Why I VERY nearly didn't Renew my Membership

I agree with the OP - box set management in Roon is atrocious at present. At the very least we should have the ability to label discs, and to be able to display album art for the individual discs in the set.

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No that is not the case. I do not use DSP in my room at all.

However, I do use parametric eq to compensate for some bad recordings. For example, 80’s pop/rock seems to be mastered for walkman, and has little bass.

Another case is if you have CDs with pre-emphasis then you might want to apply a de-emphasis filter to compensate. Once ripped the emphasis information is lost and if your ripper is bit-perfect it does not compensate for pre-emphasis when ripping.

A third case is when you have CD rips from HDCD-encoded discs - these should be decoded to 24/44 on the fly regardless of your endpoint.

So as you can see these are three cases where track-based DSP would be useful.

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I have to admit, that’s a level of commitment I’m not up for. I am impressed that you are. I accept recordings for what they are, and consider them a feature of the music - that can be fixed by a remastering, but not something I’d consider doing. I do think it’s an interesting proposition - especially if I could do so on a “mass” basis - eg, “find all tracks that meet these criteria, and apply this DSP to all of them”. But I couldn’t actually imagine doing it individual track by track.

My question on features like this is - how does Roon assess what is a feature where the USP is valuable to a broad enough segment of the market that it creates differentiation. I’m not claiming I’m right or you’re right - I have no way of knowing - I just wonder how Roon does its product marketing to assess what they should prioritize. What to you seems like an obvious architectural choice / user need doesn’t to me - but I’m not a sound engineer nor am I a product marketer or PM in audio.

I would like this feature, too! Track based, but also or even more album based. So many things that could be ‘improved’/personalized. No must to use it for those that are interested to hear what the master engineer did. And it could even be extended to within track changes of DSP settings. Would be a great feature.

That’s called tone controls. Plenty of integrated amps, preamps and receivers with those on the market. If it wa something simple for Roon to integrate I would say sure why not, but personally I’d rather they focus on more universal needs/fixes than yet more DSP.

I think they’re just happy with what they’ve got! My take on what Roon is is here:

Since I wrote that, they’ve fixed the issue with the LYRICS tag!

What I have found is that one particular curve seems to be fairly universal, at least roughly so. The parametric graph is below. So really not an album-by-album tweaking (which I agree would be grueling). But what I want is to be able to assign a saved eq curve to tracks or albums. The curve below is saved as “80’s” and I could assign that to whatever albums I decide needs adjustment.

As for the Roon book of work and how things are prioritized there, I would argue that this is any software product. Consider for example Photoshop: It has a breakneck evolution and new/improved features all the time. Surely not every feature requested by users makes it to the final version, but clearly a lot do. I don’t see the same level of customer requested evolution in Roon.

And I am willing to state that track-based DSP is something that should be available. Period.

That’s not the way a software company should behave. Consider Audirvana and JRiver: they have evolved relatively quickly. Audirvana has incorporated some user requested features (in fact some I requested). JRiver has fixed bugs I showed them.

Like I said, maybe this is a case of having started from a 20 year old technology (Sooloos) and all of the baggage that comes with evolving such a beast. I don’t know if this is the case, but it looks like it given the exponential decrease of evolution speed in Roon.

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“Should”? Companies of all sorts, software and otherwise, behave as they do for all sorts of reasons. Privately held companies, like Roon Labs, have fewer constraints, and fewer owners jerking them around. I think Roon is more or less exactly what the three owners want it to be.

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I agree. Companies “should” behave as they choose. They are offering a product for a price to a target market. Customers will buy it or not. If not, then maybe they need to reconsider their product, price, or target market, or all of the above.

Ok, I agree companies are what they decide to be. However, I would argue that even bugs are not being addressed - consider for example the crashes on iPhone. I experience those everyday so keep resorting to my iPad to control Roon. The crash has been outstanding for over a year. No solution yet, but the cause is fairly clear: a memory leak.

So although I agree there is no requirement for a company to add features at all, there is some level of responsibility to provide PAYED software that does not crash.

Fit for purpose, I think the Brits call that. Maybe the Roon guys don’t use iPhones. :slight_smile:

Look, you’ve got a reasonable feature request that I find interesting: allow association of various DSP processing to tracks, not just zones. But have you ever heard the line, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar? Running down the product doesn’t seem to be the most effective way to get the Roon development team to pay attention to your otherwise entirely reasonable feature.

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I don’t know why, but my iPhone 11 Pro Max never crashes, nor did my iPhone 6S Plus. Just lucky I guess, although I don’t believe in luck.

Imagine having asigned track based EQ to hundreds, maybe even thousands of tracks and you decide to buy yourselfs a new pair of loudspeaker, or a subwoofer, then what? Start all over again?

While I do see the value of eq-ing certain albums I don’t think a track based eq is the way to go. I think a better way is to have a couple of presets that can be instantly controlled by infrared remote, or Roon control app. That’s what I have been doing for the last 20 years, works like a charm. I have three presets that cover everything from the nastiest 80’s recordings to the most overblown modern hip-hop. Even if track based eq became a feature I don’t think I would ever use it, nor will the majority of Roon users I guess. Not everyone is tweaking things to dead, most people just listen to music instead.

Not about listening only. When great tracks are not well eqed I correct them for my own pleasure. It would be nice Roon would allow me to keep my tweaks. That’s what I expect from the premium offer.

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I am tired of being nice and helpful!

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You don’t want to know what I expect form a premium software that isn’t there or functions badly in Roon. DSP is somewhere way down low on my list.

I am not suggesting eliminating endpoint-based DSP. As you can obviously see, if you have a track that has rolled off bass, you should be able to adjust that and such a correction would apply to all endpoints.

As an example, the 80’s eq curve I mentioned above sounds great on my tube/avantgarde horn system, my chord mojo/aeon 2 closed headphones, etc.

Additionally, notice my request means linking a saved eq curve to tracks/albums - all I need to do is modify this saved curve and all tracks will pick up the change.

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Yes I agree. There’s clearly higher priority items than track-based DSP. Like fixing the iPhone crashes which has not happened in over 1 year. And the reason for this is known - all logs point to a memory leaks in the iPhone implementation. Yet, no fix. Which is why I wonder how well the core of Roon is written in the first place.

It looks that this concept I would like to have is too much out of imagination of some. Now they fight for their house curve how do they want to handle their track curve when they have 120k tracks?? But still the availability of this should be there in a modern ‘player’, more so on a music management system. All single and bulk processing should be offered, please all, lock at what is offered for photography, so difficult to to have it in audio?