We’re not going to leave you behind.
At the same time, we will destroy the long-term viability of Roon if we do not continue to keep up with what is going on in the streaming world, so we have to give it some attention to it also. Peoples’ expectations of music software are rapidly changing.
Yes. It’s not going anywhere, and people who use files are not going anywhere either.
Yes. Some of the largest stuff on our roadmap supports both use cases equally.
No, but there will be some. It also depends on your viewpoint. I don’t see 1.8 as being primarily focused on streaming users, even though there are some features that have that limitation, but you may be getting that feeling.
Here’s how I would break it down–
1.8 features for everyone:
- User interface overhaul
- The focus feature on artist, album, and composition pages
- Improvements to classical browsing experience
- Listening Dashboard
- The subset of discovery features that make sense of in context of a local library
Limited to streaming users:
- The subset of the discovery features that are difficult to apply to smaller sets of content, or that, for some other reason, don’t make sense purely within one person’s music library.
- The ability to browse outside of your library on artist pages and composition pages.
We are trying to give people the best possible browsing experience for whatever content they have access to, period, and we have plenty of users that use both kinds of content. There will always be things that we spend time on that don’t make sense for files-only users, and vice versa, and some that work for everyone. It’s just the nature of the beast.