Will local files come to be regarded as being as obsolete as turntables?

Then obviously record replay is simply not for you and I respect that, and everyone else who is like minded.
Conversely please show the same respect for those who still have a deep passion for playback of a record and all it’s little foibles :sunglasses:

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Absolutely. Cracking a joke does not necessarily mean lack of respect though. I can rephrase on a more serious note: I don’t think it’s desirable to have to clean physical media - or do anything that is unquantifiable - to ensure a certain sound quality. It introduces an element of uncertainty that taints the experience for me.

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There is so much missing on all the platforms that I I still own they will likely never appear on them. Why should I stop listening to music that’s a big part of my life because it’s no longer in vogue or really never was because it’s not on streaming . I will not stop buying music for this reason alone.

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Not indefinitely though. You do have to connect quite regularly for them to be licensed or you can tally them. Did not last a week last time I did it with Tidal downloads and no internet. Admittedly a while ago but I doubt it’s changed that much.

8-track tapes? Just rip them…

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For some maybe. Out of convenience or lack of interest. I really like my local files… I often have several editions (specific remasters, b-sides, DVD-A, DSF extractions of SACD, quality vinyl rips).
No streaming services will come close to my collection in terms of quality, attention to detail in meta data or scans. If there is a fire, I will grab my 8 slot synology nas and leave the rest to burn…

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I strongly recommend cloud backup.

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It seems this thread has evolved a bit from the original complaint about hardware compatibility and required internet access to a big discussion about local files and media ownership. The fact that we are even having the conversation means Roon needs to get super clear on what it’s users see as the Roon value. For me I bought Roon because it was, highest audio quality, hifi equipment agnostic as opposed to Sonos, Apple, and Alexa, finally, easy to use interface which is dependent on rich Metadata although I rarely use the meta data directly. So in Roon terms that means synchronized lossless protocol compatible with any hifi equipment and music media sources and a great single pain of glass ui for ALL my listening regardless of service. As a result, I would argue staying religiously rigid with respect to which services the integrate is a long term risk for roon. Rather figure out how to provide a quality but limited experience when using inferior sources similar to providing the pipeline audio quality visualization. FWIW, I am running an Intel NUC, 4 end points to my kitchen, living room, sitting room, and patio, and 2 entrypoints for my record player and Bluetooth so Lisa can play Spotify or anything else her heart desires on the same hifi hardware already installed. If Jan had not made entry points I would have been forced to by Sonos or something else in addition to roon. Side by side systems would have sucked but I wish I could just install a raat client on any network connected device and choose it as the speaker and the sound would get routed to roon!

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Let me explain how I came to be musing about this.

I was looking at the raft of questions about what to use for a Core machine, and various problems people were having with Windows and MacOS and Rock. I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Roon could just supply a virtual Core machine in the cloud? Spin up a server image with ROCK on it?”

Of course, a number of problems with that approach immediately came to mind.

How would you do endpoint discovery? Well, you’d still install the Roon remote on local phones and laptops. Maybe that code could do the endpoint discovery. But how would a Core outside the LAN access those endpoints? Well, maybe it doesn’t; maybe the endpoint connects to the Core, instead, via some added feature of Roon Bridge / Roon SDK.

But look: the latency issue would suddenly become huge! How to manage that? Probably have to be done by the code in the endpoints; other services seem to manage it somehow.

But endpoint groups, how would they be synchronized? Well, there are a number of algorithms for synchronizing multiple computers. Presumably one endpoint would be “elected” the group leader and would handle the synchronization.

What about local files? How would the Core outside the LAN access them? That’s when I started thinking, maybe local files aren’t all that. Maybe they’re a more ephemeral musical artifact than I had appreciated.

Might as well just use an established streaming service if you don’t use files and you want a cloud based system as they work already will save you money, they all have better search facilities, better curated content and algorithms than Roon can offer, they are more robust and work with most devices.

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I am a Qobuz subscriber, and have been for several years. Nothing you state here is true for Qobuz (or at least the classical music section). Search facilities can be hit and miss - depending on the metadata that has been loaded for the particular album. Sometimes you will have a minor artist listed as the album artist, which makes search difficult when you are searching for a particular version of a work that has been recorded many times or when you are searching for a particular artist who should have been listed as the album artist for a particular performance. There are albums that are poorly labelled, such as Piano Concerto No 3 but with no composer in the album title. The joy of Roon is that I can amend the metadata for the album when I add the album to my local library and I know that I will have no trouble in locating it in the future. I can organise and curate my music in the way that I want to access it and can find the music easily and quickly, rather than rely on the hit and miss of Qobuz.

Qobuz does provide the PDF booklet - which can be accessed via Roon but other information about the composer, the composition, the artists or the particular performance are rarely available via Qobuz and never in real time while actually listening to the music. While listening via Roon, I can quickly access information about all these aspects of the performance that I simply cannot do easily via Qobuz.

Classical music lovers have access to a wide range of publications and websites that can inform their listening decisions, whether this be music that may be new to them or new performances of works that they may be familiar with. I don’t think that any serious classical music lover would see any major value in an algorithm that selected music for them on some basis of its apparent popularity amongst other classical music listeners.

I believe that Qobuz does set out to target classical music lovers as one of its key markets, but as I have shown above, it falls well short of what a serious classical music lover would want in a streaming service.

I tried Tidal for a while - many of their classical albums were presented with tracks out of order which makes most classical albums, where this occur, unlistenable. They did not seem to have the slightest interest in correcting these were they were brought to their attention. There was rarely any information about the album or the performers. I suspect Tidal has no real interest in cultivating the serious classical music consumer (and they are entitled to make that commercial decision).

In practical terms I can access Roon on any device that I want in my house - and of course with ARC, this facility is now extended to when I am travelling.

I don’t see that. You’d miss the DSP for room conditioning, the various endpoints and grouping of them, the remote control, the metadata displays, etc.

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I play local files (rips) because a segment of what I listen to isn’t available via my beloved Qobuz.

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I wonder what proportion of Roon users doesn’t require local file support? I suppose Roon Labs knows.

That would be interesting to know.

that is a hard one because you have to draw a limit - 1 file? 10? 10k? etc

Zero or some would be the two categories.

If one were to run a Core machine in the cloud, it presumably would not have access to any local files.

It would be relatively simple to allow access to a file repository at home to be accessible from a cloud client but the complications will come from securing it properly (beyond the ken of a lot of non-tech people - just look at ARC port forwarding posts) and not punching huge holes into your network from outside.

On the subject of Core in the cloud, I’m not sure if this has been part of the discussion prior to this point, but the costs of not hosting the Core at home will be borne by the user ultimately. It costs to have compute resource on Azure, Google Cloud or AWS and if Roon were to offer this ultimately, it would be reflected in the subscription cost as would the not insubstantial traffic costs in and out of the hosting provider. Depending on the hosted model, if your Core is available to you instantly, then dedicated compute resources would be costed in; if it was spin-up on demand, the delays in readiness could mar the user experience. Even scheduled availability (such as I have seen for virtual desktop in the corporate world where resources are scheduled between 07:00 and 19:00 local to the user) will still have drawbacks.

Virtual Core would be an administrative and cost-prohibitive/accounting nightmare at present IMHO.

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I tend to agree with that analysis. Even though compute costs keep trending down, traffic costs are still crazy. I could imagine some mitigation strategies, but even so…

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They won’t, if you care about sound quality.