That’s a gross generalisation. I’m a lifetime member. Not feeling defensive at all though I could be excused for feeling that way given the dismissive way that people like you talk about us.
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I hate the “us and them” thing that lifetime vs. subscribers seems to foster here. It’s (still) an individuals choice, no need to analyze the mortality. Personally, I think Roon should never have started with the subscription route. Sell it for $499. Done. And save all the heartache and admin costs. A subscription is just being greedy, subscribe to play my own music? Right! And everything else has it’s own app.
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I agree but the subscription model has permeated everything. It’s easy to say oh, it’s only $9.99 a month but it adds up. Between HBO, Netflix, Showtime, Roon, Sirus, Disney+, Apple TV, Prime, music streaming services, donations to various charities, it all adds up. This is in addition to cable TV, mobile phone, gaming, etc.
It’s not just a music player though. What you are paying for is a subscription to the metadata services which requires ongoing maintenance and an IT infrastructure behind it. Without a steady income stream then Roon cannot maintain this service.
If Roon were just a software player then your argument would be very valid but it’s not just a player.
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Yes, that’s true, but the really important thing you are paying for is a device/vendor agnostic transport between your library (and streaming services) and your endpoint of choice.
Roon has, IMO, made all of that part so seamless that subscribers forget it’s there and vendors can focus on building great audio hardware w/o getting savaged by contract software designers and developers (like me 
).
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There’s always LMS, free, does a similar job. Doesn’t do too much with metadata but if you have a modest collection, just press and play.
Actually LMS works great with metadata–if one has the files well tagged and organized. Several LMS users have libraries in excess of 500,000 tracks. The largest I’ve ever used with LMS is about 9,000 albums and about 115,000 tracks. LMS with community involvement is a pretty amazing piece of work to this day, long after Logitech abandoned squeezeboxes.
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Apologies. Very grateful to the community (It was the original (Slim Devices) Squeezebox that brought me back to Hifi after Kids. I plugged it into an unused pair of active speakers, a new dawn…)
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No apology needed at all. Just wanted to put out there the point that LMS still works very well and has had major development since Logitech abandoned it. In fact LMS Ver. 8.0 was just released by the “community”. 8.0 allows library integration with Spotify and Tidal, “similar” to Roon, without the same level of extra information, bios, connections, etc. But still pretty cool for an abandoned product, including having replacement hardware (rPi running piCorePlayer, jivelite screens, hats, etc.). It’s not Roon, but it’s the next best thing. And third place is really far down from Roon and LMS.
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FWIW I love these “why I bought/left/abandoned Roon [or whatever ]” threads. I discovered Roon from a thread in a J River forum started by a guy who didn’t like J River and its nasty, ego driven management people. Got Roon, dumped J River. Very happy at the moment. I learn a lot from audiophile forum squabbling…though I have to say that at least 80% of what I learn is nonsense. There are more stupid opinions peddled as “fact” in audio than in any other public forum I can identify. (Like the guy on Audiogon who insisted that the kiln dried maple platform on which he put his turntable created noticeably better sound than the oak structure he’d been using before that.)
What DOES seem to be an irrefutable fact, however, is that digital audio is a young and evolving technology, and there will be lots of short-lived victories for some companies, false starts mistaken for genius with others, some keepers, some stillborn. All part of the soup.
We’ve come a long way in a short time since RIAA was suing teenagers for stealing music on Napster, the music industry was “dead,” and we were thrilled when someone was able to put a CD in a mobile, battery operated device that we could take with us.
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I’m not sure I’d go that far. Digital audio is a quite mature field which most of the low hanging fruit has already been plucked for any given bit rate and depth.
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Thanks. New info! See? New info from an audio forum can happen.
Major topic drift: But now, having read your link, and seeing that the concept is credited with having originated with SF, I find myself wondering where I can find the 10% of SF that isn’t crap. I might have a different opinion of the genre if I found that hidden gold. The SF community doesn’t seem to self-curate quite as ruthlessly as other genres, though I suspect that’s a marketing failure more than anything.
May be. But I suspect you’re not as old as I am, so your metric for “young and evolving” is probably quite different than mine, or even that of the global economy.
I bought my first Sony Walkman (cassette) in 1983 in Tokyo. It was about $100, and we all thought that was a deal. CD’s were fairly exotic, called by some “the gift that keeps on taking,” given how pricey CD’S were. The exotica of DVD’s was still out of reach to the mass market, if many even had heard of it. Our fathers joked about programming VHS machines to tape Johnny Carson. MTV was considered cutting edge content. Streaming video was on a par with the Jetson’s in terms of future tripping. NASA was still launching space shuttles. Challenger hadn’t exploded yet, and Columbia wasn’t built yet. No one owned a PC, and the building-sized DOS machine that IBM started with started appearing in homes—along with its small library of books and manuals—shortly after that. That was all while I was in college.
Windows didn’t even exist yet, so Apple hadn’t even sued Microsoft for infringement. That didn’t happen until 1995. Just after my 10th reunion.
I watched the first internet explosion, and then later, implosion, and in my law practice took a few early internet millionaires through bankruptcy. Amazon was just an upstart online bookseller. Justin Bieber and Paris Hilton weren’t born yet. No one knew that Michael Jackson was a pedophile.
Roon was in beta at 2015 CES. When I was 20 years old, technology that had been around for 5 years was mature, having existed for 25% of my life. It would take considerably longer than that now for something to have kept my attention for 25% of my lifetime.
We also see industry consolidation happen with mind numbing speed, and I would not be even a little surprised if Roon, Tidal, Qobuz, Idagio, Spotify were all bundled into one in the not distant future. Probably owned by Amazon, the upstart online bookseller.
So I’m sticking with my story. [Wink, wink] Digital audio is a young and evolving technology…in a very unstable marketplace.
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It’s all relative. CD’s are 40 years old, and many of us grew up with morse code.
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Yeah. I still have blankets with burn marks from my days as a smoke signal proof reader.
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.-. — — -.
Morse code??
I had my mail delivered by pony express!
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Being in business and especially technology business for years, I can tell you my opinion. Some companies like Amazon wants to lock customers by not opening their platform for third parties like Roon. The reason is because they want control the customer. So, when you are running their app they can advertise to you, and use you as a product to other customers. They do not care about your music subscription but your data.
I like Roon because their business model is clean. You have only the music to enjoy. Imagine Roon giving you free subscription but annoys your life with ads including the selling of what you even listen to other companies. Respect to Qobuz also. Tidal has this MQA agenda which is a shame.
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