Each to his own but there is no need to be so derogatory
JRiver and Roon are SO different as to be incomparable, the real thing they have in common is they both play music extremely well
If you don’t like a more traditional application so be it , but I dare say a good many of us cut our digital teeth on JRiver before Roon wooed us
My opinion , no more…
Mike
Hopefully Tidal keeps going. The Qubuz pricing model makes Roon look bargain basement.
Currently I‘m paying more for Tidal (20€ per month) than for Qobuz (220€ per year) and with Qobuz sublime I have a great offer of paying mp3 prizes for hires albums and can stream all purchased albums in hires. All in all the better offer for me, as I‘m not much into MQA. Due to the need and the dependency on a decoder that does not come ‚open access‘ and lack off access to a decoder MQA could downgrade the SQ to less than CD quality at any time. Hires in Qobuz is available in many open formats.
For me it’s £220 a year to get 16bit 44kHz streaming (I haven’t bought albums for years). Tidal I pay £29 a month and get Hifi with a family subscription.
Horses for courses. For my case Qobuz looks pretty expensive (£320 a year per person for hires).
Couple of questions - if you’re on Sublime (220) you can stream at 16/44. But you’re saying if you buy an album (which you can do at MP3 prices) - you can stream it in hi-res?
Second - their website says you can import your music for offline listening". Is that like downloading in Tidal - not the same as buying an album but storing it locally (and if you cancel your subscription, you lose the download)?
On your second question: yes, that’s the way (I understand) it works.
320£ is this the price for sublime+ subscription in UK? Of course this is better SQ than what Tidal offers and therefore more costly. Hires at Qobuz means 24bit up to 192k PCM quality. Not only CD quality. With both sublime and sublime+ you can store tracks or albums for offline play, but only accessible through the Qobuz app. I’m not sure on how many devices I can run Qobuz in parallel, but I’musing it on 5 devices without limitations. So, it can be used by the family but only with one login that has the playlists, favorites…
Purchsed albums show under purchased and then in sublime subscription can be played as hires. In sublime+ all available hires tracks can be played and locally stored as hires. Again, locally stored does not mean that you have access to the data with all SW and file browsers but only with the dedicated apps available for all common operating system. This is the same with allstreaming services I know.
Of course you can download the purchased albums to any location on your harddrive or on the cloud, sticks…, in all resolution and SQ in equal or inferior quality of your purchase, eg as alac, flac, aiff, wav. So you buy an album with 24/192k and can download as 24/96k or as CD quality or even mp3 320k as many times you like. These files have no copy protection and can be backuped and used in all ways that are legal, no limitations introduced by Qobuz.
Cheers - thanks very much for the detailed answer. I’ve signed up for Sublime+ now. I’ll see how I fare with it - I’ll keep Tidal for the family side (different logins). If I start buying albums again maybe next year I’ll drop to Sublime.
In the UK it was £349, not 320. My mistake. Guess it makes sense that the content costs more than the delivery but it does make $119 for Roon look cheap.
If Roon did integrate with Qobuz and was able to support the digital booklets as well it could be interesting and compelling.
Which raises another question that I’ll try out now - are the digital booklets available with the streaming or only for downloads.
EDIT - with the Qobuz app on my phone I can access the digital booklet without buying the album… That’s a neat feature and adds to the experience. Maybe there is a nice synergy between Roon and Qobuz. As long as Roon could get access to things like the booklets too 
This is all in your head 
You have already seen parts of the UI redesign. The new zone picker, zone settings, volume controls, device setup screens, device auto-detection flow, device auto-configuration functionality and the totally rebuilt onboarding wizard released in 1.5 are all in the new look+feel. We are releasing the redesign incrementally, have been since last year, and will continue to.
We don’t like to re-skin UI without adding functionality.The design work is ahead of the adding-functionality work, so when there isn’t some graphical progress for a while, it’s a good bet that it’s held up behind some attached functional improvements.
My intent is for us to release the updated details screens and overhauls of discover + the overview screen alongside the new radio algorithm and a bunch of new data driven functionality built on the same set of infrastructure/building blocks.
The underlying infrastructure project–to build a robust data/machine-learning pipeline that combines our metadata databases with usage data + other sources of information–has been running since October of last year.
That project ties in in a lot of places. It modernizes our offering significantly, adding functionality that replicates or improves upon most of what the streaming services are now doing. It fixes dozens of rough points that we all feel but maybe don’t clearly articulate. It makes Roon work for people who don’t have much or any local library. It also helps people with a local library explore areas that their library does not cover well.
The last piece of the UI redesign is the toplevel navigation, settings screens, and the album/artist/track/etc browsers (+ any other smaller screens that remain). I think that gets released at the same time as mobile.
I want to stress that the above is just my current thoughts about how this all comes together. It’s likely that it will not play out exactly as above. Other stuff will be worked on in parallel and released in the mean time, too.
Just my 2 cents, others have stated the same (or otherwise) I know.
I’m not going to criticize Roon for the decisions made and the way they are steering the product, overall what was intended to do which is on premises audio processing and playing while organizing your content is admirable.
I was very hesitant to pay Roon’s premium without exploring other options first, I tried A+, JRiver, JPlay, Minimserver, Kazoo, Bubble even Plex (for which I’m a lifetime subscriber for 8 years already), had so much issues with certain DAC’s and endpoints and had none when I was using Roon (trial) that I decided to become a lifetime subscriber and I don’t regret it, the software works great with content, plays with no issues, it has a DSP engine that competes with HQP itself (given, you have more options and your own personal DAC with HQP with better SQ options as well) but you don’t have to go the HQP way as you can upsample within Roon. It is added value and it is welcomed.
Tidal (I’m a subscriber) it is a very good added value to Roon as well and with the MQA decoder included another convenience point. I don’t prefer Tidal, I believe integration with Qobuz or Deezer would be very much welcome as another option, for a fact I will as I prefer these two over Tidal.
I do respect the decision of the company to not try to bake some half a… solution into their offering and at least try to work with another service to provide some flavoring to the streaming option.
I am using the recently (few months already) radio addition option and works great and provides yet more features in the menu.
I was concerned at some past point about the inflexibility of adding another streaming service but sometimes you have to prevent yourself from listening to others and trust your vision and where do you want to go and I believe Roon’s vision is solid and stable.
For all the comments about how Roon is better for streaming music from other services look at Plex, people uses Plex to play their own libraries, Plex added after many years the option to stream Air TV but that’s not the core service they offer, it is convenient but it is not why you use Plex.
I would love Qobuz integration but knowing the apparent inflexibility of the company it is very unlikely they will be working with Roon (I may wrong though), I think since Deezer is in the need of capturing customer base and have more intelligence about selecting music with their Flow feature they look like and ideal candidate and likely they will be sharing a custom made SDK / API with Roon than Qobuz, they can even start providing MQA content in this partnership.
Something else we may be overseeing since Tidal’s integration was performed in Roon I’m pretty sure politics in place would have favored keeping that in place at least for an agreed timeframe, both parties will benefit from that and would give them more market exposure in that way, and this is perfectly valid.
All good
@brian thank you for such great product.
I’m excited because it demonstrates to paying customers the Roon team is very capable of adding new features in elegant ways.
Like many others, I’m unexcited about Chromecast’s audio quality but I need to remind myself these devices are $35.
I am the starter of this thread, and I have to say I learned a thing or 2! Really I was just weaseling in another thread about other streaming services. 
That being said, I definitely have a better understanding of all the moving parts. I actually have several chromecast devices, but I have RAAT’d most rooms so I was hoping I could also group in the chromecast devices, but oh well. It is just me and my wife, so I usually have all zones grouped and we play music throughout the house most of the time.
Anyway, thanks to everyone for teaching me a thing or two about a thing or two!
Brian, I love you. This is more than I asked (and hoped) for!
Sorry… have to get rid of Danny, and this annoying @RBM, talking in my head… 
@brian The underlying infrastructure project–to build a robust data/machine-learning pipeline that combines our metadata databases with usage data + other sources of information–has been running since October of last year.
It’s great to see - yet again - the speed of response and level of detail provided by Roon. Quite a contrast to many others.
Can I put in a plea for some form of ‘user management’ - e.g. to include ability to restrict dataset for certain users. At the moment, using Focus / Tags / Bookmarks is not an adequate solution - as soon as you search it looks at the whole library. How about something which enables the pipeline to provide a filtered dataset (e.g. filtered by storage location, bookmark) so that all operations in Roon only work on the restricted dataset. Individual users could then be allocated either full or partial access. Doesn’t need a fancy UI to do this - could be a simple interface within settings.
Thanks for the information on Qobuz folks. I took out a Sublime+ subscription and have the app installed on my phone, iPad and laptops. I have to say that the app is a pleasure to use - well thought out - and the metadata and features are great (so is the digital booklet integration ). They’ve done a great job on it.
Would be useful, but remember that multiple users could use the system at the same time. Not quite trivial to build.
You can access the Qobuz digital booklets from any of their streaming apps - desktop, iOS and Android. On desktop and android apps, you can actually also download the booklets.
Using the apps was a pleasure. The iPad works in portrait or landscape and their menus are logical (4 options on the left. If you want to access settings to to. “my Qobuz”. Sensible enough. Settings replace the content to the right. Also sensible enough as I don’t need to use both.)
I know they’re working on integration between Roon and Qobuz. I’d actually be happier if the integration was integrating Roon into Qobuz (the Roon infrastructure into their app) than the other way around - I prefer the Qobuz app.