Is that really a problem?
As always with these questions, it depends. Or, to misappropriate Ernest Rutherford, âThe only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some donâtâ. 
For me, it was one of the main selling points of Roon that I can have a complete view of my library for productive artists of which I have (or are available) some releases on vinyl, some on CD, some as downloads, some in Qobuz, some in Tidal. (Those that only have a vinyl release are dragged into Roon by creating a fake FLAC with the correct tags).
This way I can choose to see their whole output chronologically or use focus just on particular media. Wouldnât want to be without this.
3 Likes
I know the thread is clearly Roon vs Audirvana, but I wonder why I donât see threads comparing to jRiverâs offering? I wonât touch Audirvana. So I am curious. Is it not considered serious or . . . ?
If Iâm way off topic, entirely possible, I will delete.
Thank you.
Iâm not sure what I am seeing, but if Audirvana can do this too, good for them. I was writing on the assumption that it canât as stated above. In any case just saying that I like the ability, whoever provides it.
1 Like
No, Iâm showing that Audirvana does Tidal and Qobuz, but local files are a different screen. I never noticed that before.
Ah, understood.
LMS will also do this âintegrated library viewâ of local files and services. But only for Tidal, Qobuz, and Spotify as far as I know.
Thatâs what was meaning , Roon mixes streaming and local in the same view AS uses 2 views , its not much better really than using say the Hardware app , StreamMagic or Naim etc which has 2 views . They come free with hardware
As a lifer Iâm locked in for the ride.
Until any competition software can offer the same features as Roon, and match or better Roonâs DSP engine (convolution filters for crossover) Iâm not interested in looking elsewhere.
I stream pretty much everything I listen to these days. I have circa 500 albums of local content but everything else is Qobuz. My preferences in music have changed a lot over time, so streaming suits me.
To date, no software I have tried comes close to Roonâs features, user ability, GUI or reliability.
6 Likes
That is how most players present that have linked in services based on the API. Roonâs deep integration is responsible for the âunified viewâ.
1 Like
Kind of itâs got no concept of versions last time I used it so itâs just a lot of duplicates shown if you have a local copy and add one or two different releases from streaming. You canât group different versions together either. I group all different releases together so only ever see one album cover, make the one I prefer the primary and just manually choose from versions if I want to play a different version.
2 Likes
Correct. Itâs certainly not Roon in this regard.
Unless DSP is applied, the two services are simply network audio transports, transmitting digital audio streamsâwhich are preserved via TCP/IP error checking protocols. Thus, by definition the âsound qualityâ will be identical between the two services, because there is no sound at all until the signal is converted to analog format by your DAC.
As to whether one service has superior digital processing, that should be easy to measure, although it isnât of much importance to me. I never use volume leveling and rarely upsampleâand the GUI and user experience is so exponentially more sophisticated and ergonomic in Roon that any minor gradations in sound quality (which would be minor at best) arenât worth the hassle. Audirvana is like computer coding before object based languagesâway, way too complicated.
I do wish Roon had Highresaudio available however.
3 Likes
How do you mean?
1 Like
I have other applications that filter by hidef. Roon will let you âfocusâ I used album â focus
Many users especially those striving for really high quality material are asking for highresaudio.com integration but obviously Tidal & MQA lobby is stronger 
Ah, the service! Got it
1 Like
So if you are really interested in software running your music. Check this out.
No gain here for me. But I do like this channel. Also a roon rock sounds better to me on dedicated NUC then all the rest. Just to bad HQ player software is not integrated. Would buy it if its in pad version of roon rock just to try it.
2 Likes
As long as only âyour Internetâ is the deciding factor here, thatâs fine. However, I strongly suspect thatâs not the biggest potential outage here. IF Roon is homed in AWS or any of the big cloud providers they actually have a recent history of large scale outages taking down massive swathes of services that are homed there. Google âAWS Outage December 2021â if you doubt it. The issue is NOT just âyour last mile of Internetâ it is the fact that Roon now requires an IP connection to a live centralised service end to end to play your local files. Iâm shocked that any Audiophile would be ok with this when so many argue about spending thousands of dollars to obtain tiny increments of additional determinism in jitter or some other marginal gain. This is actually a very big paradigm change and you donât have to be âoldâ to be concerned.
3 Likes