Okay. Roon is not for you. Thanks for playing…
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I would think their goal is to be for everyone; if instead it’s just for people who consume content in the way they want to present it their audience will, by definition, be limited to those people.
Thats the wrong place for you here at the Roon forum.
Try some other software which fits your needs.
I suggest Amarra 4.
I also like iTunes, works fine, especially with a reasonably sized library, say up to 1000 albums.
Just for your info, DSD Master can make your DSD rips compatible with iTunes if you’d like. (If you have DAC that can handle them if i understand correctly.
And if you want to, the named Bit Perfect software will perform both upsampling (if you’d like) and also switching the necessary settings uopn sample rate changes. Works like charm and costs almost nuttin’
No product can be designed to work for everyone. If you think iTunes or the QuickTime player offer the same functionality as Roon, you either don’t understand Roon or it offers no functionality you require.
Like I said, thanks for playing…
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Ok, but let’s turn the question around: given your interests, what could Roon offer that would make it more interesting for you?
An Apple logo.
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And of course locking any music you buy from them so their products are the only ones that can play it.
Apple does not do this now…and has not since 2009.
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Well, yes and no. I agree that if Roon wants to replace our usage of the media players and software we already have, and pay a pretty penny for it, it needs to provide features that are core to our mode of listening.
HOWEVER, Roon is a new paradigm that isn’t about album reviews. When you’re listening, read the artist bios, and go to the links to associated and related artists, and poke around. If you don’t have Tidal, this won’t result in much. But if you have Tidal, you’ll immediately be able to listen to related music, lossless quality, and not just a sample like on Amazon.
You can jump eons in music understanding and the history and constituents of your favorite bands and triple the amount of content you have that fits your interests, very quickly and it’s really fun.
Roon is a good music player for an existing collection. What it does, if you let it, is use your collection as a gateway into the wider world.
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AKIMBO Seth’s new podcast.
‘Just about everything we buy comes with a story included’
Roon’s story??
It really is a different paradigm.
When I play say an album, I don’t do anything else but listen.
Alas this isn’t as true as I once thought it was. Roon will only present links to artists/musicians etc. already in your collection.
The consensus seems to be this is a limitation but no indication from anyone in Roon as to whether it’s seen as something that needs to be resolved.
.sjb
Really, I like a lot of what it does, though currently the pricing is a bit high to use it as the iTunes replacement I would like it to be.
First, I’d like to see support of more formats; for example it can play files recorded in the “.m4a” format but not the “.mp4” format. The two are very similar, so aside from file type it would take little work for Roon to be able to support both.
Second, it would be nice if it would warn you that you are using a sonically inferior connection when a better one is available. For a while I had my Oppo connected via both USB and via the network, and it would have been nice if it had asked if I wanted to use USB instead as it (at least with the Oppo) is a sonic improvement over the network stream. Perhaps a sequenced list of preferred outputs where it would fall back to network streaming if the USB device wasn’t found but would switch back once it came back online.
Third, it would be nice if it could somehow interface with iTunes as an alternative UI the way some other players like Pure Music or Amarra can; in that way things like iTunes Match would still work but the audio could be routed to a Roon endpoint instead.
Really, I’d like it to be a superset of iTunes where it could do anything iTunes can, with the addition of playing FLAC and being able to output all digital files at their native resolution. It’s very close on that aspect except for the .mp4 issue I mentioned.
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Agreed, but the bar is low. Roon could be a hell of a lot better in this area and in leveraging metadata.
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fully agree
Fully agree as well. I really hope this will be the main area for future upgrades.
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With you all on this one as well. I find Roon Metadata could be improved. Recording dates, liner notes, performers by track, access to additional reviews or album information (from Wikipedia, for example) would be useful additions.
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Yes, including more sources would be great. Before Roon I used iTunes in combination with the App Artistinfo by Metason. They also have a rich Database on the web: https://music.metason.net/artistinfo
They combine Data from multiple sources like Discogs, Musicbrainz and Wikipedia.
With Roon I sometimes feel to be downgraded 
Look at this: https://music.metason.net/artistinfo?name=Laure%20Le%20Prunenec
And that’s what Roon knows about her.
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I have avoided posting on this topic because I don’t have anything positive to add.
After today’s little messabout, I think that maybe negative comments can be useful.
Though I am a fully-paid Roonite, I haven’t recommended Roon to anyone because it doesn’t work very well in many of the situations it ought to.
My experience is that it works nearly perfectly when the Core is the endpoint or is directly wired via Ethernet to another Mac running Roon or Roon Bridge. Introduce a network into the mix, and Roon becomes flaky at best and utterly unusable at most; the latter case about 50% of the times I have tried it.
I have three iPhones, an iPad, two Apple TVs, and three Macs on my mixed wired and Apple WiFi network. There’s a HUE hub and a couple of Amazon Dots and Echos. None of these other devices has any problem; turning all of them off doesn’t make any difference when Roon doesn’t feel like playing.
The network is fast. I get speeds of 350-400 Mbps over WiFi to Speedtest. That’s around 45 MBs per second, which is more than enough to deliver an audio file and associated metadata. My music is on a hardware RAID with throughput that can saturate Thunderbolt 2. My Core is the fastest Mac Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Endpoints are wired Airport Expresses and an 8GB Mac Mini 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5—the former should just pass a signal and the latter has enough RAM and processor power to deliver four streams of high-quality HD video at once; it should be able to handle a RAAT stream.
I’m sure there is something I’m doing wrong. I’ll bet there is hardware I could buy that would solve the problems. But that’s not the point. The point is that Roon isn’t a Network Music player that just any old person can use, like iTunes or Swinsian, or even VLC. Unless you’re direct-wired, Roon requires a bunch of screwing around, and nobody I know would put up with that.
Speaking of other tech that work perfectly every single time I try them on this network:
AirPlay
Chromecast
Whatever Amazon uses
Plex
It’s nice to have RAAT and cool information about my music library, and I dig the interface and most of how Roon works. It’s made me very happy. I just wish it worked well enough to recommend.
Update: I got rid of the Aiport network, set up a trio of Orbi RBK50+Satellites. Same problems exist. 