What is Roon? My thoughts

@Mike_O_Neill Depends. If one isn’t interested in tagging, it’s definitely an advantage to let Roon do it.

But if a person has a curated library and wants to continue curating it personally (and there may be various reasons), then no. Roon won’t let you 100%.
And when you don’t accept what Roon proposes and try to impose your metadata, then the problems begin.

Another thing: I don’t agree with the crowdsourcing of metadata (like the images of artists in Valence). They already exist outside Roon (example Musicbrainz).
It would also bind you to Roon and if one day you wanted to change players or Roon would disappear, all this work would also disappear leaving you with “empty” music files of metadata.

As I said, in this case the solution would be simple: let Roon read ONLY your files

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I don’t tag. I’m not interested in holding local files.

I have about 500 CDs of local content, but stream pretty everything I listen to.

I don’t have the time to tag, or update metadata. That’s what Roon and Qobuz do for me.

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Roon is not a metadata editor, it allows a minor adjustment of metadata , not full blown curation as we are discussing here.

I have gone the full blown curation route especially on my classical albums , 99% have Compositions, Movements and opus/catalog numbers , Orchestras etc so i am not unaware of what you are suggesting

My reasons are like yours, come the day Roon fails , or indeed Tidal as that would devalue Roon massively for me, my JRiver library will be as up to date as possible.

The curation was done mostly pre-Roon, would I have done if Roon was around , there’s a question.

Crowd sourcing I too don’t agree with, I actively used SongKong but the results were sketchy for classical albums not because of the (excellent) software but because of the data source.

Now with streaming I add very little to my local library so grooming has dropped considerably

It’s a fascinating debate

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I suspect the genres of music one prefers drives requirements and preferences for music management.

The vast majority of my listening is electronic.

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As a long time jazz listener my metadata approach and needs are slightly different than those for classical music, opera and popular music. For me good metadata would include:

All the musicians who performed on each track, with working hyperlinks within Roon

Recording information, such as producer, location, date and possibly recording engineer

As an example of what I’m looking for in the way of metadata just look up Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue recording. Roon’s screen is filled with all the information mentioned above and hyperlinks galore.

Now as an example of Roon falling way short on metadata look up almost any new jazz release on Tidal or Qobuz. The new release by Pepper Adams “Live at the Room at the Top”, states right on the cover that it is Pepper Adams with the Tommy Banks Trio and yet the credits in Roon don’t even mention Tommy Banks. This is just awful and Roon provides no additional metadata other than what one would get by using the native Tidal or Qobuz app/player. Going forward Roon needs to address these issues, which is why I suggested a bit of crowd sourcing. Or at least more hyperlinks to Internet sources of metadata, such as the record label site, Discogs, Wikipedia, etc.

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I have mixed reactions to your take. I get what you are saying about the influence of marketing, That comes from the consumerism culture.

Artist vs. Performer… I think this is a positive. If music “performing” is such a rote thing that the individuals don’t matter, we can call them performers. But if they are interpreting and adding their soul and personality, I think “artist” is apt and respects their dedication to the craft.

But most of all, Music has always been cultural and social, from its very roots. You are saying it like Roon is losing its way by featuring pictures of the artist etc…. I would go the other direction, I think Roon needs to amplify in this direction… more pictures per artist (i think underway), community reviews, more biographies, more backstories, liner notes, etc. Music IS a culture, yes. That is not marketing in my view.

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We should have informational tags on our user names in this forum to say whether we are primary local, mixed, or primary streaming. The points of view often align towards that breakout. Full streamers point to challenges with integration, playlists, and features vs. the native apps. Full local are rightly looking at meta-data and future proofing their hard work and collections.

I think most Roon users are 80% happy and that is not going to change. If your needs are relatively simple and Roon meets it 95%, well, you probably don’t have a case to buy Roon and you drop out. If Roon falls below say 70%, you get fed up and leave to a solution that meets your particular needs better. So the 80%-ers are here, passionate, and desperately want to move to 90 or 95% happy, which may or may not happen.

I am not making a point, just an observation and advice to myself to be happy with the 80%. It’s often enough. With the exception of those facing significant playback issues, which i occasionally have…. My sympathies, that is a tough spot.

(All the percentages are made up just for discussion, don’t read too much into them)

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Roon themselves say the forum users are not representative of the, I believe approaching, 400k users. So we may chat amongst ourselves but not necessarily be chatting about the path that Roon is interested in.

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“Also notable is that while almost all Roon users do have a local files library, the majority has under 1000 albums, and a nontrivial % is under 400 albums.”

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Yes, that’s true. Still, it’s always been my suspicion that Roon has sh*tty change control and bug tracking software, if any at all.

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To maintain software with compute intensive core across many OS platforms and versions, remotes across many platforms and versions, interface with two major streaming services, and integrate with hundreds of third party electronics devices, and changing music formats (MQA whether you like it or not, multi channel, etc)… i don’t see how they could survive without tight controls.

It’s been my suspicion that their priorities don’t align with mine! :slight_smile:

Ever notice how bug riddled and regressive the Roon Builds are? I rest my case. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Again, lots of great thoughts and discussions. We don’t always need to agree, but facts should play the basis for all further thoughts.

@ged_hickman1 @Danny only elaborated that it is now heading towards 500,000 or even 1,000,000 customers. But he is not in marketing and can only present the high customer growth rate that makes even 400 error reports seem tiny.

@Daniele_Piancastelli and @Mike_O_Neill come from the same stable as me. We feel the need to not be chained and also want to tag freely. One is already done with it because there is AllMusic, the other wants to move on and correct mistakes. Only at the moment when Roon comes into play does it become clear who wants to continue working and how.

Here the Roon community divides into curators (everything still gets the personal touch) and music lovers who are grateful that this labor-intensive job is gone, even if Roon makes/passes on mistakes and AllMusic shows weaknesses across the board.

It would be interesting to see what happens to a curated local collection when read in offline without metadata enhancement. Maybe there is a routine to log in with folder/drive disabled, then go offline, re-enable the folder and never have anything but your own. Just a thought that hasn’t been tried yet.

@Mike_O_Neill is right when he says, then the good/complementary of AllMusic is no longer there either.

@Daniele_Piancastelli Musicbrainz is the most accurate source, but also the smallest and almost dead. Discogs, LastFM, Wikipedia and many others are more alive and more widely maintained. But it’s true that we can’t have everything only in Roon if we want to be safe in the future. Independent tagging without Roon pays off!

@grizaudio is already not interested in keeping local data and into this corner the music industry wants to steer us temptingly. The emergency plan is then the 500 CDs. My way was the digitalization and double solution once with more comfort and once in own fine tuning. Music services die faster than we think. I bring there 20 years of experience and two hands full of dead services. With Soundiiz and TuneMyMusic, that dying has become less critical now, but perfectly no collection comes across the street where the competitor lives.

@Mike_O_Neill do you also know Foobar2000 compared to JRiver? I think Songkong also suffers from the small source Musicbrainz. But it’s not a contradiction to improve an image or lyrics in the file and via Roon. So crowdsourcing is not bad per se, relying only on it would be unwise.

@Jazzfan_NJ Hyperlinks are the new approach that is flushing brand new players into the premier league in the Linux world as well. What used to be done by amarok clementine tomahawk is now flowing into players like Cantata or Lollypop. Just the last gnome player close to Roon, but only if there are not more than 50,000 music titles to manage. This is true for almost all players and management programs. However, we should acknowledge that Qobuz is further in the metadata Tidal. If you go deep into a genre, you will fail not only with jazz. Only with the well-known names there is a lot.

@RobOK good continuation of the discussion from a different perspective. This is how our gray matter gets to thinking. Unfortunately, none of us nor the Roon team remain free of errors in thought and action. Corrections and wishes will haunt us until the last music track we will hear in this world.

However bad Roon may or may not get, I would never use Foobar2000 absolutely ghastly in my experience.

Only one comes close to me and that is still a long way behind and thats would be LMS as it will at least play to more than the pc it would run on. I only want a headless server/client and never ever want to have the app run from my laptop’s. It’s the whole reason I used to use LMS it gets most things right it’s just slow and archaic in its management and needed way too much grooming for my liking. It’s tried to ape Roon with integrating streaming into its library more recently but it’s weak and you get too many duplicates with no notion of versions.

Foobar2000 and Roon complement each other uniquely in my experience. My teacher was here:

International is the home for knowledge here:

Of course much less active now, we are all getting older.

Here in the Roon community is still life!

I looked at years ago and ran away just not what I am after ever. I don’t need anything to compliment Roon, I use one app for a reason so I don’t have to juggle many. I also don’t use a pc like you do to play my music. Again not what I want it’s far to inconvenient.

I have never used, even installed Foobar 2000. I started to go digital, Discovered JRiver and used it ever since . I dabbled with all sorts most recently Audirvana Studio which I found to be the most confusing UI I have ever used.

The reason I use JRiver is mainly for video, but the Expression Language and the Rules Engine make setting up views you want a breeze. My views for Box Sets are a major reason for using it . Roon needs to fix box sets .

I never use the UI for playing , just maintenance. I use JRemote and Cambridge Audio StreamMagic based on views in MC server.

Music is virtually 100% Roon these days

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One aspect of Roon that we have not discussed is using Roon versus using the native control app of the various audio (and video) streamers on the market. For example KEF offers a simply terrible app to control their wireless speakers. No library management to speak of and barely functional interfaces with the various streaming services.

As long as the hardware manufacturers keep including these barely useable control apps with their streamers than Roon will continue to bring in new users once these users discover just how awful the manufacturer’s control app is to use. The cynic in me thinks that most high end audio manufacturers don’t even care about their own control app since they know that the end user will just “chose” to use Roon.

Roon is like capitalism in that it’s a terrible way to control and stream music except that all the other control apps are much, much worse.

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Cambridge Audio StreamMagic is actually quite good considering it doesn’t integrate Tidal et al as Roon does. Cambridge Connect. The predecessor was a bit shaky

It looks superb on a 12.9 iPad :smiling_imp:

I don’t think Roon should be trying to crowdsource metadata – the very thought of that is a nightmare. But Discogs and Wikipedia are both successful crowdsourcing operations, so let them do it. Just give us a link to the Discogs page for the album, and the Wikipedia articles for the composer and/or artist and/or composition and/or album. We know how to follow links.

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