James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
94
Well, if only 18 users have this problem, then no wonder Roon ignores the issue. I would.
My thought is that a lot of the other issues that are mentioned are related or have the same root cause: those that have the I/O error that result in a report that newly added local files are corrupt; those that get messages that (local) tracks are loading too slowly and will be skipped, and maybe even those that get that message with streaming tracks, those that have page loading slowdowns, and everyone who has to restart the server software to get back to reasonable responsiveness. All of these issues can be caused by Roon locking itself up with useless processing attempts.
So those are the folks that may need to be made aware of this thread…
And what does make you think that if it had 250 or 500 votes, Roon would not ignore the issue? I’ve never been under the impression that the upvote of feature requests is of much importance, when Roon decides upon what to take up and work on…
The whole mobility client thing had had a ton of user votes during a very long time, and yet it seems that it only was started when it made a difference before the takeover… The whole issue with the one-threaded backend most probably is something which could only be resolved with a sizable project of redesign and reimplementation. I rather think that the threshold of user votes for this to be taken into account by Roon would be quite high. Theirs will be a consideration of economy, not one of satisfaction of long-term users, not even one of excellence of product or strife to overcome defects and resolve long-tern non-critical bugs.
Some years ago I had high hopes Roon would consider a redesigned and more performant Roon 2.0 server. Not anymore. Roon 2.0 never came along, and what did was another client app… I finally ended up convinced that our only means to influence in some very small way is to vote with our purse…
Maybe I should add that my pessimistic or even cynical outlook on this has been shaped by my experience with documenting and reporting system unresponsiveness during heavy backend processes years ago, in several occasions, without ever receiving any meaningful reply by Roon support. This always ended up being a discussion between affected users, with Roon staff widely ignoring the issue. And I am convinced that this attitude was a planned one, it was company policy. On this thread, as far as I can remember, this problem was acknowledged for the first time, and we heard straight from the horse’s mouth that there seem no plans to do anything about it…
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
97
Good points. They did move the feedback section well down in the forum and it has only a few lines so it’s not prominent and then the feedback disappears quickly because it’s replaced by some more recent thread.
Still, based on comments from friends who I have not shared my particular Roon issues with, Roon may be getting a reputation of instability and over-complexity to keep running. What gets me is that at least some of these issues should not be difficult at least to patch even if the underlying cause has a lot of related technical debt.
My problems solved I have ditched Roon. Back to LMS where I started many moons ago. It’s caught up dramatically. Had it for a year running in tandem now switched to primary use over last week and my system is now using less than 1gb. I have Plex on here as well. I can say I don’t miss Roon one bit. Not perhaps a solution but as I pay yearly I am not waiting in hope for them to fix their broken software it’s time for me to opt out again. Did last year when remotes were broken, but this is permanent. For me they have lost sight of what is important and become another corporate entity like Blusound. I will likely use my sub to give LMS devs a nice donation to keep it going.
The fact that feedback threads are not shown on a user’s forum home, is telling…
That sounds like a good plan… Will do the same…
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
100
Well, I don’t plan to leave Roon as in general I think it’s a fantastic product. My efforts here are about my concern that many of the issues people face are from a common or related set of causes and for some reason Roon doesn’t see that or doesn’t admit it, so users are wasting efforts trying to remedy what only Roon can remedy.
Three days ago, another user posted on your ‘feature request’ thread the following:
I tend to agree… There certainly are problems rooted in design decisions taken more than ten years ago… There probably is no easy solution to the performance problems, when server processes like metadata updates or storage library updates drive one CPU core to 100%…
I am convinced Roon staff do see this, but they don’t wish to go into details and place their cards on the table, for not seeing an easy way out of the problem…
Or maybe they have long since begun work on a redesign and reimplementation, and someday we will be surprised by a much better Roon… If and when that’s the case, I will be evaluating Roon again and consider to switch back…
I have no plans too leave either having bought Lifetime, but I would like some of the issues discussed here resolved.
I have been spending more time using other solutions including LMS (which has been excellent in use), AssetUPNP with BubbleUPNP and Plex Server and PlexAmp all working with Ropieee endpoints.
While I have always really enjoyed Roon and continue too use it, there are other options that are now free for me to use.
I used both service’s and had about 30k of tracks across them. I have removed both services now and use an empty Tidal account for trialing new music and using the Listen Later feature. It’s very rare for Roon to run off and do crazy processing besides when I add new music now. I added a whole bunch of albums last night and Roon spent about 45 minutes being extremely slow and non responsive, but music playback continued, just adding more music took time
I do but I don’t have anything in my library from it // I don’t keep favourites and haven’t for 18 months. So I am doubtful this is responsible. It may be part of the problem but not the major contributor.
Why they don’t take the plunge and port to say SQLite I don’t know, surely a relational database with proper indexing and SQL based searching must be superior to a Value Pair db. The conversion per user probably is prohibitive
But who am I to comment, I’m just a retired SQL developer
I’m going to add my experience as a point of reference.
A few months back I found that Roon was getting unresponsive after adding a few Qobuz Albums or doing meta data changes. Rebooting the ROCK server seemed to solve the issue. My first attempt to solve it was moving my server to a more powerful windows machine with faster SSD etc. That didn’t solve the issue.
I started researching possible causes and the first one I stumbled on was regarding structure of my music storage. Particularly related to having a large number of albums in a single folder. In my case I have collected nearly 1000 dirt cheap soundtrack and various artist albums from used CD bins. About 10% of my entire collection. Back before using Roon and streaming without buying allot of full albums, compilations were a good way to acquire certain songs and to augment your library.
Now with streaming those songs are almost always available and other than a few specific soundtracks and compilations these albums aren’t adding much to my library. So I preceded to tell Roon to ignore both my Soundtrack and Various Artists folders. I created another folder and put the few compilations that mattered to me in it and added that folder to Roon.
Result: My Roon Server became much more behaved when adding content and doing a volume of editing.
Roon still has a handful of annoying bugs that cause me to have to reboot my server on occasion but unresponsive while browsing and playing music isn’t one of them anymore.
I still don’t know if the issue is all these compilations and the complexity they added to the Roon library or maybe many were unidentified, but it really helped excluding them. My unidentified albums count right now is 88 of 9500 albums.
So those experiencing this issue if you have a single large folder full of soundtracks or various artists albums try temporarily excluding that folder from Roon to see if it helps. This would be good information for Roon staff.
Simply put your particular folder(s) in the ignored path field in your storage definition. This is what mine looks like:
Important: as long as you DON’T clean up deleted files in Library Maintenance it will retain manual meta data changes and matches on the albums if you decide to put them back in your collection by removing the ignored paths.
Jeff appreciate you adding your experience to this thread and what worked for you.
Though most of us are pretty experienced IT users and administrators with 20 years of running digital libraries under our belts. Our libraries are generally well managed and laid out (we have discussed this and made changes as well) and we mostly use other services as well as Roon (LMS, Plex, AssetUPNP to name a few) and only Roon has issues like this.
Now that Roon has come back and said it’s by design, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way through this for us, but to suffer or leave the Roon ecosystem. Some of already chosen the latter and some of us are grinning and bearing with it.
My library is very well curated and I’ve been a software developer for almost 40 years.
My point is the meta data process that stalls out roon was alleviated for me by simplifying my library by reducing allot of compilations and unidentified albums. I thought this would be helpful for Roon staff and in the meantime help others get more out of their current Roon experience. It’s easy enough to try if a person has allot of compilations.
There has to be something that makes it worst for some and not a problem at all for others.
Sorry Jeff my point was we have pretty much all followed the Roon suggestions and it doesn’t make a difference and after 7 month’s from this ticket being raised Roon came back with it was designed to work this way.
I guess we have to understand that decisions taking during initial development come back later and cause issues. This seems to be one of those cases
For me removing my Streaming libraries helped a lot, but for software designed to augment Local and Streaming libraries that seems strange
I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. This issue has become a real problem within the last 6 months for @anon77144803. The process that is causing the issue and when it runs is by design as indicated by Roon staff. Assuming it’s a problem created by decisions during initial development is a guess.
Having used Roon pretty much since it became Roon, I’ve seen performance really only start degrading once v2.0 came out. It’s been so long now v2.x performance has just become normal for me now.