Here’s what I wrote in another thread (https://community.roonlabs.com/t/1-8-the-start-of-a-move-from-a-library-system-toward-a-music-discovery-streaming-led-future), but my guesses seem more directly relevant to the present question of WHY these changes at all. Just my two cents of speculation 
So to sum up a bit, for me your answers are much appreciated and really help me to get a better view on the update itself and its possible background.
Thanks to all of you participating and keeping this thread very clean, much appreciated as well.
Eager to hear more feedback from you all along while our time spend with this release (and hopefully some good updates) grows.
Happy listening!
NOA
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Every year or so my local grocery store changes everything around. It takes me a while, but I eventually get used to it… This would be my answer to Why At All. Change for change’s sake?
I’m not that happy with it, because, a) I haven’t got used to it, and b) there are some fundamental things missing - like a link to Discover from left Browse menu. That one baffles me.
But I’ll also add I’m very surprised at the number of people that LOVE the new look.
Agreed to all points.
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Good catch @AndersVinberg!
I’ve appended my post with select “Sort by date” as the last step and updated the animation. Apologies for any confusion.
Roon is a project in progress. It will never stay the same. It is constant change.
You better live with that assumption. Roon 2.0 will be totally different to 1.8.
Many will complain again. That is the nature of change.
We feel the challenge of change with Roon more intense, because I think it is the most valuable part of our Music Environment. In realitity Roon has become irreplaceable for many. You can replace any hardware with ease, but not the brain, which happens to be Roon.
Maybe that is why we “suffer” the evolution of Roon.
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Thanks for your feedback!
Of course there will be ongoing updates for sure, no doubt, and I love to see those, even if they might take a while to get used to it.
The WHY here relates to the in my point of view somehow immature release given the game changing advertisements before, and the content of this release.
I can’t answer that “why”. You would need to work for Roon to get an idea of the “why”.
The journey from 2015, version 1.0 to 2021 version 1.8 was very interesting. I enjoyed it.
I hope you did the same.
I expect the same in the next 5 years.
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This version is terrible, how can I revert? First dark mode disappeared; it took me days to find out where to change this as it’s not iOS dark mode related, it’s a theme inside Roon … I hate it when the screen goes all white there for a while every now and then it burns my eyes.
Also “button clicks” are up. It’s poor U/X
Thanks a lot for that tip. Seeing Barber in a suit is throwing me off, though.
My live albums aren’t tagged quite the same way yours are unfortunately. I don’t have a release year set and I had purposefully split live shows into first and second sets, since that’s how I’ve always thought of the shows. I’d love to see Roon focus on live music navigation in some future release as they did for classical in 1.8. Nugs.net recently started offering a a HiFi subscription and I’d love to see integration with that service. Beyond that, a 2 or 3 column filter with a good old fashion list view would do wonders for quickly navigating a library with a bunch of live music. I think iTunes handled this the best over the years.
Has always been that way. If you’re unsure about a setting askin the #support category. It may save you a lot of time!
Sorry, I don’t understand what your problem is here.
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Before this thread goes into those details I’d like to remind you to please stay on track with the topic.
There are other threads and ways to discuss these kind of things.
Thanks very much!
If I have to click more buttons to get the same stuff done. That’s pr definition an issue. A lack of appreciation for a user from the vendor.
All my friends have more than 5000 albums in roon! I have 6021. Roon have a lot of clients with large collections. A number of countries are cutting the speed of the net to allow services and schools to have a web, either for work or for children’s classes.
Even without Covid, if the web fails they don’t have streaming. With files you always hear music! The quality of many online albums leaves much to be desired! And Qobuz does not exist in all countries
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Super surprised this devolved into a semantic (pedantic?) argument based on a single sentence in my multi-paragraph post.
The only thing that is more surprising is that 1/3 is now not a minority.
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I’m glad you understood that I was talking about you specifically, even though I didn’t tag you. Also glad you understood the overall point of my post, which was definitely those six words.
I have engaged in several discussions on this, but I’ll try to summarize.
The essence of Roon, to me, has always been about discovery.
Discovering my own local files, in the sense on noticing relationships. Like my old story of when Paul Motian died in 2011, I read the obituary in the Times, browsed Motians work, he is a drummer so most often he is not the album artist but he had played on seminal albums with Bill Evans in the 1950s, all the way to young up-and-coming artists. But only one album (i my library!) with Keith Jarrett, why? Browse Jarrett, of course he played mostly with Jack DeJohnette, I had just seen them live, there was a story of Jarrett and Motian not getting along. So I explored DeJohnette and found a similar profile, from early classics to other young artists. So I explored some of those old and new albums, and suddenly it was Monday morning.
Once we got linked up to streaming services, the world we discover got wildly larger. Discovery, baby!
The good news was that Roon integrated local and streamed stuff.
The bad news is that with such a vast universe, meaningful discovery became more difficult.
And I didn’t want Spotify-style “these albums are trending” or “here are some playlists”.
So Roon had to do a lot of innovation, and plain yeoman’s work, to make the original vision work, and deliver that vision scaled up dramatically. This has been going on for sone time.
1.8 is just the natural next step in this evolution: leverage the strengths of Roon, build more functionality on them, and present the ever richer information in a more digestible format. Take full advantage of streaming services, and cloud-scale information processing, to do that.
It is obviously not the last step.
But it is not a changeover. Local libraries remain important for those that have them. Roon’s unique value is integrating these two worlds closer. I thought it was well integrated before, but 1.8 shows a remarkable next step. In just a few days, I have found myself browsing widely with little regard for local vs. streaming, for in-my-library vs. not. Adding things to my library is a convenience, helps me not lose track of stuff I like. But it is not essential.
So I am happy they did 1.8, I think it’s essential for the continuing relevance of a product I rely on, I view it as a natural step in an evolution, and I’m not even slightly concerned with bugs and design mistakes, they will be fixed.
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For me I like the new look in 1.8, but it is a matter of personal taste. What is not acceptable is that the system keeps crashing and losing audio devices (just lost my Denafrips Ares II again as we speak…). If we had to choose between a stable operation and sleek looks I would rather go with the former and low res images/ugly fonts. Who care…
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glad to learn “everyone” doesn’t include me (although, being pretty egocentric, I already knew it nonetheless 
) and… ok: now I also know one must reply to every single word in your posts or just shut up
Great post Anders and I think it probably represents the vast majority view of users who have spent some time trying not to hate 1.8.
As you say, bugs will be fixed along with some faux pas.
.sjb