Roon Update 1.8 - WHY AT ALL?

I agree that Roon can do better with being able to sort and filter search results (and many of the other lists it presents ordered by date or popularity with no other sort options) and it’s been raised and we should all continue to raise it because these are stupid omissions that greatly detract from the UX and are (presumably) easily addressible.

Try your search in the filter here, it may give you what you’re after and enable you to sort by album name:

I think there’s 2 basic reason as to why this release happened, one functional, and one corporate.

From a corporate perspective, it’s been a long time since Roon released a major 1.x version. And in the corporate world, if you’re not developing; changing; releasing, then you’re seen to be stagnating.

From a functional perspective Roon have been under a lot of pressure to make changes from a significant percentage of the user community, namely: those with large Classical libraries and tablet/smartphone users.

And this second functional change accounts for a lot of the polarised opinions (IMO). I mainly use a laptop to control Roon, but I also have an iPad. Roon on the iPad feels much better than it was on 1.7. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ve been able to carry off the design language to desktop and laptop users. As many have noted, it’s more clicks, more hassle for no benefit and some disappearing functionality which to be fair they’ve already said they will reinstate.

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Thank you very much for your feedback!

While I can comprehend the first two reasons (leaving the quality of the update aside), I need a bit to disagree with your last point.
I use Roon at iPad as well and I find the UI not better than before.

It’s different, needs time to adapt for sure as always, but I cannot like the waste of real estate, the functionality that sometimes needs more clicks than before or has been dropped (e.g. track is on a playlist).

Need to admit though that for me functionality and proper information is more important than a state of the art design.

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In the garden, growth has it seasons. First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again. - Chance the Gardener, 1979

[I am not making light of your comment - I think it’s an interesting perspective. But it *did* make me think of one of my favorite Sellers characters, hehe.]

image

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You could well be right. To be honest my conclusion on the tablet has come from a fairly cursory look at my own and unscientically checking the feedback from other tablet userswhich seemed positive.

One hing is true though, they copped a lot of stick for the old phone/tablet interface (lack of portrait etc), and it would have been a big driver for the update.

  • Ease of navigation and vertical scrolling
  • Focus is way better and intgrated into more screens
  • Credits section is excellent for exploring relationships between artists, musicians and producers etc.
  • Music discovery, e.g. recommended albums is better
  • Look and feel modern, refreshing and uncluttered
  • Recent activity musch better for adding to collection for later listening
  • Generally smoother and more responsive interface

There are some bugs and I’m sure they will be worked through. But overall I am delighted with this release.

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Ok. Fair enough.
I didn’t know if you hadn’t seen it or it was worse.

Thanks for these details!

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Okay. I understand.

Of course, there were a lot of people complaining about not being able to avoid seeing the recommendations. You can’t win some times.

I’d say in this case the appreciable benefit is that there are more albums, and singles too as a consequence of reformatting and moving it.

But I hear what you are saying. It was a huge undertaking and a lot is different.

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It’s always helpful talking to each other with open minded honesty. Something that regularly goes wrong in forums.

Much appreciated from my side!

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Hello @Craig_Jacko,

From a fellow jam-band enthusiast, here’s how I handle the query of “Show me shows from y band from x year”.

  1. Go to Artist page ie. Widespread Panic
  2. Click the “three dots” button next to the favorite button.
  3. Click “View albums in library”.
  4. Click “Focus” and set the release date as you please.
  5. Set the sort order to “date”.

The “View albums in library” button actually takes you to the full “My Albums” browser, but with the artist pre-selected as a filter. Since you’ve already filtered by the artist, the secondary sort order will take precedent, in this case it will be album title.

Here’s a screen recording of ^

-John

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Now you are trying to move the goalposts… But go ahead and remove the neutrals, that leaves 34% negative/very negative - 1/3 of the sample population - hardly a vocal minority. Your conclusion is faulty.

Happy to see some from Roon team participating in this thread.
At least it has some recognition, obviously.

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I honestly don’t care about the WHY, I care about how it will affect my enjoyment of music. To that end, I’m very happy with the upgrade. It gives me new perspectives on my music and guides me to the discovery of new, related music that I may or may not like but at least I am getting that exposure. I also think it sounds better; an observation that an audiophile friend made to me without any prompting. IMHO, Roon remains the best music server program available and I am very happy that they keep pushing forward with improvements.

I rather suspect we are looking for reasons that are not there. Roon is a small company. The releases almost certainly reflect the current interests of the founders at any one time.

It’s just speculation, but it does look as if 1.8 prioritised the needs of those with streaming accounts on smaller mobile devices. But I don’t go along with the view that there is some grand strategy to shift to streaming and shrink an expensive to support local library user base. There are a lot of issues that have inadvertently arisen for sure but the simplest explanation is that it is just unintended collateral damage.

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Yeah, I liked on 1.7 how on the single album view (my most used) the recommendation sidebar - which also gave pretty consistent results for me - it gave you a peek of one or two albums and so made you want to click it open to see more. No scrolling involved.

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@bbrip too much MINUTIAE-- those who forget the past are doomed to relive it-- what would all these complainers do if ROON let alone TIDAL Qobuz A+3 or CDs didn’t exist–just enjoy it and I doubt most had anything to do with with the development of ver 1.8–again nice work all you ROON guys&gals–just meant -get over it-it is what it is.
I for one like it and am using ROON more than ever before. bobbmd

If this holds true than rolling this release out with that Big Bang announcement is, well, let’s say, brave.

Thanks for the feedback!

Good to hear, thanks for the feedback!

I hadn’t noticed View albums in library and View tracks in library, that’s very cool and very useful.
However, in my case I didn’t get the secondary sort order, seems random.