Why I've quit Roon after a few years use

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

@mikeb

The MBL “Roon Module” uses a Raspberry Pi embedded with Roon Bridge, very cool!

not Roon Bridge – it uses the RAAT/RoonReady SDK.

[Nyquist]

@Sallah_48

If I’d seen Roon actively accept and work on the crappy little details within the software for which so many people, me included, have been clamouring for refinement for so long, then I would have probably kept with Roon.

I don’t know why this thread has exploded into a upnp - dlna discussion. That’s was not of any concern of the OP and shouldn’t be your concern as well. Raat is perfectly fine, Roons multiroom system works like a charm, it’s all the little frustrating things in the UI that is the problem. There has been next to none development in the basic features of Roon which are still full of annoying things. The fact that there is no progress in the very basics is what’s concerning the OP. That’s what this thread was about.

[AndyR (Andy)]

To be fair, I think the Roon UI is probably overall, generally, broadly (you get the idea) at least as good as anything else. Personally I’d rather trade a bit of polish on the UI for a properly thought through, well designed and implemented fundamental architecture. A bit like I’d rather have a well designed chassis and suspension on a car so that it actually behaves properly without the intervention of all the current nanny electronics…

Which is not to say I wouldn’t welcome some improvements!

[Nyquist]

@AndyR

Personally I’d rather trade a bit of polish on the UI for a properly thought through, well designed and implemented fundamental architecture

That goes hand in hand with a good UI, unless you mean more audiophile features.

[AndyR (Andy)]

I most definitely don’t mean ‘audiophile’ features…

[RobOK]

@Phil_Ryan

If this has not improved by the end of my subscription it will not renew.
I mainly use Apple Music and Sonos as the main household interfaces and Roon is in a minority for usage hours.

There are many threads on this. There are not any music services getting added anytime soon, at least not announced. Spotify is not HiRes. Apple and Amazon won’t play with deep API integration. SoundCloud limits API playcounts dramatically. (Sonos obviosly is a HW platform not a service). So if Tidal and Qobuz don’t offer what you need, then Roon might not be for you.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

thanks @RobOK – thats a great summary of the situation with the streaming services.

Spotify also wont do any commercial api stuff, so that’s out.

Sonos is obviously the big exception to everyone… its because they have most of the market share.

[Jacques_Distler]

@danny

While that volume thing sounds like a bug, UPnP is fundamentally flawed:

@AndersVinberg: We are working with Bel Canto to get RAAT into their devices. Our contempt for UPnP basically comes down to a few things: UPnP requires codec support on the endpoint, therefore making different endpoints support a different subset of whats out there. This also puts a burden of patent licensing on the manufacturer. UPnP has no good solution for streaming proprietary/unsupported/new formats UPnP creates an ecosystem of lowest common denominator support UPnP lacks “a brain”, like…

Having spent several years in a UPnP/OpenHome environment before switching to Roon/RAAT (and having made a few very minor contributions to the leading open-source implementation, upmpdcli), I find many of the points made there to be tendentious at best.

Nevertheless, I don’t really wish to argue the matter, as I agree with the bottom line:

1. RAAT has many advantages over UPnP/OpenHome.
2. There’s no good rationale for Roon to implement the latter.

[ged_hickman1]

UPnP was never universal or plug and play.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

ok this topic has gone way off topic in so many directions… and I’m one of the contributions to that

closing this one out.

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

Just a follow up here by the OP:

Back into the fold after 7 months hiatus...a fresh perspective and still some compromise

I’ve been using a combination of Musicbee, Bubble Upnp and Serviio, to sort of give me the Roon experience on the cheap. In the end after slumming it for 7 months, I’ve come back to Roon. The main reason is because, for all its foibles and relatively high outlay, Roon still does local networking the best. Frankly I’m just fed up with intermittent upnp connection to local devices like chromecast and DAPs. Musicbee’s been fine and that’s where the compromise comes in. Since Roon does not have a…