Sure I like things about Roon. What Roon promises to be is exactly what I’m looking for:
Properly organise my library and let me effortlessly browse it when I’m in the mood
Play matching new music (most important)
Seamlessly integrate library and streaming service
Be my radio, without the radio hassle (no ads, track skipping, personalization)
Play internet radio
Unfortunately, for my use case, only the last point is true, that’s why I turned away. I wrote this post to help Roon to evolve. I’m glad @mike already stated that they hear me.
This just plain wrong for so many people out there that use Roon and one or both streaming services.
Most of the music I listen too was recorded prior to 1985. Qobuz and Tidal my have 99% of the music I have physical copies of, but they don’t have the masterings I prefer. The CDs and SACDs I do own do have the masterings I prefer. The difference is not small either.
So please don’t assume that your usage patterns and requirements are universal. Because, based on what you wrote, I can assure they are not…
Since this thread has been airing some of the fundamental design choices of how the software thinks (album centric, etc). One thing I noticed that I do NOT like is that your music metadata can be changed without your consent. An example is that The Dixie Chicks decided that the “dixie” in their name is a little too much of a hot potato these days and changed their name to “The Chicks”, which is all well and good. But Roon went in and changed all the previous mentions of “The Dixie Chicks” to “The Chicks”. So in the library, there are albums labeled “The chicks” where the cover art right above it clearly says “The Dixie Chicks”
As someone who has spent decades meticulously grooming their metadata, this rubs me wrong. Fortunately Roon is polite enough to not reach into the files themselves and change the embedded metadata.
@Sheldon_Stokes, Is this true even if in settings you tell Roon to use your file metadata for artist name rather than Roon? I’m not at home to check my own Dixie Chicks albums.
Yes, one can tell JShiver not to change metadata, but like everything else in the program the option is buried in a morass of other options and its use is not intuitive.
The only thing I would agree with is that Valence is a failure. At first, I thought it was good. But I’ve also noticed that Tidal’s AI is very good at discovering new artists and that Roon is picking music that is nothing at all like what I was listening to. Perfect Example is Sam Brookes, Kairos. I really don’t think Mogwai’s “Remurdered” is a good match - and it picked a bunch of music that was all over the place - this was just a few days ago. Very frustrating. But when I got on a drive in the car and listen to Tidal, I’m finding I’m creating completely new playlists of all these new artists that Tidal suggests and plays. Totally disappointed by Valence.
On the other hand, putting all your songs into one folder called EDM is classifying all of them as EDM - so why not just change their artists to EDM, and the song name to the format of " [ARTIST] - [ SONG_NAME].FLAC" ?? You can use a lot of programs for managing your collection but Tag & Rename allows you to rename files and tags in bulk in the way I just explained. My suggestion is to get with the times, learn how to tag things and manipulate programs to your liking and move on and stop complaining. Because nothing is exactly perfect - especially software. There are too many people to keep happy.
My hat’s off to Brian and the Roon team. You guys who hailed from Soolos, to Roon have some serious chops and have created a wonderful program in Roon. Don’t let the haters get you down. A lot of us LOVE Roon - and that includes me.
What might be interesting is some sort of ‘pass through’ option for Tidal and Qobuz where one could use their ‘radio’ function instead of Roon’s Probably an impossibility but just throwing it out there.
Honestly I couldn’t live without Roon at this point (and why would I having invested in a lifetime and dedicated server). My main gripe is and always has been the navigation (click here and here and here to get there) and lack of universal functions (such as being able to filter down the complete library from any page view). But I have a feeling Roon know this and we will see (fingers crossed) some changes to this down the road. It is unique in the world of audiophiles, but I can also see how it may struggle to bring in or impress younger users who have a different mindset towards music.
This thread has gone in a predictable direction. Clearly, the motivation for the OP is not to tick off all the Roon fans or to pick at their sore spots but to flag Roon with what he sees as the reasons why he chose not to purchase it. It would be nice if there was a way to do just that without ruffling feathers and precipitating a deluge of dickering.
Probably not, but I’ve let Roon’s suggestions override my metadata on import 98% of the time. I can see that change being made at time of import, but now that my stuff is already in the database, I was surprised to see it change.
If Markus is free and more than welcome to explain why he won’t go further than the trial period, ones are also free to comment why they do not agree.
I think problems could come from assumptions like « everybody or everyone » that irritate people.
To end up, I saw a post from a Roon dev saying that posts like these are helpful to them, then perfect start reading posts requests from guys that use and paid for Roon
my understanding is that Roon is always updating metadata and artwork in the background as it gets newer/better info, even on previously imported files.
There is a way. You can do it through private messaging. It was pointed out that you won’t learn everything about Roon during a trial period, especially if you don’t ask, “how can I do this or that”? He could have taken the time to play a lot of his music, choosing Roon Recommendations (that are albums) to curate a library of new music so the Radio could be more successful. But no, he wants it his way or the highway.
1 Like
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
53
Well, of course there are lots of different ideas about what “properly organise” means. However, I think that adding appropriate tags to albums can help with that a lot, with Roon. But Roon does not help very much in the addition of such tags.
It’s this second thing, “play matching music”, that’s almost impossible. First off, matching what? An album (what it tries to do now)? A track? A set of tracks? The sub-genre of your organization scheme you happen to be in, a scheme of which Roon has no understanding?
Which brings up:
The big difference here is that Tidal has all the tracks to play with, and Roon doesn’t. Last year I started to work my way through the papers at the MIREX conference. A repeated theme is that it’s hard to get the actual music to analyze, so that you can do proper pattern-matching and other forms of correlation on tracks. Roon doesn’t have the actual tracks. Tidal does. Perhaps there’s a way to fix that, and perhaps Roon Labs is working on it. But right now, nope.
Roon simply does not have access to enough of the right kind of metadata about the tracks, in order to make Valence work “properly”, at least for some sizeable subset of Roon subscribers.
So let’s not assume they don’t read the threads. Let’s assume they read them, and are doing their best to implement the good ideas (while politely ignoring backwash like folder view until it becomes unbearable).
Few things in life are perfect. If you’re looking for perfection, you probably need to look elsewhere. And, why does it matter? We’re just listening to music here. If Roon Radio happens to play something you don’t like, click on something else.
I also don’t understand the obsession with metadata. So what if the 3rd seat obo player’s name is spelled wrong? I think some here are so overly obsessed with nits and nats that they lost sight of why we listen to music in the first place.
In my opinion, Roon does a great job of streaming high resolution music from our own music files, Tidal, and Qobuz to our sound systems, as varied as all that can be. At our finger tips, we have access to almost every album ever recorded. All that for $10 per month or $700 for the rest of your life.
That’s really weird mate, I dislike the tidal app, I always buy hi-res physical files of artists I like because tidal pays them crap, I only listen to whole albums, I find internet radio boring and the minute someone says chromecast I just start to feel like a snob! Sorry!
Oh and my kids are the opposite, they like Spotify mp3s playlists titled “bangin parteez” have Apple tv and still use those horrific earbuds that came with their phones! I really I must change…
H
2 Likes
Bill_Janssen
(Wigwam wool socks now on asymmetrical isolation feet!)
57
That’s a very good point, and possibly why spotify, pandora, and apple music seem to do a better job of stringing together a more coherent set of songs to play. Roon Radio with a Qobuz account can be really good if fed the correct album. Like if you feed it a really seminal work like say Fleetwood Mac Rumors; there’s a bunch of obvious music that would match that. But if you toss it something odd or esoteric that doesn’t have much similarity with other artists, it can really struggle. Roon Radio seems to use metadata and artist similarities (ala music map) rather than analyzing the music for tempo, key, etc.
I’m not hugely obsessed with it, but with other music management systems (iTunes etc) metadata is what keeps things tidy. And in my example they renamed an artist without my knowledge. I feel like my dog after someone moved his food bowl… The artist is now filed in the “C’s” instead of the “D’s”
But you are right, we have so much info about each piece of music now. I lament not having high enough resolution album art and wether I should scan my liner notes. And back when I was in my prime, my most played music was on a Maxell cassette in the glove box with like two words scrawled on the label in pen.
Before Roon, I went over 30 years hardly listening to any music except whatever played at random on the car radio. Now, with Roon, Tidal, and Quboz, I can’t stop listening. What a great invention, this interweb. Well, except for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
