Why I VERY nearly didn't Renew my Membership

[Squeezemenicely (Dom)]

Well, I am still testing Roon and have very mixed feelings. As I have a 100% classical collection with about 75% Opera boxsets, I am obviously the most difficult Roon user. The Metadata which issupposed to be the reason for the pricing, is very vague for my stuff. Also I would have to manually identify about 1900 albums mysel, because Roon did not do it, it find 1400 other albums. Without the actual Roon metadata it is a visual upgrade to my Squeezebox universe, but the main kick is missing. I cannot see myself manually identifying moreless 2000 albums, plus grooming.
I would love it, if it actually worked as advertised, but for classical music owners (as read in many posts) it seems to be less than ideal.

Something I really love about Roon, that LMS cannot do - Merge artists. This is a great feature, being able to group Callas and Maria Callas together as 1 artist, often I only used surnames in my tags.
I am really still wondering, in a way I like Roon - but without the actual gimmick of functioning Metadata for my collection, the price does not seem right. It moreless just would do what LMS does well - but looking nicer at it, with some links. Mainly having my own Tags, would probably not be worth it.

[Grump]

I’m with you on that. I have 8k+ classical albums and have been through each and every step you describe. It is drama (no operatic pun intended ). It is also extremely time consuming, and I agree Roon needs to do a lot better on this. Especially on box sets, still little progress has been made over the past few years.

[John_V]

Roons UX is like being voted most attractive person in the hospital burns unit.

ROFL ten more characters

[steveoat87]

I hope the Roon folks are paying attention to this important thread. I am a lifetime member with a strong investment in Roon improving. I agree with many of the concerns voiced. Thus far, nobody from Roon has commented on this thread. I hope we hear from them in the near future.

[Mike_O_Neill]

I did ask @Joel to comment or pass on BUT

[James_I (The truth is out there but not necessarily here)]

I get the feeling they’re very busy with something. It may not be a new software release, but I’ve noticed that the Roon team has been pretty quiet in the past couple of months.

There may be some bi-product of the lifetime subscription going on here. I mean, if all of the collection groomers have already signed on to a lifetime license, they’re not going to get any more money from them. That means they don’t have to listen to them anymore and thus can focus on bringing in a new demographic of subscriber.

See, this is why I keep my license annual. It’s all about leverage!

[steveoat87]

I get the feeling they’re very busy with something. It may not be a new software release, but I’ve noticed that the Roon team has been pretty quiet in the past couple of months.

There may be some bi-product of the lifetime subscription going on here. I mean, if all of the collection groomers have already signed on to a lifetime license, they’re not going to get any more money from them. That means they don’t have to listen to them anymore and thus can focus on bringing in a new demographic of subscriber.

See, this is why I keep my license annual. It’s all about leverage!

I don’t agree with this. Lifetime customers are Roon’s best customers and the ones most invested in the product. They are also the best ambassadors to other potential users as well as those most willing to give the Roon team useful feedback. I feel they are committed to keeping us happy with the product and the considerable monetary investment.

[James_I (The truth is out there but not necessarily here)]

Well I was half joking. However they do already have your money and thus the profit motive in pleasing the lifetime subscribers isn’t there relative to a new demographic of subscribers.

I just wonder if they feel they have already captured the majority of collection groomers, and thus have been going at other ways to expand their install base - i.e. hardware integrations rather than UI/UX enhancements for collection organization. I have no idea and don’t mean to make accusations. It was just something that occurred to me as I was writing my prior reply, and I thought I’d throw it out there.

[mikeb]

I get the feeling they’re very busy with something. It may not be a new software release, but I’ve noticed that the Roon team has been pretty quiet in the past couple of months.

Hopefully they’re busy working on Devialet RAAT certification

[Edward_Nazarko]

I’m also on the bubble for renewing Roon. I know they source the metadata from somewhere else, but I find it very often to be wrong, and wrong in a weird, weird way. Like a hard edged R&B album labeled “easy listening” weird. The Roon genres are just soooooo broad, something I’d been able to fix in my JRiver library management with an hour of time here and there. I don’t listen to “world music” - I break it down by regions in Africa and Asia, whether it’s classical or electronic Indian. Calypso and Reggae just don’t belong in the same category when I’m listening.

I do so much of my listening when working so the deep background data doesn’t get much of a workout, and even there, I often find what I’ve read deserves a shrug.

What’s holding me is the Tidal integration.

I know a number of people for whom the genres are fine, and they happily sit at read the background info on their tablets and jump around song to song. I completely understand market segmentation… I may just not be the right target market for Roon.

[xxx (Banned - toxicity)]

The Roon genres are just soooooo broad

This has always been my big complaint. ‘Focus on Similiar’ is useless a lot of the time in that one can end up with a selection of tens of albums that really have nothing to do with the current criteria.

I think one of the main culprits is the Pop/Rock genre. It seems to be a catchall that negatively effects the returns of ‘Focus on Similiar’.

[Rugby (aka Daniel or Big Dan)]

Soundtracks are a big culprit of mashing normally un-associated genres together.

[Dajokr]

Only slightly off topic, since it is about classical streaming: if you’d like to see the Classical streaming service Primephonic integrated with Roon, you can register a request here:

Primephonic audio connectivity

[Dajokr]

Oh, and in response to the thread title, I just re-upped for a year. Not fully satisfied, but there’s enough to keep me around to see how things shake out.

[Sallah_48 (David)]

Roon-Tags are one of the best features in Roon (also frustratingly underdeveloped though) - It’s probably THE main reason I keep plugging away with Roon. Tags are your fixall friend!

[Krutsch (Recovering Audiophile & Snake-oil Addict)]

Yes, tags can save the day. Here is an example: I have a collection of RCA Living Stereo SACDs ripped into my collection. In iTunes, I added (Living Stereo) to the album title for each one.

It was nice when Roon displayed this versioning information, but I am noticing that this is now BROKEN - I tend to annotate albums with (SACD) or [Remastered] and none of this is displaying, anymore. Yes… I’ve checked the Library Import settings.

EDIT: correction. This is working. Operator error.

Anyway, In iTunes, to create a smart playlist that captures my collection, I simply look for album titles that contain “Living Stereo”.

In Roon, you cannot “Focus” on arbitrary meta data (e.g. something in the Comments or Description tag, or search against a title). So, to create my Living Stereo “Focus Group”, I had to focus by genre and label (RCA, RCA Victor, RCA Victor Living Stereo, RCA Red Seal). Of course, that pulled in other albums. And, it missed some, as the Roon label data was incorrect for a few albums. So, I corrected these.

Then, I selected the 42 albums from my Living Stereo collection and then added an explicit tag. Now, I can Focus on that tag and save it as a bookmark.

Too much work, to be honest, and also error prone: if I rip another Living Stereo disc, I have to remember to add the Roon tag.

I really wish the Roon folks would have taken some cues from iTunes and it’s Smart Playlist capabilities. I know it’s popular to trash iTunes, but their library is amazingly flexible.

[James_I (The truth is out there but not necessarily here)]

search against a title). So, to create my Living Stereo “Focus Group”, I had to focus by genre and label (RCA, RCA Victor, RCA Victor Living Stereo, RCA Red Seal). Of course, that pulled in other albums. And, it missed some, as the Roon label data was incorrect for a few albums. So, I corrected these.

Then, I selected the 42 albums from my Living Stereo collection and then added an explicit tag. Now, I can Focus on that tag and save it as a bookmark.

Too much work, to be honest, and also error prone: if I rip another Living Stereo disc, I have to remember to add the Roon tag.

I really wish the Roon folks would have taken some cues from iTunes and it’s Smart Playlist capabilities. I know it’s popular to trash iTunes, but their library is amazingly flexible.

Amazing! This is the type of gymnasitcs I’ve had to use in order to create smart playlists for myself. It would be SOOOO darned easy for Roon to recognize and allow search/focus on the other metadata in the files. It really is a shame it isn’t done.

You can see it in the Roon database - go to track, view file info, then file tags - the info is all there! But Roon won’t use it!

[anon73739233]

This is my #1 gripe with Roon. There is so much potential there. But they seem to make no effort to unlock it. The product could be a lot smarter and a lot easier to use. At the moment I just don’t see the appetite for it. When you have users having to come up with protracted workarounds it’s a pretty clear sign something isn’t right.

[Cheung_Hon_Wah]

This is the most annoying scenario ever faced in ROON, just share it and no solution yet, I have to wait for long holidays to do all the editing and cover photo updating

I have a series of CD called RCA Best 100 (not box set but 100 individual disc), as I don’t want to rename 100 folders, so I Keep Master folder of. RCA Best100, and 100 folders from CD001 to CD100, every folder contains individual FLAC files for each tracks and imgxxx for cover photo and Backxxx.jpg for back side of cd case, after imported into ROON, ROON imported 100 albums but imported 200 photos in RCA Best100 folder, and select single photo represents all 100 disc, so you can see difference album but with single photo, I have to update them one by one manually, super time consuming exercise!

[CrystalGipsy (Resisting the flow!)]

That’s not was stopping Roon. It’s the abiliry to add their material and play it from your local library and database that is Roons issue with all the other services. It’s their philosophy and sp that it all integrates into one library. If the service does not allow this via APIs then Roon wont look at it This was the issue with Qobuz, so maybe they have renegade on this and let them access what is needed if it’s going ahead. Spotify won’t allow this as they want only access via their own app.