Roon vs Plex - a serious discussion

Roon Software Discussion
85

Hey guys,

As there are not much more statements anymore, I would like to thank everyone for your contribution.

Your statements made the picture and the comparison more clear for me.

At the end of the day, I will stay with both roon for home use and plex while travelling. Hopefully roon can implement such thing in the future. I’m in digital music since 20 years, and what I can say is, no tool is perfect, but already on a very high level. I would love if this tools could learn from each other to improve the experience near to perfection…

86

Me too. Used to use plex until I discovered Roon. For home use roon is INMHO the best. It’s true that PLEX can cover 90% of your needs, but that last 10% that Roon delivers is a complete game changer!

The only complaint I have with plex is the (now) inavability to my knowledge to use Trakt.tv, that’s why I’m giving Emby a try.

87

I scrobble to Trakt.tv in Plex using the webook.

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88

Hi! Thanks for the info. Read about this before changing to emby for non-music media. The problem is it isn’t bidrectional. Emby has a embeeded plugin just like VLC that works rather well

89

I think there was another cool feature in plex that let you delete seen media ALA podcasts. Tried it out in it’s day and I think I rember it worked flawlessly like most PLEX stuff. Just a pity having a great functionality and the solution from plex is pay a plexpass (rightly deserved) and a Trakt.tv premium account, and on top of that, with less funcionality than before. Was a big bummer for me, especially considering how many people I’ve recomended PLEX over everything else

90

It was removed as a casualty of all plug-ins being removed and Trakt.tv integration would be something that maybe .1% of Plex users would want. I don’t particularly hold it against Plex, if it’s important enough to someone they will pay for it.

92

It’s worth mentioning that Plexamp 4.0.0 has introduced remote control for Plexamp instances on your network. This feature fills an obvious gap and makes Plexamp an even better proposition for music fans with multi-room setups i.e. people who use Roon.

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93

Thanks for the info.
I have not really checked this new version out yet, but I will have to look at that for work

94

No exclusive mode still. So a non starter unless you like your audio resampled by the OS. They don’t seem to understand that this is fundamentally important to any serious audio player. No pi version yet so your stuck with casting or a pc to get it into anything.

Also can’t get it to work with another Andorid device it just hangs on connecting which is annoying.

95

I do wish you could pick a different audio output as you can on Tidal. Still makes a good remote office solution as long as you can put up with the odd is sounds :grin::roll_eyes:

96

I agree it would be nice to be able to select and configure the output device. That being said, if the vast majority of tracks in one’s library is in a specific format (CD in my case), you can set that format in the sound settings and no conversion will be done. As for the rest, I would not lose sleep over them, but then again, I don’t think I fit the audiophile profile very well.
So, unless someone already did this, I’m going to test Window’s up-and-down conversion quality by playing a few tracks in Roon to System Output, setting a different format for each, capturing the output in Audacity using loopback, convert back to the original resolution and see what the differences are and how likely they are to be audible.

97

It’d not just that, you get system sounds with no exclusive mode and other apps can interfere. If you dont mind that than fine but hardly a great way to listen to music without interruptions.

98

In Windows, you can mute apps individually in the volume mixer, including system sounds.

99

As someone who uses it heavily for both zone-specific crossover and room correction, Roon’s DSP engine alone is lightyears ahead of most competitors, including Plex.

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100

But I should not have to in this day and age. From a user perspective it sucks and you then you have to unmute them all when you want them for each device. It’s poor for any music app to not be able to do this which ever way you try and cover it up. They allow it in the full Plex app at least on Windows so no excuses here.

101

Not sure what you mean by “for each device”, but if those devices are dedicated, you don’t care about other sounds. If you use them for something else and care for system sounds, then you pay the price of being “alertable”, and you might as well complain that playing a track doesn’t mute your doorbell. Anyway, all I’m saying is that there’s a very simple way to work around that.

102

Yes there is it’s called exclusive mode. :wink:

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103

Plex is really not an alternative for Roon. I tested the sound quality (by hearing) and plex gives a terrible sound. Plex sounds dull and soft. And turning up the volume did not make it better. Roon is much clearer and more detailled in sound than Plex. I did run plex server and Roon on nuc10i3. Plex I did playback from Apple TV device. Both where connected to a Teac ud-301-x DAC. With Beyerdynamic headphones (DT1990pro)

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104

I agree that this is a big miss for Plexamp.

The normal Plex Media Player already has an exclusive mode so hopefully Plexamp will add this option soon.

I wanted to correct myself here because I’ve just tried the regular plex-media-player and there is no exclusive mode. It appears that Plex’s documentation for this feature is out of date.

There is no exclusive mode in Plex Media Player or Plexamp.

105

I’m giving Plex a go as an alternative to Roon. Having discontinued my Roon subs a couple of months ago, as ever I’m scrabbling around to find a good round the house solution. I have around 200k tracks, so it’s not an insignificant database to handle.

I cancelled Roon because of mainly connectivity issues despite hardwiring the core, using mesh nodes with Wifi 6, etc. It was just a lottery whether a complete track would play without Roon losing control of something. TBH, I couldn’t really be bothered to open tickets to try and debug. To my mind, it should just work, right? I’m no tecchy, but I know my way round a pc and basic networking, and the gear I have is OK.

So, basically, I love the Roon ecosystem and ethos, but it just became redundant as a usable platform, for me.

My main criteria is just to be able to play music round the house, without long delays or crashes or dropouts. Simple :slight_smile:

Now… So far so good with Plex, it’s scanned around 3500 albums and it’s playing rock solidly via my network, with rapid access. Album art is all there, and as I’m not a sound quality nut, it’s OK in that regard. No real DSP facility as far as I can tell, no biggie for me. I’m using either a laptop as a remote with DACs from Fiio, and, heck, it’ll even play DSF, goodness knows what it’s doing to them, but it’s playing them, lol.

And it’s free.

I’ll have to see how it goes as I increase my library size. Maybe there’ll be a major slowdown at somestage as I increas dbase size.

Roon, Ill come back if stability can be improved, via wifi to remotes, I just can’t hardwire the whole house. Let me know!! :wink:

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