Well spotted 
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Was thinking that myself. The very definition of irony. 
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I didnt follow the whole thread back, your post was the first I saw in the thread.
It’s not about expressing like or dislike, it’s about how you do it. Read above and see that much of the bad behavior are people that love Roon and have no issues.
I nearly agreed with you as that is what part of the thread is discussing, but the starting post was about Roon specifically.
I certainly agree with your posts regarding respect for the opinion of others.
I’m new in the audiophile world and started just before I bought my first speakers in 2014.
I enjoyed the beginning but then I saw a lot of toxicity. People were fighting about cables. Frankly, cables…I thought I was hallucinating.
Then I used my speakers and focused on listening and enjoying music.
Fast forward 4 years, I moved abroad and bought new speakers. I discovered Roon and I felt like a beginner who is discovering a new world, like in 2014.
Sadly, I found the same discussions as 6 years ago: cables, subjectivists, objectivists and now MQA lovers/haters. I asked on this very forum what has changed in the hifi world in the last 5 years. I was not disappointed.
By reading this thread, I’m a bit sadden. How can you be feeling welcomed and helped with so much toxicity. I think everyone before posting should put themselves in a beginner shoes. Learn with a beginner mind.
Reading about employee harassment is really shocking and I really don’t understand how someone can go that way.
So I don’t know if it is the audiophile community the issue or something else.
Now what is next? If rules must be enforced for a better environment, please go ahead. It’s a consequence of a few but is impacting the whole community.
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I find a four step approach to management and dealing with customers really helps:
- Ask them to do something >> GoTo step 2 if this fails
- Tell them to do something >> GoTo step 3 if this fails
- Punch them.
- GoTo step 1
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Maybe it’s partly that people expect a “mature” software to work properly, and are less likely to cut Roon slack when it doesn’t.
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A case for umbrage in certain circumstances:
Playing music is different from other computer-assisted activities, as it is mood-related. If you’re sitting down to listen to an album, or trying to run a playlist for dinner music, or a party, the music is part of the mood and the experience in ways that, say, writing email or working in Photoshop are not. When the music software doesn’t work, it’s screwing up the mood and the event. It can ruin an evening, an afternoon, or a whole day. When it’s clear that Roon is at fault—and Roon is at fault in those cases where any other software can play the same music to the endpoint—umbrage is taken, and it should be.
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If someone has issues with the product, it is probably worth considering they may already be annoyed and it really takes very little to tip them over the edge from being mildly annoyed to hating everything related to the product, the company and the forum and never wanting to have anything to do with any of those ever again resulting in a lost sale to fund further development.
Someone who is not used to some of the robust discussions common on many internet forums may well feel quite assaulted by what regulars may feel are reasonable if somewhat blunt replies - ie enough to drive a possibly trivially resolvable situation into a complete write off.
I have to applaud Roon for at least having the guts to not immediately delete hostile posts - in the end these are a form of feedback not to be ignored (but also maybe not having anything useful to extract either). I do think too many organisations refuse to accept anything but the most mildly and politely presented feedback - that may keep their forum clean, but I wonder how much they learn along the way.
If someone is deeply irritated about the product, then I guess Roon’s ideal outcome is to understand specifically what the issues are so they can decide what (if anything) they can do about it. Even better if that highly irritated individual can be placated and converted into a long term subscriber and supporter.
More money in the development pot benefits us all.
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I frequent the PS Audio Forum most every day. It’s remarkably different. There is the occasional vitriolic post that either gets purposely ignored by the community or someone, usually a moderator, will let them know that there comment isn’t appreciated. It’s very civil. I’ve been considering the differences in the forums and I think it has to do with the amount of interaction a user has with a product. With a Preamp, an Amp, and a DAC, once setup the actual physical interaction is minimal. With Roon, the interactions are very frequent. For some, it seems frequent use has transcended to something very personal. We seem to be caught in an unfortunate circumstance where some users are passionate and willing to participate with thoughtful and creative comments and conversely users who feels that they have been slighted when a feature or functionality doesn’t meet their expectation, whether that expectation is grounded in reality or not.
I’m curious to learn if anyone else is experiencing the same differences in Forum participation, particularly between a hardware forum and a software forum.
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I would agree. I spend some time at the PSA forum, and headphones.com forum.
Both of above are very civil, helpful and useful forums.
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I think this would all be moot if Roon just had some real customer service. These forums are a recipe for disaster if you let the general public take on this responsibility. I am one who is immensely frustrated with the way Roon works and more so with the non existent help from the company when asked. No amount of censorship or hiding posts will relieve that frustration. Roon costs a lot of money but the after sales service is the worst. The mods here are very fragile. (I mod 2 sites and I would never talk down to or berate users like they do here) Same with users that have no issues with Roon. They just love sticking it to those of us who do have some negative things to say! This place is sometimes like FB in disguise! Really sad for a product that is supposed to bring joy at ALL times!
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Can you give some examples of Mods doing this ?
Looking back at you posts, I can see that the issue of Qobuz searches remains unresolved. This must be frustrating, particularly as Support have been alerted on a number of occasions on that thread and nobody has responded.
However, I can’t see any other unresolved support requests that you’ve put in. You talk about drop outs etc. and other problems, but don’t seem to have put in support requests on these.
The peer support system that Roon Community uses is now quite common across many areas of customer service and can help resolve issues in advance of official support. Obviously people aren’t perfect and some do respond in a slightly disparaging way, but I’m afraid that we all have to take the rough with the smooth (within reason).
Might I respectfully suggest that you raise your specific issues via support threads.
Yeah I have wondered if the community would be better served if there was a dedicated site dedicated to users issues, and a separate forum for everything else.
I hear you regarding your frustration, 100%, as I spent months trying to have a stable music experience. It works now (knocking on wood) and for the last 3 weeks or so, I have had stable software and an excellent music experience.
There ain’t no need to sugarcoat it, when you have issues for a while, its just a frustrating experience.
I do hope it gets fixed for you. Good luck
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With respect, there is another explanation, @anon55914447: potential new users of Roon (like those about to buy a book on Amazon - perhaps a book advising against the murder of 200 million animals each day that’s 5,000 dead while you read this - for ‘pleasure’ maybe) are disproportionately swayed by the experience of others.
Perspective is important. If someone contemplating Roon sees swathes of negative posts from the self-selecting (and justifiably so) constituency that has (legitimate) problems, they may forget that the vast majority of Roon users do not.
Surely it’s OK to help provide a balanced view?
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I think you are being a little unfair to most users who post to state that they have never experienced issues reported by another user.
I had a persistent issue for a couple of years with respect to missing metadata when using Roon Radio. Often and intermittently, no metadata would be displayed making it laborious for me to attempt to add tracks/albums discovered via Roon Radio into my Roon Music Library.
Quite a few people commented that they had not come across this issue. I can’t recall ever feeling that any of these individuals were posting with any malicious intent. They were simply confirming to me that the problem wasn’t a common one experienced by many others.
Incidentally, although I initially had quite a few concerns with aspects of the new 1.8 UI, my problem with Roon Radio metadata was resolved (for me at least) in an update immediately preceding the 1.8 release.
Finally, at the risk of facing the ire of some members of this thread, Roon runs pretty much flawlessly on my system now as it did prior to the 1.8 release (Roon Radio metadata issues excepted). I say this not to assert superiority in any way, but to point out that I have a pretty bog standard Roon installation (Roon Rock on a dedicated Intel 8i5 NUC) in a reasonably configured home network, and maybe that is why Roon just works for me. There are a myriad of ways to implement Roon in a home system/network. Perhaps this variety goes at least some way to explain why some experience more issues than others.
Of course, I do have sympathy for those who suffer issues that appear to be inexplicable, and at times apparently unique to them. I also have sympathy for Roon developers who have to attempt to cater for the myriad of different Roon installations in their user base.
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Darn! I feel like I just arrived when the pub was closing. I’ve been contemplating the OP’s question and many of the issues discussed here for quite some time.
I joined the forum 4+ years ago, and it certainly is different, in several important ways:
(1) It felt more like a club. Posters like Anders Vinberg just sharing a philosophical thought for all of us to contribute to. Debates got heated but rarely toxic.
(2) There was a lot of optimistic hope. Roon was new and there was reason to believe it would quickly evolve into each of our individual visions. Of course that would literally be impossible but you can see it in the energized discussions about how to enhance X or Y function and all of the ideas being shared.
(3) There seemed to be more “how to?” and less of “I have a problem with this” types of posts.
(4) There were a number of posters that I felt I personally identified with – sort of my “clan” here. Not that others were of an enemy tribe, but we supported each other in posts.
Things have definitely changed. The club atmosphere is still present in the fluffier threads but there does not seem to be a sense of this being a shared hobby anymore. More like the local boxing arena to get out your road rage (and yes I do that sometimes…later regret).
However, I think #2 deserves a lot of focus. After years of hoping for various portions of Roon that I feel have been neglected, I’ve given up on that hope. I have a sense that these enhancements will never come, are not in the direction Roon has chosen to head, or that they’ll simply be too late to benefit me. (Case in point, the Roontag function for importing…would have been great had it been available when I first imported my collection…or had it been available before I had redone all that work as within Roon).
I see threads like “we want your ideas for playlists!” being revived and people posting on them, perhaps not realizing they have been long dormant, and my first thought, unfortunately, is “what’s the point?”
This is not meant to pile-on Roon or take the side of those who who only post critically. I’m here because Roon is a part of my every day life, like my teenager, and like with my teenager, I feel like I have to stay committed to try to make things better rather than throw up my hands and walk out. What Roon does well, or uniquely, are absolutely critically important and I have built a vast (value-less) technology empire on top of its capabilities.
But therein lies the rub. I’ll invite someone over to sample my vast empire, but the first thing I have to do is reboot everything and reset the image cache. I don’t want them to see Roon as flaky. But it is. Luckily not flaky enough to make it unusable (or even close to unusable) but there is no avoiding the irritation and frustration that goes into paying for a premium product and getting a mixed experience. And it is mixed.
So that frustration boils out here in the forum. That said, I don’t think one can reduce the increasing level of vitriol here to one particular cause. I think it’s multiple:
—the state of discourse in the world. Notably, political discourse in the USA, but just generally. There are few good leading examples.
—the pandemic hasn’t made many of us more tolerant or jovial.
—the growth of the Roon user base, sort of like a favorite restaurant that’s now too crowded.
—many of the forum regulars from past years are disillusioned and gone, and so the tone setters aren’t here. Some of the tone-setters that remain are those that enjoy the rougher discourse, or worse are not the most mature posters.
—Roon’s growing pains.
The latter deserves a little treatment. I agree that forum-based support used to look like it worked alright. It doesn’t look that way to me now. This post isn’t supposed to be about me, but just as an example, I’ve had a support request outstanding with NO response from support for 19 days. And this is after seeing a number of other posters with similar or the same issues also not get anywhere with the issue. Roon’s seeming (and I underline “seeming”) refusal to acknowledge the issue reinforces the belief that the forum is now overcrowded and you have to shout to be heard.
That said, I will end with this. I still feel just as I did when I wrote this last year:
PS if you read this whole thing you get a gold star!
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