James, I disagree with your analysis.
In fact, I wrote an essay here many years ago about how this was functionality that would change my life, more important than DSP and other stuff.
And I’m not in the kid/earbud demographic, 73 and audiophile.
I spoke of business travel, vacation homes and hotels, boating, visiting family in Europe…
Much of my life is spent away from home.
(Didn’t even have CarPlay at the time.)
Anders
I’m in the US in a newer neighborhood where, I assume, Comcast paid the developer to hamstring cooper into the home and prevent the LEC from dropping fiber. DSL infrastructure is from the 00’s so it’s Comcast or nothing (or Starlink). However, I’m kind of insane so I have Compast Business Class at home which is half the bandwidth at almost 4x the price. But, I have a 4 hour SLA, an account rep, and a dedicated support number my neighbors don’t get access to. Very reliable. Very expensive. But, I’m addicted to the internets so <shrug> we all have our vices. Some of us are just lucky to be able to afford them.
@Vincent_Kennedy: u r right. No one use it beside some “enthusiasts”. BTW: my son and my wife stopped to use Roon. I personally use it only in my music room (high-end equipment). When I find a way to replace the Procedural Equalizer than I will stop to use Roon as well.
For daily use I switched already to the native Tidal app and Bluenode (Tidal connect).
Sad… but this is how it is…
OK guys, I think you are reacting to my example and not my point. I’m not attacking people who want or use remote access to Roon. And I am happy that people can enjoy their music how and where they want.
The theme of this thread that I was reacting to is that Roon is for many people not stable. My point was that I would like to see Roon focus on stability and completing the many, many half-done GUI aspects before adding more features.
Then my hypothesis about Roon’s motivations with the race to add features was that Roon is adding them to “go mainstream” which I think is very unlikely to become a reality based on the market and what mainstream users really care about (or don’t care about actually), thus why not focus on finishing and stabilizing the app for the niche users that make up the core of its base.
Perhaps, though the self-contained turntable/speaker combos and later boom boxes that I grew up with weren’t exactly high fidelity. My perception is that ear buds (and now IEMs) have made music listening much more ubiquitous. Today we have $50 IEMs that almost perfectly track the Harman curve and sound incredible.
Just want to agree here and register frustration. Roon is far from best in class. The ‘promise’ is amazing but the execution is terrible. Given they’ve also cut the support (since ARC?) I thought maybe if I get involved in the community they might be inclined to start serving their customers!
There are so many issues with how it works and is executed across all platforms I don’t really understand the draw. Roon say get a nucleus, which I was pondering, but until the interface works better why would I make that investment? I primarily got it to manage a multi-room set up (the kit is ‘roon ready’) but if fails constantly. I do however, as noted above, have different ‘modes’ of listening to music. I was hoping roon might be the all encompassing access for my multi-room but is proving completely inadequate for that.
Roon also advertise it’s artist info features but the write ups are badly researched (factually wrong in some cases but largely just shoddy journalism) and tells us nothing new, while the ‘new’ way of listening to music has zero draw for me. It’s the technical potential thay would make it worth it.
I’ll be investing in a network player unless roon substantially improves by the time my latest subs expire.
Music services get their artist and album info from a handful of database sources. The dominant music database in the industry by far is AllMusic (Tivo), and it is what Roon uses (also Qobuz and Tidal). In the past year, Roon added Wikipedia as a second source of information. When Roon has info from both Tivo and Wikipedia, there is a selector to choose between the two.
That is the reality of the situation. With millions of albums and artists, music services need to get information from third party databases. Here’s the story behind Allmusic:
My server takes up a lot less space than nearly 2800 CD’s and I don’t have to get out of my listening chair to change artists. I can also be in any room in the house and change what I am listening to. So simple and I have not had any problems with the setup.
This is actually really interesting mSpot so thanks for highlighting this.
Proves to me that roon need to concentrate on getting a decent product to market. I’d much rather my subs went into a stable system and proper support than poor journalism.
But coming back to the topic:
Actually it doesn’t matter at all what kind of technical proplem arrises: no one should have to wait two and a half years for a solution. The last time I heard from support about this problem was in februar 2022. In august 2022 I reached out to them for the last time and that was it. That was the moment I switched to Foobar for my Stereo outputs.
That is not something I would consider a high quality standard of a product such as Roon.
Ok cleanup on aisle 4 complete.
You know where the new downmix discussion is now.
Thank you
