Summary of issues with 1.8

Thanks! I realized the more serious problem is now for some reason Roon can’t find my storage and thus my DSDs!

Thanks for this list. There have been so many issues, it’s been hard to keep up with what’s already known and reported.

Having said that, have we lost the ability to Edit/Delete tags on iPhone iOS? Looks like I can “Add to tag” but not “Delete”. I can do it on iPadOS.

Also, I can’t use the the trackpad for scrolling on iPad Pro Smart Keyboard. I could swear it was working last night but this morning it’s not. Nothing wrong with keyboard as I can scroll perfectly well on other apps.

Thanks and apologies if these have been mentioned already.

Thanks for this info. Thankfully, I could find my DSD music because they all are tagged that way for easy searching.

I think the #1 thing many of us were hoping for is consistency across screens and better navigation (less clicks and scrolling and opening of sub windows for example) and this release went hugely backwards on all those. Did Roon have a continuity manager on the build?

  1. is the huge waste of space brought about by the header decisions. I briefly showed my wife, a non-user but a release PM at Microsoft, the Home Page and first thing she said was that the Library numbers data is interesting but in no way need to be so prominent or even first. If I go to Home on my 27" desktop monitor I’m presented with exactly eight album covers initially without having to scroll, open, etc. I’m not playing a numbers game - I could care less to see the stats of my library first thing, large and prominent, and “Hi, Charles” (oh isn’t that cute). I want to see as large a choice of albums to play as possible, with as little work as possible needed by me.

  2. Readability of large text bodies, or should I say non-readability. This one’s huge esp as Roon’s whole game now seems to want to be a sort of hybrid publisher. Fine, but at least make it easily readable. Like this forum is.

  3. Customization of menu items and themes. One user has already shown that with a few lines of code he can have a consistent highlight color of his choice, so it can’t be that hard.

  4. Ability to go to genres and just be shown all the albums under a particular genre without the fluff (essay, etc). Perhaps Roon needs to release a power user version that’s just focused on the basics of cataloging vs trying to be a repository of vast musical knowledge (it isn’t).

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Two points: (1) I’m surprised by the number of things that broke in the transition from 1.7 to 1.8. Shouldn’t a new version be a seamless update of the previous version that fixes bugs and doesn’t create new ones? (2) Where/how did the input of Roon users guide the development of 1.8? Nowhere in the five days of gushing emails about the new version did I hear the phrases, ‘users requested’, or ‘by popular demand’, etc. Instead they left the impression of an elite group of developers who know what’s best for the rest of us. Surveys or focus groups of current users could have reduced both the loss of desirable features and the creation of undesirable ones. We pay for Roon, so I think our input should be considered up front, not just after the fact.

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In the “Recommended albums” box on an album page (below track listing and “selected discography”), there is “NEW RELEASES” tab. This tab mixes albums with singles and EPs, seems like it should just be albums. On the Home page, you can choose either Albums or Singles, which makes sense.

If you just want to show your DSD albums it’s easier to use Bookmarks than Tags. Eg. Go to Albums, Focus, Format, DSD128, and you can then see all your DSD128 albums and create a Bookmark for them. I have one called DSD Classical and another called DSD non-Classical, and also a DSD128/256 bookmark too. I don’t use Tags at all.

I think vertical scrolling was the main feature demanded by users. Now it’s vertical everywhere. Personally, I like the horizontal album view because it created a different experience from the monotony of vertically scrolling on the general internet but it was something users kept asking for.

What are the massive improvements? I really don’t know.

With something as complex as Roon, people use it in different ways on different devices. I use it on PC, not mobile devices. I suspect that maybe a lot of the improvements are for mobile?

In what ways is 1.8 massively improved over 1.7?

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I agree with the slower startup and also that I miss the A-Z quick access, I used this a lot. Now I have to either scroll down or ‘focus’. One click was all I needed before.

You are quite right to highlight the fact that uses of Roon. I listen to Classical music (mostly) and the search facilities have improved dramatically.

Indeed, yesterday, I had concerns that some of my habitual ways of locating my music were slightly more difficult. However, today I,was just about to use my old method of locating a particular composer performed by a particular artist and then thought why not use the new way - which proved both faster and identified more albums than I would have located using my former approach. My appreciation for the improvements has actually increased.

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I read that you can type the letter and it will work that way, not ideal and haven’t tried it myself. Might help you though.

That is exactly what I used to do - but found the alpha search was actually quicker to get to an individual album. (I suppose this does depend somewhat on the size of your library - I have about 3,000 albums thus I did require quite a bit of scrolling using 1.7 once I got to the general location

I can see that the alpha method works, some what differently of course. I’ll realign my self to the new method :slight_smile:

@Paul_Williams , what is the new way of searching Classical?

Bring back the Favorite heart asap. I use this to filter on tracks

There are good reasons for putting EPs and Singles here.

  1. For some new artists, EPs and Singles may be all they have. Often, they’ll put out several Singles over years in between new albums. That music is interesting to know about.
  2. If you have most of an artist’s work, sometimes the EPs and LPs are all that’s left to be explored.

Perhaps “Recommended Albums” is just poor wording. There is a similar situation on the Artist’s page too.

Frank.

It should be there. You may need to search a little.

If you want to be more precise about which heart you are looking for, one of us can direct you.

I posted this elsewhere, but this is a better place for it:

Here is a partial list of things I liked about 1.7 that are broken in, missing from or made harder to use in 1.8. I’m referring to the desktop experience, as it appears that the app has now been optimized for phones and tablets.

  • The waveform is too small to be used as waveform. It’s just a progress bar now.
  • The sidebar with album recommendations and the artist discography is gone. You have to scroll or go to a different page to find that information.
  • The album title font is both strange and needlessly gigantic. The first song on the album is at the bottom of the page. This focus on massive headers is literal form over function.
  • The song titles, which you actually need to read, are too small. In fact, most of the buttons and text are smaller, but there’s a huge amount of empty space everywhere.
  • The current song title and artist information on the bottom left of the playback bar often has to be truncated because it shares space with the too small waveform.
  • Album covers are too big, showing too few albums on the screen, once you scroll past the huge headers.
  • Tagging is much more difficult to use.
  • Shuffle is limited to 5,000 tracks, which means it’s broken.
  • Focus uses “AND” for criteria instead of “OR”, which it should not do and did not do before, so bookmarks are broken. Focusing on “Jazz” and “Blues” eliminates all albums that are not marked as both.
  • Album star ratings have been removed from where they were most helpful.
  • The indication of whether a song has been added to a playlist has been removed.
  • Albums are shown based on “popularity” criteria, which has rarely has anything to do with the quality of their content.
  • The dark mode is too dark and the light mode is too light. Small white text on a fully black background is headache inducing. Especially when it’s interrupted by flashes of Electric Purple.
  • The “queue” button has been moved too close to the transport controls.
  • The album title (and other text) exhibits weird line breaks. Pat Metheny’s album called “Day Trip” puts “Day” on one line and “Trip” on another. For what reason, I’ll never know.
  • The distinction between albums you own and albums from streaming services has been made less clear.
  • Half of the home screen says “Hi Keith” and prominently features a huge graphical display of time usage stats. I don’t know who that’s important to.
  • Dates for albums: We used to get date recorded, date released and date added. That was great, given how many reissues and remasters there are. Now we just get one ambiguous date.
  • On multi-disc albums, you used to have individual links for each disc. Now they’re in a menu. So more clicks.
  • There’s a startling lack of symmetry and congruence to the visual design. It’s nice to have a mostly fixed place for things to be. A good analogy would a dashboard in a car. Roon 1.8 it’s just messy. Depending on the metadata received, the arrangement of items on the album screen changes radically. There are square images, big round images, small round images, huge round circles with artists initials in them. Orange backgrounds. Blue backgrounds. And did I mention the purple?
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