What do you like, and dislike, about Roon?

Roon Software Discussion
82

That is because Roon is not web based but built like a video game.

83

I love:

  1. The metadata, of course. I use to thumb through my AllMusic Guides continuously in the 90s as I discovered new jazz artists and figured out the jazz genogram. Roon’s artist, album, and composition AllMusic Guide/TV integration is great.
  2. It’s snappy on my computer.
  3. I like that the minimized view doesn’t give up much, except the sidebar, compared to the full screen version.

I do not like:

  1. the Roon tv display will cause burn in with extended use because of its design. Other streaming services, like Spotify, have solved this.
  2. Its price.
  3. It’s limited streaming services. I believe that if Roon was opened up to more casual listeners as a front end to their cluttered streaming app designs (Spotify) that it would draw a significant number of new users that a price drop could occur. Spotify and Apple Music (and its beloved classical app) have significant user bases, as two examples.
  4. The split between Roon server and Roon endpoints. I think this is another major drawback to adoption. This made sense for users with large local collections and may still have a place for those users. But if you only link to a streaming service, you should not need a roon server. A cloud-based solution would make more sense.
  5. Add audiobook service integration.
  6. Add podcast integration.
  7. Tracking composers (songwriters who are not performers) and producers needs a lot of work. Tidal has figured this out and it’s great for discovery.

Now, I know most long time Roon users may react in horror to this. “Spotify users!!!??? Man the gates! Non-music services? How dare you!” But, you can see, combined, this would greatly expand Roon’s user base and could significantly drop prices.

84

Are you aware that Roon has approached other streaming services Spotify and Apple included with no success.

For Roon to do it’s thing it keeps a copy of the streaming service catalogue and sync’s frequently. Apple, Spotify et al will not grant that access so no go

It’s been discussed ad nauseum

85

In that case, Roon could at least provide a proper interface to route the audio stream from the Spotify or Apple Music apps to the Roon zones.

86

Roon, as far as we have seen, will not compromise the “Roon Approach” , they buckled over a few issues after the Harman acquisition eg Internet always on and Folder Browsing was “over dead body stuff” but to move from the total integration of a streaming service is so core to Roon I don’t see an restricted API approach ever happening

Does your streamer not have an app that supports Spotify etc. Mine is a Naim so if I want to I can stream that way.

87

A few gripes:

a) corporate culture has, over time, shifted from opinionated to arrogant. With it seems to have come a nosedive as far as both code quality and innovation is concerned…

… which leads us to

b) my library is entirely local, a bit north of 100k tracks, running a ROCK Nucleus+, and the slowdowns are constant. I don’t care if you used to work for Bloomberg, tens of seconds to load an album with that much computing power, memory and memory bandwidth available is unacceptable, and anyone with a modicum of remaining humility would hang their heads in shame over it.

c) Following the pivot to Celine, sorry, Valence, local seems to have been left to rot. The justification was that many of the features couldn’t work with comparatively small local libraries (which is fair, not everyone had the full Celine Dion discography locally back then). That’s all fine and dandy if your priority is Nugs integration and your idea of innovation is Drops, less so when Plex offers a half dozen variations of that thing you’re thumping your chest about, using only local tracks.

88

Almost any streaming devices can use Spotify. Unfortunately, however, audio normalisation and crossfading are often missing. Things aren’t looking so good with Apple Music. It’s only supported by a few devices.

89

I think corporate culture has shifted in the exact opposite direction. There shall be no opinion but that of Roon has opened up to more input and a focus on fixing problems, such as memory leaks, scrolling etc.

I think the fundamental problem with Roon is library Vs non library. But to fix that would be to rewrite everything. Can’t see any commercial sense in doing that.

90

There shall be no opinion but that of Roon has opened up to more input and a focus on fixing problems, such as memory leaks, scrolling etc.

I fear you overestimate the attention being given. See @mjw ‘s recent take, for example… just because a suit really wanted folder browsing and made the unthinkable impossible inconceivable happen doesn’t mean anything has changed beyond that, quite the contrary: the more opinionated seem to have more time to explore things more valuable to them, and what’s left appears to be what was causing inertia… my personal canari for something having changed with RoonLabs’ attitude is the day it becomes consistently possible to export all locally-stored files to an external drive (let alone one directly attached to the NUC, and not on the controlling computer) without Roon stalling or crashing.

In any case, there’s about a million little and bigger things that could’ve, and maybe, should’ve been done and never were, both user-facing and not.

I think the fundamental problem with Roon is library Vs non library.

I’m not sure about Lyrion, but PlexAmp is library-driven, and while it doesn’t have the interconnection via personnel that Roon does, it offers “sonic similarity” as a workaround, which, in my case and in terms of daily use, I find a more useful metric than knowing whom the sax player on track 7 is.

91

I said opinionated, not arrogant. And, I don’t see this as a bad thing. Indeed, your post is opinionated because it firmly reflects your usage and experience. But the gist of my post is that Roon isn’t so different to many businesses. But what is apparent is that they listen more than most. However, listening doesn’t mean doing everything in Feedback > Feature Suggestions.

Consequently, I agree with @ged_hickman1 because Roon’s recent focus has been on getting the application working better rather that adding major features. This is welcome.

I’m about to find out how Roon stands up without streaming services integration as I just cancelled TIDAL. Unlike you, I like to check track credits. Indeed, I discovered a gorgeous album this afternoon as a result of checking a vocal credit.

Incidentally, I don’t believe a suit (Harman) had anything to do with folder browsing which really is old news anyway. Likewise, Drops is not part of Roon and doesn’t consume any of their resources. I already said why nugs is a good thing whether you use it or not.

92

I said opinionated, not arrogant.

And you described behaviour going exactly against what @ged_hickman1 was describing. “Opinionated” is beyond welcome as far as I’m concerned, and it’s something I like(d) quite a bit about Roon, because it used to be a driver for innovation and quality, not complacency.

Unlike you, I like to check track credits.

I didn’t state I didn’t do it, I stated I found algorithmic matching to often be more useful.

Roon’s recent focus has been on getting the application working better rather that adding major features.

Music to my ears.

Incidentally, I don’t believe a suit (Harman) had anything to do with folder browsing which really is old news anyway.

It’s one (extreme and good for those who care about it) example of RoonLabs backtracking on a long-standing opinion. IIRC the sequence as it was presented, the whole thing sounded a bit like the founders were made to eat a bit of crow, of the “go reconnect to your audience”, “aaah, folder browsing…” variety.

Drops is not part of Roon and doesn’t consume any of their resources.

It’s great to hear that software edited by RoonLabs doesn’t consume any of Roon’s ressources. We of course agree on Nugs.

93

It was if I recall in the “message from the founders” post , the way it read was they were told to fix 3 things double quick

  • Internet Always On
  • Folder Browsing
  • Box Set Management

all 3 were specifically named in the post

2 out of 3 isn’t bad but we’re still waiting on Box Sets. I have abandoned Roon for box sets , it causes more issues than it solves ALAS

94

Here it is…

95

What do I like about Roon,… Well, I really like that it has two O;s in it. I think that’s really special. What do you think?

96

That may explain why pinch-to-zoom is not currently available, but it does not really answer the user-experience problem.

Roon contains a lot of dense textual information, such as credits, reviews, artist bios, album metadata, settings, signal paths, and so on. On a tablet or phone, being able to quickly zoom in for readability, or zoom out for a better overview, is not a luxury feature. It is basic usability and accessibility.

For me, the lack of overview caused by the inefficient use of screen real estate has been one of my biggest complaints since day one. It leads to far too much scrolling, and after ten years of using Roon, that complaint has not gone away. The interface still does not feel good in that respect. For Example, one of the main things I look at for recognising an album is the tracklist, not being able to see the full tracklist in one view without scrolling is absolutely terrible to me, zooming out, ot being able to customise things would help a lot. Roon should focus on these basic points for once and for all.

I understand that Roon’s UI is not web-based, and that its custom graphics engine may make standard OS-level zoom behaviour harder to support. But from a user’s point of view, the technical implementation is secondary. Most apps, regardless of how they are built, are expected to respect platform accessibility conventions or provide their own equivalent.

So I think the fair request is not necessarily “make Roon behave like Safari,” but rather: please give users a practical way to scale text and interface elements dynamically, especially on touch devices. A global font-size setting would already help a lot, but it is still not the same as being able to zoom in temporarily on a specific screen.

The fact that Roon is built differently explains the limitation, but it does not make the limitation acceptable. Combined with the almost complete lack of UI customisation, it makes Roon feel increasingly outdated.

97

I’ve been using Roon consistently for a couple of years. I’m less of an audiophile in the perfect sound recreation sense, but love and constantly listen to music and use my local library only. This is my take (in no particular order)..

Likes:

  • It works with all my old Sonos gear out the box. Nothing else (at the time of setup) did. Not Plex, Navidrome, LMS etc (might have been me of course, but I’m pretty technical). Old Sonos gear is basically given away these days..
  • Library ingestion of newly added tracks is instant.
  • Muse
  • I’m always discovering new useful features - definitely check through the Mastery series at Roon Mastery Series - Tips, Tricks & Advanced Features Guide | Roon
  • The community!

Dislike / potential improvements:

  • Genres - appreciate there’s nuance to classifications, but some are fairly head-scratching which impacts:
  • Radio - I use this constantly but it can be a bit hit and miss. The ability to generate sonic analysis/similarity signatures for each file would be amazing to improve this feature.
  • Above could be aided by a more comprehensive api & plugin offering. The tinkering crew would build some fantastic options I have no doubt!
  • Linked to above AI integration for easy playlist / mood requests
  • Roadmap for features that are being worked on beyond early access
  • Two apps - appreciate it may have been needed before, but am sure there are more options to consolidate these days.
  • Option to use a fixed ip/port to access the roon server. Related to the above point, I could ditch Arc altogether, use Tailscale to access from the main app directly. Car play ppl would obv need a solution (and I’m sure there are others), but benefits to ease of server setup/access are significant.

Look forward to seeing what Roon has in store ahead..

98

I actually posted a big “24 hours of using Roon” post in a Discord I’m in and I’ll repeat or expand on some of it here:

Pros

  • No motion artwork: (Uh oh, big rant time, but it’s one of the things that made choose Roon) One of the things that chased me away from Apple Music was using it on MacOS and seeing the horrible motion artwork on many albums. The only way to get rid of them is to click a Reduce Motion toggle across the entire OS instead of just AM and I don’t like that I have to do that because it disables other things. The solution in Windows is to keep using AM in iTunes, and I feel like Apple is going to discontinue iTunes sooner rather than later. The AM Windows app is not something I like using, and while the Android app does let you disable the motion artwork, it’s also very finicky. Some of these AM motion artworks I have seen are AI slop monstrosities. There’s one Sonny Sharrock album cover where he turns his head to face the camera and it was really terrible. Even the ones that don’t seem to be AI, and are actually looping GIFs or whatever, they are just distracting. IMO the implication of these motion artworks is that still photography or paintings are a problem that needs to be fix instead of art, which I flat out reject. I don’t need George Harrison blinking at me from the cover of “Revolver”. I just want Klaus Voorman’s artwork for “Revolver” in its original form, thank you very much. Roon, and in turn Tidal, keeps my artwork static, no systemwide toggle or outdated program needed.

  • Seamless Last.fm use: I have been using Last.fm for almost 20 years now and I can’t imagine listening to music without it. It’s so useful to have that record of what you listened to on what days, and it’s second to none for finding songs you listened to, or all the songs you’ve listened to by a certain artist. The stock Apple Music app and any other scribbler have trouble working together on Android - It seems like Samsung kills background functions and it doesn’t matter if you’re running the official scrobbler, Pano Scrobbler or any other solution, eventually your scrobbles will stop. With Roon Arc, Tidal and Last.fm are just built into the app and the scrobbling just works. And I get to scrobble my own music library away from home.

  • I like the idea of having one program for my streaming service and my music library together. Spotify lets you do this but I don’t like Spotify as a company. Apple lets you do this in AM and iTunes, but I’ve already gone over how I think the Windows AM app is horrible, and iTunes is an almost 25 year old program that is getting long in the tooth and it’s gotten increasingly tough to use Apple Music seamlessly in. Roon with Tidal on the other hand is the seamless music library/streaming platform I want.

  • Can run on a laptop without having to buy a separate NUC (at least just yet). See my first thread in here for info about this. I was very grateful to know this.

  • Perfect for my needs. I used Lyrion for 10 minutes and immediately decided it wasn’t for me, but Roon is basically perfect for my use case

Neutral

  • The price: $15/mo is certainly something I’ll have to keep in mind. That’s more money a month than I pay for Tidal, and I want to wait a few months to get used to Roon before committing to the yearly subscription.

  • The editorial content: This was certainly neat to have, but to me it’s extemporaneous information and I actually turned it off. I mean no shade to Allmusic/Tivo, who content I grew up on, although I have visited that site much less since they let Stephen Thomas Erlewine go a few years ago. If I want to read Allmusic reviews or Wikipedia pages, I can just do that on Firefox instead of directly in Roon.

  • Getting used to the UI: I am coming from the ancient world of iTunes, so Roon is a whole different experience. I wish there was a way to make Roon more compact and, to put it in another way, iTunes like with album covers not in the tracks library. But I know Roon is a whole different experience and those are key parts of what make Roon unique.

  • The way your library and your streamer are mixed together. Let’s just say I want to search for Pulp. I don’t have the entirety of Pulp’s debut album “It” in my music library because there’s really only one good song on that album and it’s “My Lighthouse”. When I click on “It” in Roon/Tidal, it shows me just “My Lighthouse” which I have as a local file, and I have to go to “versions” to click on the full album in Tidal. This is in neutral instead of a con, because this is Roon working as intended, I think. I see why this would be a preference for other users, and even me at certain times. I think I’ll get used to this just fine, but I do wish this was something you could toggle on and off.

Cons

  • Not exactly new user friendly: Roon took me all day to set it up just how I liked it, and it was hard to find ways to edit metadata to display just how I liked it.

  • Metadata tagging: I noticed that a few of my Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers files were scrobbling to Last.fm as “Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers / Tom Petty”, and that is not how my metadata is set up, and I spent a good half hour trying to find the solution to just list them all as by TP&H before I found the solution staring me in the face in Primary Artist Links. Same thing with my Prince files: I keep them all as Prince for Last.fm reasons even if they’re technically by Prince & The Revolution or Prince & The New Power Generation, and it took me a moment to figure out how to simplify those tags. Even when specifying to Roon that I wanted to use the metadata on my files, it didn’t exactly do that. I just wish there was a simpler way to edit metadata as opposed to all the menus and options.

  • Speaking of which: One fun tale of metadata was looking through my library after the first go-around and discovering that Roon had tagged tracks from the album “Born After Saturn” by the British indie band Django Django as being from a live album by the American 90s hair metal band Firehouse. It took me a good long time to figure out what the heck was going on here: Every time I thought I had it, Roon reset it the Firehouse tracks. Ultimately I fixed this by replacing the Django Django files entirely. I presume I could have found the same option I used to fix my Tom Petty and Prince tags that I found later. At the end of this headache, I mostly thought it was amusing that this happened to Django Django, and not the Minutemen spinoff band fIREHOSE, who are also in my library and have nearly the same name as Firehouse.

99

I think that it’s much better than “poo”.

100

I’ve always lamented the moving of the queue button to its current location. It deserves a place of honor where it once stood, in the gaping hole about ¼ of the way from the lower right side of the Play/Skip screen. The other action button didn’t obscure it there.

101

haha. yeh, that’s most certainly wouldn’t sell would it.