Forums like this are most commonly used to vent frustration, for whatever reasons, but I’d like to take a moment and thank the Roon team for, well, ROON!
I’ve been a Roon subscriber for a year-ish; migrated off an old Squeezebox hosted on my gaming PC. As the Squeezbox became harder to use, discovering Roon was a godsend.
My needs are meager compared to many, but Roon WORKS for me.
I don’t have a gigantic library, or a particularly complex music ecosystem. Roon runs on my Win10 PC, streams to various nodes in my home, and just works.
I love listening to music. Less so futzing with metadata. Roon makes it easy to find and connect to my music, then get it playing; the MUSIC makes me happy. For me, I want software that lets me get the music I want playing, then gets out of the way. The fact that I can use Roon to broker my Qobuz and local collections together is wonderful.
I’m a retiree from large-scale tech, and understand the complexity of software like Roon. Frankly, I’m pretty impressed it all works as well as it does.
So, why am I writing here? Few satisfied customers would bother to write, let alone even visit here. I get the weekly forum summary, see some of the discussions, and I want Roon and the community to know that Roon does work for some of us, that it’s appreciated.
My personal concern is fringe bloat; software “features” that are intended to satisfy a few, vocal power-users, but contribute to complexity, database and network traffic, and that most users will never need.
To be clear, I love useful new features and capabilities within a given application, but developers have to avoid the trap of diverting resources to satisfy a vocal few while missing the opportunity to fix bugs or develop features useful to the larger, often less vocal, customer base.
To Roon, I simply say “thank you”. You make it easy for me to enjoy the music I love.
To fellow readers (and this is rare for me, as I don’t tend to linger in forums) consider:
- If you don’t like Roon, work with support on your issues, or unsubscribe. No one is twisting your arm.
- If you have suggestions for new features, do let Roon know, and these forums are a means to gain broad support if your idea is well articulated and of use to a broad audience. But understand that while talk is cheap, good developers are not and your idea may be dismissed, shelved, or take time to code. Try to be OK with that.
Lastly, a plea for patience - Roon and in general.
While we’re all anxious to exit the pandemic toward normalcy, many businesses are seriously struggling to find staff. I see rants on reviews for restaurants citing slow service, when the one server trying their best to serve a space usually staffed by three is slammed. Patience and a warm smile, even a review citing how hard that person was working in the face of a challenging situation, go a long way toward us all getting along a little better.
Wishing you all a musical day.