Can you name any product where the marketing hype lives up to the reality? Maybe I’m just naturally cynical.
If I go to my local library, and I admit that’s not something that I’ve done in years, I wouldn’t expect to find every book ever written - just the ones they stock. By the same token, I don’t expect Roon to know everything about every album I own. How could it?
What I would like to be able to do is to add information to Roon. I have quite a few albums that are unknown to Roon, and will probably remain so, so the ability to add a review or other data would be very welcome. That’s not quite the same as saying I expect Roon to find it out for me, but I suspect it’s born from the same frustration.
@DaveN I also do not expect everything, but the majority in the automatic would be much closer to the advertising promise. Less than I have myself is disappointing. Not all data transfers from Qobuz or Tidal would be disappointing…
Out of my own collection of 780 albums Roon only failed to identify about 20 I think that’s a good chunk and some of those can’t be identified via any music tagging software either and required manual trawling to find images etc and track names. Some much older acts don’t have much online presence especially if they where pretty niche to start with. You can have all the metadata services you want it still won’t cover everything as everything hasn’t been catalogued.
@Simon_Arnold3 it’s perfectly fine if it doesn’t become 100%. It’s fine if not 300,000,000 tracks are covered by Soundcloud. It’s not so bad if some Bandcamp purchases are manually edited. It’s enough if Tidal and Qobuz is passed through completely and well. Allmusic, Musicbrainz and others have almost stopped way too early and new albums and artists are hardly taken care of.
There platforms like Spotify, Qobuz & Co with more service providers do more. I have yet to read a Roon review from Laut.de. I only find that on Qobuz. Tivo at Roon and that’s it. Qobuz is not completely passed through, because certainly license agreements are missing.
If I’m at Discogs or Wiki, I find almost everything!
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
75
To be fair, it’s not an easy problem, matching entity references across two different services (Roon and Wikipedia). Though they must be doing this already to some extent, to deal with the metadata they already import from various services.
Whether the high end audio manufacturer offers a mediocre control app or not, the end result is that many of the equipment owners will give Roon a try, especially since extended free trials of Roon are very often offered with the equipment.
And then there are the differences between users who come to Roon from the computer side and those who come to Roon from the audio side. An audiophile buys a high priced music streamer and all of sudden that audiophile needs to become an expert in network management along with having to learn about digital audio from the ground up: file formats, tagging, network shares, etc. Yes I know one can use Roon with Tidal and Qobuz and no local files. However one still has to deal with the network management issues.
By the way, I say this from experience since one of my good friends is dipping his toes into streaming audio via wireless KEF speakers and a Bluesound node. He is getting very frustrated with the manufacturers control apps and about ready to give Roon a try.
This is so true of most streamers but one possible exception (from the demo I’ve seen) is innuous.
To me, if you want to prune and curate your collection, something like this makes much more sense than Roon. It still blends local and streaming but is much more focused on just playback. Its also built into a product you’d inevitably buy (a streamer).
Roon is in a difficult spot in the sense that Apple Music now supports high res, allows you to upload your local files (where they don’t exist in AM) and you can edit metadata. Don’t get me wrong, airplay is not where it needs to be yet but it will be and when it does you then have at the very least lossless multi room streaming.
Roon has to strike a balance between a lot of us on the forum being vocal about stability, metadata and editing features while also delivering more features to grow and even just compete.
Without Roon mobile, better discovery features and a much more slick mobile experience in general, people that aren’t on Roon yet will pass it by. They can just as easily go with Apple Music.
I must admit, I’m not concerned about Qobuz leaving market.
Not once have I thought geez, I better keep my 500 CD rips safe so I have an emergency music catalogue.
Honestly I haven’t had an issue with accessing a streaming service in the last 4-6 years, and I don’t suspect I will have an issue morning forward. I would however like to see Amazon HD, Apple, Spotify or similar added to the streaming services within Roon; However my assumption is Roon will adapt to changing markets and do what work is necessary should streaming services change.
The question around Library management and the extent to which Roon is focused on this, probably needs to be raised directly with the product manager. I believe you can book a meeting and chat.
My assumption is most users are perfectly happy with Roon running the roost, enjoying the simplicity it brings to Metadata management. Wrongly or rightly, I suspect there is a trend towards users streaming content V’s local storage and curation.
Streaming any content these days is super reliable, I honestly I can’t think of any <45 year olds who store local music/videos anymore, which haven’t been downloaded directly via Netflix, Apple music etc.
Why does someone buy a high priced music streamer when he could have bought a cheap electronics book and started building one himself? Why try and fail setting up a network when there are companies offering to do that for you as a service? Why spending thousands on High-End equipment but buying the cheapest peripherals, and that includes network products like routers, switches, access points and the such in our days?
Marketing perhaps and the inability of people to look behind the curtain, to read between the lines.
What should marketing promises even be? Marketing is using a lot of words and non-descriptive graphics and pictures to make people curious to try/buy a given product/service. Rule one is: Don’t make promises that you can held liable for. IMO do marketing promises or the also mentioned marketing hype mostly exist in the audiences mind only. But yes for sure, marketing does it’s best to create those in peoples minds.
IMO is Roon fair in offering a free trial for everyone interested in the product so everyone gets a fair chance to discover what Roon actually is - versus promises and hype - before they buy.
I appreciate this opinion and hold the opposite. I want Roon to be my portal into the artists, ones i know already and ones to discover. Sometimes i listen passively other times i want to explore. Roon is good at basic exploration but could be much more.
Edit, from home page
“Roon’s interface turns your music into journey of exploration and discovery, giving you richer insight, understanding, and appreciation.”
I have issues occasionally, but the forum-based support structure turns me off from reporting most of it. I doubt I am alone in that.
But as a predominantly local file user with 0.08% of my library from Qobuz streaming, Roon largely delivers on its promise of integrating those two using a slick interface either bit perfectly or with a handful of DSP settings.
While I use Roon every day, I don’t consider myself a power user, as there are many features I don’t use.
It would take my core use to be severely impacted before I would take a break like @Uwe_Albrecht is doing… but I completely understand him doing so.
Oh my, what a disaster… There are likely about a quarter million of different ideas of how metadata should be applied. And the few hundred that have well informed ideas and the drive to see them through will likely tire after a few months and the remains will haunt us forever.
Have you had a look at the artist images in Roon lately? It’s rarely a pretty sight and at least to me, it looked a lot better pre-Valence…
I’m not sure about you, but i payed pretty steep on the promises that i “wouldn’t have to curate and mess with metadata and library grooming”…
I am getting confused , is this discussion about Roon reliability and stability or Roon’s Feature set . It started out discussing features now its back to moaning about networks.
Some users clearly have stability issues , I personally have run my Roon core (approaching 6 years) on 2 x tower desktop PC’s (one replacing the other) and now a NUC 10i7 ., I have a large local library and as far as I can remember I have had zero stability issues.
I am 71 , computer literate but far from a network/hardware expert. I keep things simple and use Ethernet. How many people with issues are trying to run a core on WiFi when Roon specifically does NOT recommend it.
“My petrol car doesn’t work when I put diesel in it therefore Ford is crap ”
I may have Features issues but I consider that a “Time” thing when Roon gets around to doing “my request”.
It may clarify the discussion if there was a split between technical stability and features , they are not specifically related.
PS I am not a Fan Boy , Roon has shortfalls , I could enumerate …
@Mike_O_Neill sure it’s not good to keep using a product and then just whine about how bad it is.
Of course everyone can read in the forum what helps with certain problem and if something does not run, everything should first be set up in your own house so that it works.
Common tricks (sometimes just a reboot) often already help over many problems, but there are recurring things that need to be worked on and solved in the Roonteam.
We have to accept that there are people who don’t want to read and write here, just vent for a moment because something is very annoying right now.
It would be arrogant of me to pass over unsolved problems just because I don’t have them myself.
A stable chain of connection from Qobuz/Tidal - Roon - end customer has a cause/effect between each hyphen. Not everything is up to the end customer. I observe correlations between weekends, user load…that need more investigation.
Dont forget that SongKong also uses Discogs, but it is more difficult to match because we cannot directly use Acoustids to match to Discogs, there is more that can be done to increase the Discogs match rate.
1 Like
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
90
What is Roon? I’ve long held it’s an experience, not a product. You buy a ticket to ride, not a piece of software.
My experience from Spotify, Qobuz, Tidal and Apple Music has been considerably worse than Roon.
If you just casually browse Spotify forums you’ll find this for yourself. None of these companies take support seriously, probably because everyone pays for the software anyway.
If anything Roon has been significantly better because at least the team communicate what they are thinking even if they are shredded immediately afterwards.
Not saying your request is unreasonable, I’d love support to be more of a focus, just saying that Roon is not uniquely poor in this area.
However one still has to deal with the network management issues.
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