I’ve been using Roon for over 2 years now and love it.
When I joined the main reason was that I found digital music difficult to manage and engage with - all that music in digital files or available via streaming but somehow it became hidden.
Roon resolved that for me - the integration of local with streaming albums; being able to sort and explore by categories that made sense. I was happy to ditch my cds and honestly have only kept my vinyl for nostalgia purposes.
But I recently ditched streaming for good - for various reasons I won’t go into here - it’s early days but I think I am happy with my decision.
So this does pose a question - is Roon still worth it or is there a (cheaper) alternative that will do what I want or get me close enough at any rate now I am dealing with 30,000 local tracks but no streaming? My membership runs until the end of the year so I have plenty of time to investigate.
I will never ditch my CDs (ripped), SACDs (ripped), or hires downloads. Why? Because 95% of these were purchased for their specific mastering. Tidal an Qobuz, or any streaming service, typically don’t have the mastering I prefer. In fact, the usually have a mastering that is one of the worst.
Streaming is still pivotal to my use of Roon. Tidal is my only option until Qobuz discovers the equator
Should Tidal demise I am not sure what I will do
Roon has sufficient flaws for my musical tastes to make me think about continued subs
While I stream very little , I like to dig and investigate new stuff , I would miss it (maybe)
Roon’s 1.8 changes for classical help but still not enough for box sets a major gripe, I will remain Annual until this becomes clearer.
The analysis of streaming above is clear, T &Q are on shaky ground with the big boys . The big boys probably know what Roon is but that’s where it ends. I can’t see any of em buying Roon to improve their streaming offerings.
So Roon remains a niche product, and a good one , mostlyn
Streaming is still pivotal to my use of Roon. Tidal is my only option until Qobuz discovers the equator
Should Tidal demise I am not sure what I will do
Roon has sufficient flaws for my musical tastes to make me think about continued subs
While I stream very little , I like to dig and investigate new stuff , I would miss it (maybe)
Roon’s 1.8 changes for classical help but still not enough for box sets a major gripe, I will remain Annual until this becomes clearer.
The analysis of streaming above is clear, T &Q are on shaky ground with the big boys . The big boys probably know what Roon is but that’s where it ends. I can’t see any of em buying Roon to improve their streaming offerings.
So Roon remains a niche product, and a good one , mostl
Just as a matter of interest: whats still missing there for your use case? I actually think box set handling is one of the (maybe too few) areas that is now really a lot better.
I can appreciate this, I wish we had more transparency / visibility to the versions, but of course the labels try to hide that, not sure why. I think that the streaming services are subject to whatever versions the label give them and they surely don’t want to host multiple mastering versions of the same song.
as far as I am concerned I would additionally like to se a section „compositions on album“ or the like with a condensed view of works on the album. And the bugs in focus needs to be fixed where compositions are not shown for some albums (including lots of my boxsets)
@brian This was not the outcome of 1.8. All of the UI adjustments have diminished focus on the user’s own opinion while promoting the popular opinion. From default sorting of albums, to hiding hearts in filter lists, to not promoting hearted tracks in the top tracks under the artist bio, to removing user tags.
Please bring all this back. The strength of Roon was allowing a user to take the popular opinion as a start and put their ratings/hearts over the top to make it their music collection.
For so many reasons streaming is risky. Internet connections are very fickle in Australia and on holidays often not present. And as for the services, I started in spotify, went to tidal and got so frustrated i now focus on local files. Streaming services will come and go over the long run and licensing means that not all services have all albums. I use streaming for discovery at work but when i come home to the big system i just want certainty and my local collection.
I think the guys I’ll quote here were/are much more clever than we are, but look what they predict.
Thomas J. Watson Jr. of I.B.M. is said to have opined in 1943 that, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.”
2Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
Darryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”
Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977
“Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”
Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995
“Apple is already dead.”
Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft CTO, 1997
“Two years from now, spam will be solved.”
Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, 2004
Ballmer on the iPhone:
“$500, fully subsidized with a plan?!.. That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard”.
The fact that the „200-Track-Limit“ is gone and you now have all tracks listed under any given box his helpful. Also you now have the filter option at album level.
Example: I was just listening to some tracks from a 22CD Bach Complete Organ works set. If I am looking for all compositions of him on a given choral, I just enter a ‚defining‘ word from that choral in Album Filter, and I get those filtered and can select which one I was looking for or add all those to the playlist.
This was impossible to do before. Its probably still not perfect, but much better.
Its more the gaps in the composition identification. From the composition view I can merge those that can be merged and kill two birds with with one stone. Maybe if the metadata was more solid I’d use the album focus more.
Maybe it was myself saying this
I’ll started in the 80s as engineer writing assembler code and 640k were for machine code an unbelievable amount of memory.
