It would be nice if over the next few weeks/months, the functionality many of us relied on to manage a local library can be clawed back. It may just have been an oversight. I suspect though a decisive break has been made and that in hindsight 1.7 will be seen as the high water mark for roon and local library management.

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43

Even though I’m a Tidal subscriber (switched back from Qobuz after being gifted an ongoing Tidal sub by somebody there) I often use the Qobuz app for discovery and/or bandcamp and other places outside Roon (and Tidal) and then search for it in Roon(Tidal) and add to the library. Roon discovery with 1.8 has become even more confusing and useless imo. I think for a lot of lifetime users, with this release Roon is going to become not much more than an elaborate player and container for our collections with lots of pesky boxes and fields of ‘discovery’ taking up time and space. Fair enough. It still sounds good and plays to any device in the house.

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44

I thought about this, at first I was going to object - but you’re absolutely right. For many lifetime users, the use case is and was “I have a big collection of locally stored music, let me easily navigate it and mitigate some amount of metadata hell”. I’m a more recent lifetimer, with a different use case, but I think they’re gonna fix some stuff, however, i won’t be shocked if as someone said nicely in another thread, something like “1.7 is the high water mark for those who use Roon for local library management”.

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45

Yes, some odd design decisions in 1.8. I probably primarily use Qobuz, Idagio and BandCamp for discovery. But I used to find the roon “recommended for you” and “in your library” picks on the right hand side in the album view very handy. That’s gone now. It came in for some flac but I don’t get that decision personally.

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46

I think you are right, but there’s a big disconnect in Roon world in angling towards attracting more casual streaming, mobile device users - most of them are not going to want to run a Roon Core server (or even know what that is), or pay for a sub to Roon for what they are already paying a sub to Tidal, Spotify, etc. So first and foremost Roon’s base is record (i.e. digital file) collectors, whether those be local files or titles from Roon’s current stable of hi quality streaming services. And they dropped the ball on them. Not good.

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47

That’s a very good statement. Of course, the people at Roon might have data that shows otherwise, but I would still agree that at this price point, a software that’s just a nice layer on top of a streaming service is probably not the way to go.

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48

So, again my hypothesis (totally unsupported by data, but I can spin guesses out pretty fast in search of data - what does google call it, ‘strong beliefs weakly held’?) is that they are actually already seeing that be a strong growth pattern in their useage. I’d agree that the set of “I have ZERO local library” is likely a fringe case (as you point out, given the fixed cost), but I bet that they are seeing lots of people who come in with a local collection, and their useage migrates very rapidly to be dominated by streaming. If I saw that, I’d want some more of that business - because that I can find a way to get. And frankly, if that becomes more and more a frequent if not dominant use case, it’s easier to imagine how you’d get closer and closer to a more cloud-y implementation (albeit without some of the features) with less and less hardware requirement on site. If I was Roon CEO, that’s where I’d be heading. And yes, I’d try not to piss off the existing crew too much along the way… But I’d have my eye on a no/minimal-hardware SaaS subscription offering for wherever the growth was happening. And I happen to have a guess where that is.

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49

Yeah, the ‘recommended for you’ ‘in your library’ and ‘artists similar to’ sidebars were probably my most used ‘features’ in Roon. Now it’s just seems like hard work to get to what they replaced it with. And ‘discography?’ Nice idea but a mess. I just want to see what’s in my library, what’s not and on Tidal/Qobuz, and go from there. I also don’t need it presented to me by what’s most ‘popular’ - that’s what the rating stars under the thumbnails were for that they took away. First and foremost I always want to see an artists catalog by date recorded.

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50

This is a very fair point to my understanding as well. I thought we have paid lifetime or yearly membership fees to get something different than another streaming solution on top of others. Namely one that cures our existing local library in addition to all the features of new streaming content from different providers.

This is the USP of Roon in my view, hopefully it will not go into another direction because of actual trends that will always change from time to time. Roon will stay substantial if the way they started will remain and be developed on this core base elements that make it different.

51

Perhaps an interesting (or at least relevant) anecdote. I use Tidal for music discovery, but I have recently decided that I don’t want to rely on it for the long term (mostly because I think that there is good chance they won’t be around in a couple of years). So I went through my collection and identified albums that I wanted to own and put an order in with a friend who owns a small record store. He told me that the labels are deleting tens of thousands of titles from being available on CD. He will likely be able to fulfil half of my order of around 70 titles - and these were not obscure, fringe releases.

Yes, I know that there are other options to acquire them (Bandcamp is a great one), but the shift away from people “owning” music and having local libraries has already happened, People are buying more LPs than CDs now, Those of us who own large libraries of our own are the fringe case now, and we are not getting any younger.

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52

Fair enough I fear…

53

I am all with you Noa and recognise myself in your feedback. Very disappointed to say it politely. Actually I believe it is the first time I post something negative & hesitated quite a lot before doing so.

54

This! 1000X!

The Roon team is really focused on the “magazine”, and streaming and discovery on mobile devices.

I’m more like 75% my library and 25% streaming and always on a desktop.

Managing your own content with a feature rich desktop app is what they promoted when I bought my lifetime subscription, but I get the feeling that they would rather do away with that completely.

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55

Thank you. Although I do not want to appear negative. It’s about open discussion and I would also love to read words that prove me wrong in this case.

56

Roon Labs made huge changes in the visual design and user experience, which are of course highly visible so people go nuts because they are thrown off or a thing they loved was (re)moved or changed, etc. Visible changes, especially at this scale, are always going to elicit vocal response - we are visual beings. Also everyone is a part-time graphic designer and user experience expert.

On the other hand, they could have made zero visual or UI/UX changes, only updating things on the backend (performance, code optimization for future features, search algorithm, etc.) and people would have gone nuts because 1.8 “wasn’t enough” or “I was expecting X” or “my pet feature request wasn’t put in.”

Then the other option would naturally then be that they didn’t do 1.8 at all. They just stayed at 1.7… forever. Didn’t ever update it beyond that. People would go nuts because, well, software does indeed need to be updated for all sorts of reasons (performance, security, reliability, scalability, external API changes, bugs, new features, perceived value, marketing, etc.)

So, it’s inevitable and necessary that software gets updated. (Which I suppose is the answer to your “why at all” question.) That it wasn’t updated in the precise way some individuals wanted is always going to be the case, especially since Roon Labs is on record as calling Roon “opinionated software” (I love that term).

There’s a poll on this site with hundreds of answers and the great majority see 1.8 as positive or very positive, so it seems the vocal minority is skewing overall impression of this update.

In the end, 1.7 wasn’t perfect. Neither is 1.8. Neither will version 4.3 or any other version. Version 1.8 is progress, for some it wasn’t good progress, but for most it was either positive or very positive. I hope the Roon Labs team is happy with this level of satisfaction and are ignoring the fringe that seems to have taken personal offense at a software update.

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57

? Recommended Albums For You is now just below the album tracks. They moved your cheese, but the cheese is still in arms reach. True, “in your Library” is replaced with a snapshot of the artist’s discography, but that’s similar in kind.
Is there something about what you are seeing here that is fundamentally different than what you had before? I’m curious how you see this feature as changed.
There are more albums now, but that may be because they could only fit two next to the tracks?

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58

I would say the level of responsivness by Roon is off the charts compared to any other software I use, especially in this price range.

People always talk about the price of Roon as if it’s exorbitantly high. It’s $10 / month, which is less than the hifi tiers of Tidal and Qobuz (or any one album if you’re purchasing music directly), and how responsive are they to their users? Do they have an active community where the CEO, CTO, and many other senior people respond directly?

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59

I don’t disagree with you but I want to state clearly that I’m not touched personally, I’m challenging the direction of this release and therefore asking other users.

I can and will use 1.8 as I’ve used 1.7 and all versions before, even if there are downsides in my point of view. I do understand it‘s not my personal piece of software.

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60

Fair enough I’d say.

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