What is the weakest part of Roon?

Roon Software Discussion
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Time for some tough love. There are threads for things we love, Feature Requests and priorities for the next major release; but this thread is for venting frustrations. What parts of Roon get in the way of your enjoying the music or don’t let you do what you want ?

A few guidelines. Firstly, keep it nice. Although this thread is for things that irritate you, it’s not intended for abuse (Maybe I should start a different thread for that ? ) Secondly, make sure you’ve given the software a fair shake before posting here. There were lots of things I didn’t get in the first few days but they aren’t the things that have turned out to grind my gears long term.

So have at it ! The devs know we can only tell them these things because we love them :heart_eyes_cat:. If you agree with someone else’s gripe, just like their post. That makes it easier to tally up numbers.

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So let me start off:

Artist recognition and confusion
Most of the time it’s not due to Roon, but is upstream in the data providers. This is one of the areas that will be getting a good deal of attention for the next major release, and that is good, because it needs it.

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Queue management: it’s all just sort of ‘bleurgh’ at the moment. I don’t know how to properly describe the experience. It doesn’t feel resolved.

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The composer screen is quite messy.

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How limited the local radio functionality is. It’s not really usable in it’s current state. (it repeats the same artists/albums all the time) and it’s not configurable.

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And why I find this so irritating is that I can’t imagine it’s the most difficult thing to fix (of course I could be totally wrong here). Radio is such a big part of Roon with options to use it everywhere and it is very irritatingly unfit for purpose.

SJB

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Without detracting in any way from the proposition that Radio needs fixing, I have been using the “ban” stick on albums it gets stuck on recently and that has substantially broadened it’s outlook for me. The :heart:️ toggles to :no_entry_sign: and the ban seems to help unstick Radio from albums it gets stuck on.

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The ‘weakest part’ of Roon for me is sort of the same thing as my top 5 wish list, so I won’t repeat those things here….

  • The ‘Blank screen’ issue with remotes is really annoying. I really thought 1.2 had fixed it, but apparently not, its back again. It makes Roon quite frustrating to use which is a real shame as it detracts from the slickness of the system in general - probably just because it happens so often, and has been going on for so long……

Beyond that, there’s very little that I feel really strongly about in terms of Roon being a bad experience in any way, albeit I think there are lots of details that could be improved over time, and most likely will… If I had to point to something….

  • Radio and Internet Radio in particular are weak. Radio could do with some options/preferences and algorithm tweaks. I’d also like to see a ‘volume levelling only for Radio’ option. For Internet Radio I’m sticking with TuneIn unless I have a multi-room need - I honestly don’t think Internet Radio is up to the ‘Roon’ standard, and cutting and pasting streaming links from a forum isn’t why I went down the Roon road….

  • Zones. I’d like a central place for zone management, and zone transfer - it feels a bit unintuitive to me right now.

  • Getting music into Roon and managing the folders should be easier. I would love to use the drag and drop feature - I think its amazing - but I sort of don’t trust the managed folders and would prefer if there were preferences for retaining an iTunes style structure. I also don’t want a split structure of iTunes and managed, so for now I go out to VNC and do it that way.

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for me the weakest parts are:
a) Stability of iOS Remote:
a lot of crash while swipping from albums and often no connection to server
b) Playlist handling:
needs possibilty to sort playlist (by songtitle, by artist, random, …)
needs duplicate detection on insert title
c) Radio:
play along after last song must times plays songs from only 3 or 4 artists
I wish there was a radio option witch uses the whole Tidal not only songs in my library (like the SmartMix-PlugIn in the Squeezebox Server), that would be a great way to discover new music

Not really a weak part of Roon, but a great feature imho
Tidal Recommentations:
the killer feature for me would be to have album or song recommentations from Tidal repertoire which are not in my library based on my most played songs or albums of the last few weeks

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When I walk out my door is when Roon leaves me. I really enjoy using Roon and I think my listening time has increased sincing buying it, except when I am away from my local network. When at work or on the road or plane etc. I miss Roon and need to resort to going back to iTunes or Tidal and needing to keep those libraries up to date as well.
I need Roon at all times, give me my fix! :slight_smile:

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Queue management and play button behavior. I still have not figure out how to start a playlist in shuffle mode. I have to start it and turn on shuffle. I hate not just being able to click on a track and have the software play that song and go down the list after that.

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Oh I forgot, not having any type of comprehensive user manual to refer to. It seems like how to information is scattered around, sometimes requiring a search.

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  • big +1 on metadata editing
  • Lack of contextual search
  • Failure to keep connection to server when tablets are idle… That Roon logo pulsing is beginning to feel like the Windows watch glass of old, it’s seen so often when picking up a tablet it inspires rage
  • classical, jazz and other composers and works mixed together. End result is I never use it
  • Lack of focus in phone apps
  • saving edits / identified albums sometimes feels like it just takes too long. Whatever needs to be collected/ readied should be done in the background whilst the user is looking for matches.
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Forgot that one :wink:

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I don’t see how this thread is any different to the “Roon 1.3: Top Priorities” thread which already has 66 replies at the time of writing;

I would encourage people to “re-frame” their “gripes” as either feature requests or support issues, and that way they might be more likely included for consideration in the next round of improvements.

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  1. No portrait mode on iPad/Android tablets. (works and looks fine on my Windows Tablet in portrait)
  2. No alarm clock type feature (or sleep timer for radio) - This could be easily fixed with a scheduled task to an API.
  3. Physical volume buttons on ipad/android do not change the volume on the select zone.

Moving from a Sonos (8 zones) and Sooloos (4 Rooms) setup to purely Roon these are the things I miss from a convenience point of view…

  1. Lack of an API; even for simple commands eg Volume, Mute, Stop (no web interface)
  2. Audio Setup appearing on the Zones page - A way of hiding the setup/configuration items.

Meta data and Roon Radio has already been covered.

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  1. Roon is all about the metadata. Metadata issues get reported but never seem to actually get fixed.
  2. Tagging isn’t relational. I can’t tag albums and filter artists to only artists that have albums with those tags. Vice versa as well just not as useful.
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The big thing is mobile experience through cloud sync, not a stupid VPN. (I already liked it above, shouldn’t double count.)

Others, albeit one whole level down, include the weakness of the “works” concept which invalidates the whole composer experience. We talked about it but it is not improved, AFAIK (or has it been improved and I didn’t notice because I abandoned the whole area?).

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I guess this isn’t really the place but I have to say I completely don’t understand ‘works’ in Roon. I don’t listen to much classical, but on albums that have a composer listed, it often just shows each individual track as a ‘work’ and it all gets really confusing. The couple of times I’ve tried with classical, I’ve found it equally confusing. I end up just sticking to the ‘Album’ view.

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I’d say that for me, search needs to be improved. A lot. It seems pretty good for well-known artists, but it’s not tolerant enough of mis-spellings of artist names. (Searching on “Winton”–not Wynton–“Marsalis” yields a couple of Tidal results among a bunch of unrelated stuff, but nothing from my library.) For some reason, search seems to do much less well for titles. Composer search is inconsistent; I’ve got a lot of music by Franz Schubert in my library, but searching for “Schubert”, then clicking on “Franz Schubert” (Artist) yields just two library albums and three Tidal albums. (Just to make sure, I checked “File tags” for several works that don’t show up; they show “Franz Shubert” as composer; presumably Roon is using Roon data not file data here, though I didn’t check.) And why am I getting a “performer” listing for Franz Schubert anyway, with seven results (none of which, obviously, feature Franz Schubert as a performer? The only time Franz Schubert should ever show up as anything other than composer is when his name appears in an album title (“The Schubert Connection”) or, say, the name of an ensemble. (It’s worth mentioning that in this context, “Artist” just confuses things. In a music performance, what does “artist” mean? Is that the performer? The composer? The only way this could work is if “artist” means “all of the above,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case.)

Finally, especially for an app that aims for a rich (enriched) experience, broader search results are frequently disappointing: Search on “jazz cello” and the results hardly seem curated: two albums by Ray Brown (fine), a couple of Claude Bolling works (yuck, but OK. One features Yo-yo Ma; great cellist, but not for jazz), a couple of novelty acts, and a bunch inappropriate results (“Christmas Cello;” “Cello Relaxing Cello”). Avant-garde cellist Erik Friedlander has 12 albums on Tidal–I am a Tidal subscriber, and it’s linked to my Roon account–but does not appear in the search results. And several historically great bass players also performed on cello–Paul Chambers, Oscar Pettiford, Charles Mingus. No Dave Holland, no Esperanza Spalding, but plenty of “Girl Crush (Cello Version)” and “Cello Dreams” (Various artists).

Schubert composed 600 songs in his short lifetime, and Tidal has, by my count, 49 versions of Winterreise alone, and I have several versions in my library. But searching on “Schubert lieder” yields NONE of those; instead, I get “The Art of Frieda Lieder” and “Lieder Gut!” by Willi Herren. (In fairness, among the 42 album results are a handful of actual Schubert lieder albums.)

This probably is challenging, since enrichment relies on outside sources and metadata you don’t control, but it’s also the key to realizing your vision, as I understand it. If you want to enrich my listening experience, show me interesting new things related to what I’m eager to listen to.

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