LOL. Well, I’m not sure that I’ve ever claimed to be. 
I always laugh when people talk about feature sprawl in office products. For me it falls on deaf ears. It is the most successful software package ever created by billions. What ever they did, they did it right… not to say it didn’t have issues, but it’s success is unquestionable.
For some meaning of “right”.
“Perfect Roon” would be perfect for at least one user. Maybe a handful. Everyone has different wants. I have photo editing software on my PC that has close to the same subscription cost as Roon, is from a large company, and has millions of users. It’s not perfect either.
2 Likes
As the product manager for Office said
Everyone says they use 3% of the features but they all use a different 3%.
6 Likes
Whats the old adage. Everything before except or but is pure BS.
Perhaps I can offer a slightly different perspective and a cautionary tale.
I came to Roon after over a dozen years of streaming local music files via the Squeezebox ecosystem. For those who are unfamiliar with Squeezeboxes, the ecosystem consists of the Squeezebox devices, roughly equivalent to a Roon endpoint, and Logitech Media Server (LMS) software, roughly equivalent to the Roon Core. There are also control apps for phones and tablets, similar to the Roon Remote app.
Logitech Media Server does provide some very basic library management functionality and there are several third party extensions to LMS which give one improved library management but nothing anywhere near the Roon experience.
Over the years many audio equipment manufacturers jumped on the streaming bandwagon and introduced music servers and streamers, often dependent on DLNA and often with some half baked mobile app for control, but with no real library management. All these music servers and streamers were just begging for something like Roon and Roon has indeed filled that void.
So I came to Roon as a long time music streamer (my CD player has seen very little use over all those years) and a very different idea about what Roon should and could do. For example, compared to LMS Roon is much more robust, with a better streaming protocol (RAAT) and better library management tools. In short, I came to Roon looking for a better streaming experience and Roon does provide that experience. The “wow” factor of music streaming is just old news for me.
So while I all too often post about my perceived failures in Roon’s handling of metadata, on the whole Roon does a quite remarkable job. Can Roon be improved? Sure it can and it is to that end that I’m a vocal critic.
Now for the cautionary tale.
When I first started using Squeezeboxes the company was a small startup known as Slim Devices. As the Squeezeboxes grew in popularity and press coverage, Slim Devices attracted the attention of some of the big boys and was purchased by LogiTech. Many of us on the Squeezebox forums, where I was an active member, thought that big things were in store now that the resources of LogiTech were available.
And so it seemed for awhile as LogiTech quickly expanded the Squeezebox line of devices with the Touch and Boom but then as fast as it had begun LogiTech decided to go in another direction and left Squeezebox to die on the vine. There would be no more new devices and no expansion and development of LMS. LogiTech left it all behind and let Sonos and others pick up the streaming ball.
So please be careful of what you wish for, since as the OP very properly inferred, the big boys play very rough.
6 Likes
Interesting. But I don’t think that roon’s dilemmas are just corporate and choices over de-mergers into larger partners.
What exactly is the roon proposition? I have had Bing Crosby at Christmas and the London Symphony Orchestra sitting at the top of my roon recommendations for months. It’s February?
What is going on? I don’t have the feeling that roon is some advanced music AI hot bed. There’s a few things that I like. But there’s nothing new or fundamental going on. Is there? It’s all starting to feel like the smoke and mirrors of audiophile nonsense but in the application layer instead of the physical layer. Have I missed something?
1 Like
It’s all audiophile nonsense just smoke and mirrors?
I agree that Roon’s (self) vaunted AI is, to put it mildly, a bit misplaced. I would much prefer it if Roon’s put all that AI power to bear on metadata. I’d rather have lyrics available for all of the EXACT SAME VERSIONS of song than the current haphazard way lyrics are presented (or more correctly NOT presented). Oh and it’s a computer, use colors in the interface/text to indicate all kinds of different things. For example if the lyrics are “unverified” by a metadata provider than make them blue instead of white. Seems pretty simple to me.
My take is that Roon is betting on innovating something that is market disruptive rather than just being good at all its current features. I think, that they think, that is the only way they will grow geometrically rather than incrementally.
The issue with that is is leaves many users frustrated as they adopt Roon, believing something works to a given level, and then they find out it doesn’t quite do that, or not as well as expected. That’s not to say there aren’t many features that work quite well.
I just don’t know the solution as to how Roon could do both on a more accelerated basis. Taking money or a strategic partnership will put Roon on the LMS path. Not taking money means Roon’s current pace of development. It’s a tough one, without an obvious solution.
Could you elaborate? I can’t see that.
Very nicely stated. I wholeheartedly agree.
Actually no, I can’t, as I don’t have any idea what Roon’s next big feature is.
For a while I was thinking it would be their mobile solution, and it seems they’ve put a lot into their AI engine, but both of those have been done by others - so while useful, not groundbreaking.
I guess I am just assuming something else is being worked on, as while I did like the last update, it didn’t seem to be something that should have taken as long as it did from the prior major update.
That said, I think scaling and fixing performance issues might have been a big time-sink for Roon the past 12 months, and so maybe we will see some acceleration on work on the front-end now?
Wasn’t that when streaming systems like Sonos took off and all were thinking that this is the new way to do it?
Probably not. What fundamental/groundbreaking changes are to be expected when it comes to serving audio to different endpoints?
Cars were now built since over a century. There are no fundamental/groundbreaking new things to come any-more. Even the new electric driven cars aren’t new – electric driven cars where already there in the beginning of motorised mobility. Sure if cars could fly – but could they still be called cars any longer?
It’s the job of the marketing departments to make users perceive other/changed ways to do things as new/exciting while there’s in fact only evolution and trendy features.
Well, the value add is not meta-data, because without standards, surely no one has an answer.
Roon does seem to have an odd mix of features that is difficult to pin-down a value-add unless you are a “roonie”. Also, an unusually old demographic in the 50’s and 60’s if the polls are anything to go by. I would imagine that is roon’s greatest dilemma.
That’s my memory of the sequence of events.
I haven’t a clue but perhaps Roon Labs knows the answer.
A lot of technology is at a cross-roads at the moment. Even a venerable 100-year old industry like the auto-industry is having to face the extinction of a fossil-fuel model and assumptions about the necessity of a driver. Almost certainly a roadless, wheel-less, gass-less and driver-less future transportation model will also turn much of society upside down as well.
Is roon at the vanguad of that type of revolution in consumer audio consumption? Of course not. But some of us may be starting to feel as if we were sold that puppy.
Isn’t that is why roon does the disruption of RAAT instead of UPNP?
But that isn’t really my gripe. I had assumed that roon would do the disruption higher up in the application layer. That is library management, meta-data etc. I was wrong.
Metadata
I think that for Roon there were many changes under the hood in their metadata cloud over the last months as many new sources got added (Tidal, Qobuz, MusicBrainz, …). As metadata is treated/stored/delivered in different ways from different sources, there was no possibility to do a simple field matching to integrate those new sources. A much more improved and clever way to match the data from different sources was needed. I also think that Valence has emerged from this efforts. But at the end of the day there’s still no way to display (additional) metadata for content were no (additional) metadata is available from the – available to Roon – third party metadata providers.
As already mentioned in another thread, the additional metadata (metadata beyond the basic set of album/track titles, performers, …) is mostly not understandable by a vast majority of potential Roon customers anyway because it’s availability in English only but this is not a problem per se, as those potential customers will either not get any additional metadata at all or the same English only metadata, no matter what player they choose in the end.
Library Management
What’s a users definition of library management?
As Roon never touches your files, you end up with the same files in your library that you started with should you choose to stop using Roon and as far as streaming content is concerned, it’s just gone. No tags or playlist created in Roon reflect to files and/or streaming providers. Is that management?
RAAT vs. UPnP/DLNA
RAAT looks to me like a technically superior way (over UPnP/DLNA) to stream audio content to endpoints. It’s one of the reasons why one – even the non English speaking one – would might want to use Roon.
That RAAT then fails to deliver with products of major brands (NAD/Bluesound, KEF, …) is a pity.
1 Like
Onkyo, Denon, Yamaha, etc. too.
But I doubt Roon has a leg to stand on, really. All the biggies want to dominate the home, both hardware (hi-fi and smart tv and voice assistant) and software/system. There’s really no place for Roon in that context. Third-party music streaming like Tidal and Qobuz will get squeezed out by the biggies (Amazon, Apple, etc.) who will undercut their services in order to sell their voice assistant. I assume Roon will have to align with one of them in order to survive; I just hope that it’s Alphabet.
By the way, everything comes around again. I just read that Japan is opening a dozen coal-fired power plants to replace the nuclear ones they are shutting down.