Go look at the number of bugs/ issues reported by users that remain unaddressed.
As for your quip re their vision, as others have said, in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
Profiles are crap and pointless so library segregation isn’t possible
box set handling is crap and makes them meaningless
Anything in bookmarks can’t be sorted
Anything in roonalbumtags can’t be sorted
Anything in roontracktags can’t be sorted
Search results can’t be sorted
Exploring all performances of a track can’t be sorted
User added album art and artist pics are replaced without warning
artists duplicate like breeding rabbits
no way to add bios or reviews to albums and artists where Roon has none, not even a simple bloody text file
Roon reanalyzing an album if it’s moved to another location - another we couldn’t be bothered bug
support ignoring issues raised by users when they don’t have answers or its a bug they dont want to give priority to
all Roon tags perform terribly compared with other type browses / lists. Nothing done about it since implementation
No Boolean search or Focus
Multiple users have offered suggestions re how some of these can be dealt with or requested that minor functional enhancements be undertaken to turn something useless into something useful e.g. adding sort options … all of it is just roundly ignored.
Of course if all you do is click on an album cover and press play then ya, Roon’s great at meeting simplistic requirements.
Let me spell it out for you… When all I do is click on an album cover and press play it’s a simple requirement, something Roon excels at. It’s when a user wants to do more than those basic things that Roon quickly shows its many longstanding shortcomings.
So many of you get upset when someone criticizes Roon or asks them to do better (so much so that you basically implore them to leave and find another solution), but have you stopped for a second to realise:
they criticize because they’re invested in it and want to see it improve.
a better product benefits everybody, even if YOU don’t use all its features.
I could turn my house into an apple shop given the apple kit the family has - but just try explain the iPhone or iPad UI to your grandma and you can see how bad the IoS (Android even worse) design system is for guiding app UI development. When you do customer journey design typically you design for a set of personas. eg for a banking app there may be 10-20 user personas that guide user testing. Problem is how do you design a UI for a segment of 1? Like yourself? I guess Roon is doing user testing and those tests reveal that for its selected personas the UI is good. Naturally there will be those that don’t fit those personas, eg, there’s no way my grandma is going to get on with Roon at all. I’m not saying anyone who doesn’t like Roon is like my grandma, not at all. But it’s very possible for someone to not like or get on with Roon. And that’s absolutely fine.
Personally I can’t see what the alternative option might be, and I’ve tried a few.
I don’t think there’s anything I’ve said in this thread I would not repeat, in person. When people see Roon at my place and ask me about it I tell them it has great potential but that at present it’s bug riddled and lacks some basic functional necessities and key enhancements that significantly detract from my ability to derive value and pleasure from using it beyond simplistic browse and press play requirements. When one spends more time working around issues and compensating for bugs or being frustrated because you’re staring at an unsorted mess rather than deriving utility from something, it is, to my mind, crap…and that’s my daily experience with Roon in its current form. So I actively discourage them from signing up and suggest other alternatives that may offer less metadata integration, but also offer a lot less frustration. Should the day come that my experience changes I’ll gladly recommend it, something I cannot conscionably do at present.
I sympathise because there does seem to be a defensive reaction from some when Roon is criticised. As a Roon newbie when I started using it I also listed out a whole series of improvements, and saw the lists of other users. eg the “Roon is not suitable for classical thread”. I was surprised at its weaknesses. Especially it’s much vaunted “it’s like when you could read LPs and CD booklets”. It’s close but actually nothing like that. Also the links to additional data, strong for some music, weak for others. The endless threads (did you see the one where the SQ of the latest version was critiqued (without hard evidence) by a boutique server vendor?)
The trouble is every time someone, as I did, posts a “whys this not meet my expectations?” all the veterans groan. And after using Roon now for 6 months, with all its foibles, I suppose I’m a veteran!
But I simply don’t see that Roon has any competition right now, but I bet they must be worried because it wouldn’t take huge investment for a competitor to arrive on the scene. If one does let me know, and I’ll try it.
H
I know I’m a demanding person… Never happy just pressing play and pause. needs to dig in the internals and expects “features”. Even functioning ones! Whats that? Terrible!
This topic is falling apart … if it continues this way it’s likely to be closed down by the @moderators.
All of you please avoid using antagonist language in posts … it’s fine to discuss Roon’s short comings but avoid the provocation of those that hold a different view.
I think you’re right. Roon’s marketing has targeted users with promises of meeting aspirations way beyond simplistic requirements of being able to browse and press play. Beyond the marketing facade they have catered mostly to those simplistic requirements that every music player has to meet.
I think some folks underestimate the difficulties associated with database management. Developing an app that accumulates and collates sometimes suspect data from third parties and attempting to present that data in a comprehensive but uncomplicated manner to the end users is a daunting task. Not to mention maintaining the integrity of the audio replication and network integration of the app. Can Roon be improved? For sure. But the perceived flaws in the UX are not as easy to fix as a lot of people seem to think.
