Why aren't all your friends using Roon?

Roon is great! It is great! A great software should be free! Make it open source for the greater good.! Ask for donations, roon might earn millions u never know! If it is free I promise to donate 100$.

Sorry, I don’t get this Free thing. Would you go to work for free? Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t, but that’s not the point. People are entitled to get paid. Open source would be a nightmare as I see it.
As is, the Roon team are building something that they envisioned, designed built and control. Perfect!

Just my view.

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Just a wind up merchant Chris. There is nothing the competition would like more than making what Roon does open source. There would be plenty of money made but not by Roon.

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Add $19 to your $100 donation, and it will be free for a year.

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Bugatti Chiron is great! It is great! A great sports car should be free! If Bugatti gives me a Chiron for free, I promise to donate 100$.

I suggest we enslave the Roon Team and force them to create only free products from now on, until their dying days. Water and bread will be their rewards.

You also believe in fairies? I suggest you ask Karl Marx’s “Capital” from Santa for Christmas. Dream on :wink:

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We’ve finally reached the bottom line of all these whining posts about the price.

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I am happy to pay for Roon, I think the software is great. I am happier paying for Roon than TIDAL (in fact, I am stopping my TIDAL subscription). I have also convinced a small number of my friends to use Roon, and even my wife thinks its money well spent.

As someone who has worked as a software engineer… this stuff isn’t easy, it requires a lot of time and dedication, and that’s just the software side. The curation of all of the interesting meta-data is also very time consuming. Why do you think people shouldn’t get paid for this time? Sure, lots of software is open source… but you realise the majority of people that work on the most recognisable open source projects are paid to do it. They do not work on it for free (yes sure, some do, but the majority do not).

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Nick, either you misunderstood what I wrote or you replied to the wrong person. I quoted the OP so I could disagree with him, using sarcasm.

BTW - I was a software engineer for 20+ years, although they didn’t have such a fancy name when I started.:sunglasses:

Oh yeah, one other thing, Roon and TIDAL go great together.

Sorry Slim, yes my comment was in general to the thread, not specifically aimed at you!

Hi,
I am a computer engineer and I really don’t think Roon was that easy to set up. It is if you use your computer as the Roon server, but I don’t want want to have to put my computer on to listen to music.

So in my case, I tried Roon for a month on my PC, then I decided to go for a NAS implementation.
After some time I found out that it did not work on my Synology DS214+, I had to delve into some technical threads and in the end I had to upgrade my NAS, bought an external SDD-drive, learned how to attach that to the NAS (reformat). After that I noticed Roon did not load every time my NAS restarted, which had to do with the with the way the harddisk was connected to the NAS. I had to ask Roon development, they suggested to reformat the harddisk in yet another way and after that it worked.

I now have an implementation which would appeal to some of my friends, but it did take some sweat and I would not advise it to non technical people without a helping friend.

A nas installation is atypical and it is still a computer, just a different one you’re switching on.

But agreed, a certain degree of computer literacy is required in order to get the Roon ecosystem functional.

Hi Soren,
honest answer(s)? - Only my point of view.

For now Roon is unfortunately NOT worth the money (regardless of subscription or lifetime memerbership).

Why?
Simple:

  1. With only TIDAL as supported streaming service Roon is far behind all/most other options. Even 40€/$ devices have a more feature rich and also working integration of sources

  2. RAAT is powerful, very flexible, but at the end of the day, what does it add one really needs? Mixed device multiroom support? For HQ listening? Really? If you are after a Raspberry PI solution, you may not be willing to spend 100,- €/$ a year for the control software.

  3. The missing mobile support is for sure a reason why my kids are not using it.

  4. With the missing internet radio integration my wife switched back to the vendor application because it’s to complex if you just want to listen to “easy music”.

Please don’t take my answers too literal, but I think Roon need a big push or will turn into a dead end.

bye

Markus

Soren hasn’t posted since November. So your post may need to be private messaged since obviously you spent some time working on it. Roon isn’t fully developed, but for me it has been worth every cent. Do you have any suggestions for a superior solution that is currently available? Cheers. …Robert

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Am genuinely curious to know more about these computer based players which fully integrate Tidal and other streaming services?

Hi Robert,
minor error, but doesn’t affect my impression about the current “situation” in regards to Roon’s feature set and feature requests. I have no perfect answer / solution, but without TIDAL (subscription will end soon) we are more or less fine with the following:

  • Living room / kitchen area for background music => Bluesound multiroom with BluOS Controller on phone/tablet or 5 radio station preset plus Qobuz, Deezer, NAS, BT, …

  • Living room for music only
    => BluOS Controller -> Node 2 -> NAD C510 -> Dynaudio Excite X14a
    => MAC / Qobuz App / Whatever -> NAD C510 -> Dynaudio Excite X14a

  • Office
    => Qobuz App -> Meridian Explorer 2 -> AKG N40
    => PI (rune audio / other) -> DAC -> JBL Control one (active)

  • Workshop
    => Qobuz App -> NAD D 3020 -> Needle
    => iEAST Play / Audio Cast (full Qobuz/Deezer/NAS/…) -> NAD D 3020 -> Needle

So it’s mainly the Qobuz App replacing Roon if “user interaction” is requested, for just music it’s “hardware” or simple touch control based on a PI.

Roon is moved to “standby” for now in a way- as a lifetime member I will/may check if the feature set fits better for me.

As a “collector” the Qobuz option to buy Hi-Res with discount compensates the 220,- € / year in just a few weeks/months.

None of “my solutions” can compete with Roon if it comes to access the local collection. But it’s one server/system less to power.

So I’ll wait for 1.5 or even 2.x - hope there are enough years left on my check :wink:

bye

Markus

Hi Sallah,
have a look at the Audio Cast M5 / iEAST Play devices - not a PC, just a small box.
bye

Markus

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Keep banging, Mark. The message may get through eventually! :smile: $500 is a whole lot less than buying a decent CD player or network player. Some may rue the day they didn’t go for lifetime.

Also, I’m pretty sure I read that Roon Labs can’t offer monthly subscriptions because of licence restrictions with some curated content. As for me, I wish TIDAL offered a yearly subscription at a small discount.

Since when was Open Source software free (gratis)? Free is a reference to freedom of use (libre) not monetary cost. People who just take software and say “I didn’t have to pay for it" usually don’t look beyond the freebie. Open Source is pervasive and the most successful companies sell services around it. In a similar way Roon is more than just an excellent piece of software–we agree on something–it is a service for music lovers. What would it be without curated content and arguably TIDAL? And why should you have that for “free”?

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For me, the amount of new music I’ve discovered through the Roon/Tidal connection has been amazing and I would never just equate that to having a hardware device capable of streaming another service like Spotify.

BUT…there is probably a user base that is an order of magnitude greater than the Roon user base that doesn’t care at all about music discovery. They look at Roon as not offering any way to get Spotify to the living room or their mobile device.

AND…there are families or other groups that are a combination of both types of users, and maybe some that would use Roon feel they can’t make the investment, especially in the endpoint hardware, until they have a way to make their Spotify family members happy.

SO…maybe Roon wants to consider making RAAT work as an audio device on a PC/MAC (I think JRiver does something similar) so that there is audio transport to Roon devices and so that users don’t feel their investment in Roon endpoints doesn’t exclude the preferences of other users in their household.

Thanks for the info, Markus. But it’s not quite what I was hoping you’d show me :slight_smile: - I have that already, with Chromecast Audio to a large extent (now redundant with Roon and various endpoint developments in my home). I was thinking you’d hit upon some software which marries HDD and Streaming and offers the encyclopedic format that Roon offers and at a fraction of the cost. No worries!