First up it is important to acknowledge a number of factors at play with users:
- No server system is ever likely to meet the individual requirements of everyone
- Organising classical albums is a nightmare, not help by confusing meta data everywhere
- Roon is a developing system so will improve meaning the cons below are hopefully only temporary
So the biggest Pros for me so far are:
- Most of the editing done on Sooloos has come through to Roon
- Information on artists, composers etc is easily accessible for those albums having the links
- The options to choose from tags, artists, composers etc is great
- The search engine is generally (but not always) good – better than Sooloos
- The hardware requirements are not expensive, are flexible to allow for a variety of budgets and, best of all, are relatively simple so the KISS principle applies
- The potential is there to achieve the highest possible audio quality (dependent on hardware, not software)
- An opera will play all discs in the set if they are merged and similarly will play all merged albums in any set
- Back up facilities are good
- The developers are available to assist users and are as anxious as the rest of us to improve Roon to be as user friendly as possible
- The Roon community is a helpful place
The main cons for me currently:
- Editing is not intuitive or as easy as it was with Sooloos – the lack of copy and paste facilities require extra typing (with added typos for me) and some editing, like that in tracks, is not available within Roon
- Other editing seems to have bugs as choosing preferred options does not always alter the data (this could reflect my ineptitude but, if that is the case, it means the instructions are not as intuitive as possible)
- Only half the albums in my library have those nice links to artists, composers and compositions
- Random play/shuffle facilities are crude and hard to find. And it seems that even when one has album tracks randomly selected, trying to move to the next track does not move play out of the album playing but merely chooses another track of the same album – a major annoyance as the move for another track was made in the first place to move away from the music being played in that album to another in the selected focus
- A very minor irritation for me is the ineptitude of tags sometimes chosen by Roon. Sometimes there are far too many and a few are completely wrong. Editing those chosen by Roon is a chore I’ve given up on, preferring to use the personally inserted tags.
- A few times, while using Roon, this PC has hung. To date there seems no repeatable reason and could be as much a fault of Windows 7 (64 bit) as much as Roon but one can expect any program used with W7 to be programmed so it is stable.
The caveat on all the above is to appreciate the complexity of what Roon is trying to achieve and to be pleased with success to date while looking for even further improvement for the future.