Why Roon? What are our reasons to stick with Roon?

Don’t sit in the White Room too long :joy:

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: What happens with the lifetime subscribers if the company folds or is sold?

1- integration of streaming/own files/radio in a single app
2- distributing musing all over the house for all family members, partner and kids friendly. Full control of my Devialet amp and PI-based other endpoints.
3- DSP features for speaker and room correction
4- Alarm-clock extension for musical wakeup and handling of radio accross the house, from bed to kitchen to shower

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For me it is RAAT. Then the DSP. Without RAAT I would not use Roon I think. I have used a microRendu with Roon since I purchased a license. Hasn’t failed once! I also use Roon/AIR since I own a Devialet 250 Pro and find it comparable to RAAT, but I prefer the sound via microRendu (and a Mutec reclocker). My speakers and their placement dictate use of DRC. The DSP engine in Roon makes this very easy. I’m not a big fan of the ‘other’ features of Roon. I really want to disable a lot of that, but I’ve learned to ignore most of it… I only use a local library by the way. No Tidal or Qobuz. And one more thing; Roon is very solid and stable!

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Content of post removed by Frank_Daman

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Why I stick with Roon? I like RAAT. The sound, and the convenience of getting sound all around the house. I also like the simplicity of it all.

But that doesn’t mean that I should “abandon ship” just because I feel the team is on the wrong track from time to time.

Paying by subscription means I pay from year to year. I totally understand new features will be implemented from time to time, the software should develop of course. But some of the requests are quite old, and many are about basic functionality, such as for instance being able to browse a box set without having to use other software to do it. Being told that’s a solution to the problem, that doesn’t surprise me anymore. So people who have a problem or two with how things are being done, or how the team makes their priorities, they should all just stop paying their subscription and start use other software? How is that a solution to anything?

Being a paying customer and having my reasons for sticking with Roon, naturally I question the priorities being made from time to time. Things are being worked on and changed as the software develop, bugs are being sorted out and so on. But much of it has nothing to do with basic functionality. Often it creates quite a stir as well, because of how it’s done. We’re all sifting through feedback about the 1.6 update still, and it’s not all positive, quite the opposite in fact. How important box sets are for me or not – shouldn’t be a factor here at all. Being able to at least have separate album covers on each item in a box belongs to the category of functionality I consider to be very basic today. I mean, come on – if I have understood it correctly even JRiver can do this. Roon shouldn’t be fiddling around with basic functionality any longer, these things should be “boxed” a long time ago in my opinion.

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Roon is polarizing, no doubt. I’ve analogized in the past that Roon is like the burger place with the best burgers in town, hands down, but for some weird reason they refuse to serve fries (“chips, no fries!”).

I have demoed Roon to folks and they’ve been heavily impressed. I’ve demoed Roon to folks and they’ve been very “meh” if not surprised that anyone would pay the price for it.

Roon does things better than any other music library software out there. Roon can’t get some very basic stuff right and seems to make very odd interface choices that you wonder how they ever got off the glass wall with the sticky post-its.

I love my time with Roon because:

  • Integration with Tidal and Qobuz make one’s collection feel virtually unlimited.

  • A virtually unlimited collection combined with some metadata helps me to identify music I should have been aware of a long time ago and makes each Roon session a new experience

  • The RAAT/client/core model with multiple control/display points and endpoints synchronized as enabled me to really Borg my music system all over the house

  • The latest Roon Radio seems to work well with the genres/seeds I have tried for the most part and has also helped me discover new music

  • It’s really fun to poke at the Roon fan-sters

Roon frustrates me because:

  • Many of the features feel half-finished…Discover, tags, box set handling, inter-operability with other library management tools (recognition of custom embedded metatags); slowness/performance

  • It takes too long to fix bugs and obvious missteps - artist photo cropping and zoom, lack of large album cover art in Now Playing; issues with Realtek drivers (which are not going anywhere)

  • It doesn’t match the other big players in terms of custom configurations and pages although it’s generally more attractive

  • It includes some goofy philosophical choices like no drag and drop play, no folder navigation, etc.

  • It is priced like it should have already solved the above issues

Bottom line, Roon is good enough to wait out the issues, but it’s perfectly reasonable for those who feel they’ve paid a substantial amount for the software to keep pushing for advertised or half-implemented features to be improved.

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Though everyone will have their own definition of base functionality. I think roon radio is fantastic and am really glad that resources went there. I have a few box sets which I’ve coped with.
I went to roon as it looked like sooloos which I loved for the metadata, with those links and radio it keeps me amused for hours. I’m now getting told I’m doing too much screen time by my wife.
I personally never really look at the artist pictures or album art.
For everyone that passionately cares about a feature there are those who don’t give a fig. I know there are many who don’t use the radio feature etc.
When I was talking to product owners at Microsoft about how over feature rich products are and the 3% of word/excel people know and use. They would respond with, yes but it’s a different three percent for different users.

Hmmh … It looks like there are two tribes here. I’m in the “pretty pleased tribe”. For me the positive aspects of Roon that keep me using it are:

  • Search. Allows me to search through a lot of albums in a more natural manner than scanning file folders. The links embedded in the descriptions are a fantastic way of looking at a collection in a non-linear fashion.

  • Sound quality. I think it is pretty good. At least it is definitely good enough for me.

  • Hardware/Software Compatibility. I’m not locked into a small eco-system. Although I do like tinkering with stuff - I prefer listening to music more.

  • Aesthetics of the UI. I like the way Roon looks. I’m not saying that I necessarily like everything in version 1.6 but I think that the Roon team has a good approach.

  • Music discovery. I was using non-Roon sources for my music discovery (primarily Amazon music). This worked fairly well but was very cumbersome. I dropped Amazon and switched to Tidal. Huge improvement. Now the Roon radio continues to improve the experience. When Qobuz gets out of its trial stage in the US, I might add or switch to that for music discovery. Due to the state of streaming (general lack of profits) I think this is a really good idea that Roon maintains a relationship with multiple streamers.

  • The other thing that I should mention is that I have no friends that are “into” music. So I don’t find out about new music unless I search. Roon, Tidal, and the “what are listening to” threads on this forum have been of immense help to me in finding new and new-to-me music.

  • Updates. The frequent updates show the commitment to the product and don’t seem traumatic when they occur. I know some have had severe issues but mine have been painless. Also, my main trauma with software updates revolve around the update not occurring/having a major functional flaw or the update changes/hides/moves stuff in an incredibly confusing fashion. I have not had these types of problems with Roon updates.

What are my negatives in Roon?

  • Updates. I think that Roon should have a way to temporarily roll back or a better way to delay an update. It just makes it easier for the user if they have an issue with a new release.

  • Classical Music. I actually think Roon does okay with this - BUT i have not seen anyone do it well. Classical is just a mess. You generally have the same orchestra and conductor but the albums frequently have multiple composers. Search is your friend in classical or setting up a lot of tags. I’m not sure of solution here . . .

  • Editing your library. Although Roon lets you fix some minor things inside the software, I sometimes use an external editor for some issues. I know Roon wants to stay away from being a program with a full fledged editor but perhaps Roon could team with someone to help with some Roon-centric utilities in a stan-alone editor.

There are also some things I’m pretty neutral about such as cost. I used the trial download and then bought the lifetime subscription. If Roon lasts five years I’ll be happy. Nothing is permanent and that is why I buy rather than stream when possible. So if Roon really is my lifetime solution, that is fantastic. For me, it works better than any music software I have used . . . and I hope I will be able to continue to say that for at least a few years.

There really isn’t any competition. The metadata pulls, weak as they may seem to some, are a big deal, and hard for anyone else to replicate. The integrations with TIDAL and Qobuz probably required a lot of negotiation which would similarly be hard to duplicate. And the secret RAAT protocol being adopted by so many upscale hardware manufacturers makes it a nice “moat” to protect against competition in the distributed LAN player space.

Whatta ya gonna do? Switch to Spotify or Apple Music or Google Play Music?

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I guess I’m in both tribes then, because I agree with most of your points, except for aesthetics of the UI. :slight_smile: I even agree with your positive aspects of Search, it’s just the way it currently looks I object to.

Also, I keep fairly silent most of the time, but inspired by @Jan_M_Thorsen’s post, I think it’s important to also let this perspective be heard a bit more from time to time, because the way Roon is developing up to now, I think your tongue in cheek remark about two tribes actually does contain a bit of truth.:wink:

Grump, Thanks for the comments!

I’m not in love with V1.6 but it is acceptable to me. However, I have not had issues with some of the extreme photo cropping issues some have had. Some of the cropping has been noticeable but again - something I can live with.

Same with search. No speed issues with me at all. If that was really slow for me I would be fairly irritated.

I just wanted to throw some some positive input and personal criticisms into the mix.

And I’ll close by saying I have no idea what software I would choose if Roon went bust. I want it to keep going and getting better - I think the alternatives that are out there are fair at best (and I mean that as a personal subjective judgement).

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Seems like my thread starter has opened up a can of worms!

I’ve come full circle in the last 2 years using Roon through the stages of

great initial enthusiam->annoyance at limitations->positive recommendations for no-brainer improvements -> disenchantment at the lack of development in any of my suggestions -> despondency -> acceptance in the status quo and what I can do with Roon -> enthusiasm and hope for the long term future

I really do sympathise with those who are at the disenchantment stage and hope they can overcome this :slight_smile:

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I identified with the comment about going through phases of ups and downs. At first I thought common recommendations like box set improvements or even smaller items was something to expect but I have quickly learned to focus on what I like and work arounds to perceived limitations. When new things come out I am trying to explore if they are of interest vs thinking about what wasn’t added.

Thus I liked this thread about what we like and why we stay.

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My strong reason to stick with Roon is sound quality. (strange that not many people mentioned it)

I used to listen through software such as Audirvana on iMac to my external USB DAC to my on ear headphone. The iMac runs on pure SSD. However, no matter how I tweaked the settings the sound was just not good enough. It’s harsh and not smooth. I wonder its the combined effect of coreaudio and noise.

I tried other popular software too, but there’s always other reasons pushing me off, such as bad GUI, poor library management, slow response, complicated setup, too many settings, instability or sound quality issues.

So happen I receive an ipad pro 2018 12.9 inches as a gift but the size is too large for daily use. So I make use of it and try the following setup:

[Music library+Roon Core@synology NAS ds918] —(wifi)–>
[Roon Bridge@ipad pro] --(usb-c)–>>
[USB TYPE C hub with power delivery (with mechanical timer on at night for charging)] —(usb-a) -->
[Audio-gd NFB-11] -->
[Headphone]

The sound is very pure, clean, detailed and dynamic. So I bought the Roon lifetime subscription.

The solution is not perfect as I need to unlock the ipad (with face ID) every time I listen. Another problem is ipad pro with usb type-c interface cannot play DSD over PCM (but iphone/old ipad with USB type-a interface can). And I dislike the number of cables and boxes. My library and roon core still stay at ds918, but I might like to try another all-in-one endpoint such as the new Teac NT-505. But I am afraid the SQ can’t match. Any idea?

yeah i was trying to make it +ve, haha.

actually it’s fascinating to see the general level of marmite love/hate going on here. “i love this BUT hate this” sort of thing. It seems that many many people are going thru these stages. It should be an interesting analysis for Roon to try and work out what’s going right and all equally what’s not.

time for some market research, perhaps, for roon to consider what they should actually be developing, lol :slight_smile:

With a mix of 24 and 16 bit music in my local library and a mix of 24- and 16-bit capable endpoints (Moon in living room, 16-bit only Sonos in other rooms) I used to have to keep two different copies of my library when streaming over UPnP. Now Roon does live bit rate conversion based on the endpoint, and it’s all happy days no matter what the source file reads.

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Having been through most of the alternatives, and having built multiple RPi streamers over the last few years (Moode, Plex, Volumio etc), the combination of Roon + Ropieee has proven by far the most functional and easiest to deploy - I’ve now coughed up for lifetime membership of Roon, which - given my propensity to build my own kit and software - has to be a heary recommendation. Discovery can still be a little dodgy with both local library and Tidal, it’s nearly impossible to find MQA content and the metadata model for cataloguing and finding classical content is absolutely laughable. But I do see a properly supported and developed product, in which some real effort has gone into UX and UI design and which I therefore hope will resolve the outstanding issues in the nearish future.

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There is simply nothing else that handles consolidated album versions and generally curates my large library as well as Roon

Add in the rich associated metadata linking, I can spend hours learning new things about artists and albums in my collection.

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Hi Sallah! Funny I did not really notice that I went through the same cycle. Finding Roon, loving what it did well, then realizing my curating work within Roon wouldn’t mostly be portable if Roon folded and thus begging for inter-operability. Thinking those were reasonably requests that everyone would want. Then just nothing on any of it. Yet Roon is too fun to stop using.

In effect, they sweetened the liquid in their venus fly trap rather than provided a way out. Not sure if that is brilliant or nefarious. I guess it could be both!

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