How many of you were using some computer audio software previously and now use Roon?
Do you still use some of the previous software alongside Roon or have you found that all your needs are met by Roon today?
To start the discussion, here is my situation with 85,000 tracks:
I used to use J River on Windows as my library manager and player. UPnP has (thankfully) gone away but I still use J River as a library manager. It is far quicker to look up an artist or album on J River than it is on Roonās prettier but less functional interface. It is also far better at managing smart and manual playlists.
I generally use MP3Tag as a tag manager and have evolved numerous scripts to help me curate the tags. I have and, occasionally, still use Picard and TagScanner. I do not use any tag editing in Roon as it is not amenable to bulk operations and the whole topic of Roon and tags gets me upsetā¦
I gave up on tweaky playback software a long time ago as I could not hear consistent meaningful differences and it almost always caused complications for anyone else trying to play something. I have no complaints with Roon.
What about you and Roon?
@PNCD Used to use Sooloos now use Roon, similar size library to you.
Russ
- I use Audirvana on my iMac so I can use CanOpener Studio for headphone crossfeed.
- I use iTunes & iTunes Match to deliver content to my Macbook Pro at work. Where I again use Audirvana & CanOpener Studio for headphone crossfeed.
I use Roon on my main 2 channel system.
Once RoonBridge is released with Audio Unit support, I wonāt need 1) at all.
Once Roon has the ability to sync content offline and along with the above feature, I wonāt need 2) anymore.
Roon only these days - about 75k tracks
Roon only.
Previously Sooloos.
Fumbling about for other devices, Roon support is my biggest desire. We all move about, portable or cars or boats or vacation homes or hotels. Have to move on from the image of the middle aged white male with a hifi temple at home. Isnāt the world anymore. Just like the PC doesnāt dominate anymore.
I no longer edit metadata at all, except for glaring problems. Iām not a librarian.
I consider JRiver the glorious culmination, an exemplar, of the Windows 95 user interface paradigm. If I want that style of functionality, yes, JRiver is it. But I donāt.
Iāve tried most players that work on the Mac, and was never really that happy. Over time I got fed up with the interfaces/remotes and ultimately wanted a solution that combined all my music needs into a single, nice application.
When Roon came out I was overjoyed, as it seemed like the answer to everything. OK, itās Tidal instead of my preferred Qobuz, but its integrated really nicely. The UIās pretty, and when the remote iPad version came out I was ecstatic (apart from the expense of buying a new iPad just to be a Roon remote).
I have a relatively small library compared to many here 800-900 albums, mostly CD rips with some higher res files and a few DSD - mainly just out of interest - and dont really do tagging.
Having now used it what I consider a ālongā time, there are still a few quirks that I hope get ironed out, but overall its the most pleased Iāve ever been with a music player, and family seem to like it too.
I still have iTunes running for adding music to the core machine - as I like the way it works there. The only way to do it with Roon is to split new stuff into a separate Roon managed folder, and that doesnāt work in a similar way (or one that I like) so it adds complication. Tried it, the reverted to iTunes. I also need iTunes for putting music on my iPhone etc. If it werenāt for those two things, I would be āRoon onlyā at home.
My Room Correction situation has thrown it all into a quandary as I really want to use a software based one, but didnt want to have to forgo RoonReady networked endpoints for Dirac, so have abandoned it and hoping that Roon will adopt any way of making Dirac possible (or other plugin solution, or their own solution). The may have to change depending on timescalesā¦.I hate the way my system sounds after removing RC! 
I need ChromecastAudio and TuneIn app at home for Radio, which was easy to setup but would have loved that integrated into Roon.
I also need Tidal ap at work, and/or iTunes, so I can play music there. I hope this is addressed as part of a future Roon architecture. I use Tidal app/itunes/qobuz in the car too.
I miss Qobuz I have to say - I just donāt really like Tidal as a company, dont like their desktop Ap and dont like their iPhone ap. This is starting to make me think about my setup but I can just about live with it for the time beingā¦.
I havenāt used multi room because Id really like some simple RoonReady devices for kitchen etc - like a portable radio type thing. Iāll probably get an Airplay one for now, but this range would ideally improve. At the moment I wonder how widely accepted RoonReady will becomeā¦. it does seem like there are a few key people sitting on the fence at bestā¦.
So in short Iād gladly have Roon as my main player at home and away, but for now it isnāt quite allowing me to do that.
I think Roon has got much more potential than the product we have now, and so itās exciting - especially for lifetime members - to just wait (and hope) and think about whatās coming in the future. I have confidence in the product and the team, but know there are limitations in what can be achieved in the timeā¦
For now, the current setup is the best Iāve found to date, although it leaves me a reluctant Roon polygamist.
Iām trying to move to Roon as our primary Music player.
Up to this point weāve had Windows Media Center, Plex and Emby in use on our HTPC. WMC has had a stake driven through its heart by its maker (Microsoft), so that has now gone.
Plex and Emby are not particularly good for music collections, because their focus is on movies and TV.
So at this stage weāre at a point where we fire up Plex or Emby for media other than music, and fire up Roon for music. That in itself is not ideal, but it is what it is.
We also donāt particularly care for the lack of a 10ft interface on the HTPC for Roon. We canāt navigate using a simple remote, but need a mouse (and often keyboard). This might improve with version 1.2, when we can use a Windows tablet as control surface for playing back music through the HTPC or through the Hi-Fi.
Do any of you have problems with the lack of support for multi-user/multi-library management?
I know that Roon is working on it but I would have guessed it is quite important in a family situation. Roon is designed to be attractive to normal people and to get them quickly into playing what they like. It could be a great integrator of taste in a family setting by allowing each person to see what they want but also to borrow bits and pieces from each other. Could it work like Tidal: I see my library but also what is available in the other libraries?
I have a lot of options at the house, Kodi and Plex for music and videos. Sonos, roon, and ChromeCast Audio for music only. Media Monkey and Tagscanner for tagging. I have a license for JRiver, that I donāt use anymore, and I used foobar for years, but now only occasionally is it used in the office.
Happy Logitech Media Server (formerly SlimServer, SqueezeCenter and Squeezebox Server) user since early 2000ās, tried a lot of things prior to that and after that, but nothing came close to LMSā robustness, versatility and performance. The cherry on top is itās virtually OS agnostic. Switched to Roon once there was commitment for a Linux build and Squeezebox (read Squeezelite) was supported. Havenāt looked back.
My library is many multiples larger than what youāve quoted (my Roon DB is around 22GB) and I have no issues at all looking up artists or albums with a tablet as my ONLY Roon interface.
Roon doesnāt do tag editing and probably never will - there are tag editors for that. It will, however, in due course, enable you to edit its metadata (and I imagine this might reasonably include bulk updates). To date, apart from my having used a tag delimiter thatās not supported in Roon I havenāt really found an issue requiring extensive tag editing on my part. Iām very pleasantly surprised and pleased to see Roon already allows my tags to transparently coexist with its metadataā¦where thereās overlap between the two only one instance is shown, where I have data it doesnāt it supplements its own with mine. Brilliant! When the time comes that youāre able to edit Roonās metadata and perform bulk updates weāll have at our fingertips the most versatile library management system in existence. Iām actually pretty glad Iām not @brian having to find ways to make all of this work transparently to the user and within Roon. 
My head would seriously hurt!
Smart and static playlist management will no doubt evolve over time as will Roonās Radio functionality (which already does a pretty decent job at perpetual playlisting based on whatever you seed it with)ā¦give it some timeā¦Roon was released a year back, JRiverās been around for some 18 years.
25,000 tracks. Polygamist. But itās not my fault. Honestly. Roon doesnāt yet know how to do many things I need to be happy. I am willing to let Roon mature because right now, though technically an adult, Roon is very young.
What other software is running with Roon depends where Iām sitting.
When Iām In the listening chair itās Roon and Tidal. This is about 20% of the time. I never run Roon alone. I struggle with how Roon displays Tidal albums that may already be in my library. Sometimes I just want to see everything Tidal offers for an artist, not the condensed Roon version of my library and a partial list of Tidal albums for that artist. Roonās lag for new releases is improving but on Friday mornings Iām on Tidal, AllMusic, Pitchfork, etc looking for the latest and greatest and chances are good the titles arenāt known to Roon yet. Aye, itās a roving eye.
At my desk during the other 80% of the time, itās Roon, Tidal, iTunes, XLD, Audion HiJack, Fusion, Tag Editor. Yeah, I havenāt fully committed to the relationship and still sleep with one foot on the floor. This is because Roon doesnāt offer ripping, recording, tagging, and personal device loading services. I still use iTunes to inspect and edit, if necessary, the metadata of XLD CD rips. Then I use the āAdd To Libraryā command in iTunes. Occasionally Iāll run BitPerfect with iTunes to hear if an up-sampled version of a song sounds better. Maybe HQP is in my future. Iāve heard it gets along well with Roon in most situations.
I envy anyone that can be a Roon monogamist and be fully content. My experience with Roon is that it has made me hyper-aware of the issues in my music library and thus I need the other tools to manage it. Other times it helps me discover long-forgotten gems by offering a title when Radio takes over at the end of an album. Or displays a link to another dimension to an artistās repertoire. The Signal Chain indicator is like a intoxicating perfume.
Bottom line is that I could easily be completely faithful to Roon but Roonās got to be willing to spice things up, become more of the complete package. Know what I mean?
My wife and I are the main users, and every now and then thereās the odd āunusualā favourite that crops up or tidal album added, but we have similar tastes and I donāt want to be logging in and out of users in Roon personally. I think of music library similar to a bookshelf - its there for all to see and to choose from and ignore it if you dont like it. But then Iām probably old fashioned (not that old) and if we had very dissimilar tastes it would be more of a problem.
If we had kids or family using it more often it might be an issue?
I switched from Spotify to Tidal because of the integration, but Iāll probably continue using Spotify when on the go. The mobile app is vastly superior.
At home itās a different story. I use Roon exclusively for playback now. I still use iTunes somewhat to manage my old collection of songs. I love iTunes because itās music management is excellent and creating playlists is super easy. Also the overall polish is a little bit better, at least on OS X, but thatās to be expected.
Overall, Roon offers a mix of features I donāt get anywhere else, which is why I use it: local and streaming support, remote control and multi room. One could argue that iTunes with Apple Music offers this, but the multi room part is all or nothing, and file format support is lacking, and so is remote control.
[quote=ādbtom2, post:11, topic:8354ā]
This is because Roon doesnāt offer ripping, recording, tagging, and personal device loading services.
[/quote]I hope it never does.
[quote=āhifi_swlon, post:12, topic:8354ā]
I think of music library similar to a bookshelf - its there for all to see and to choose from and ignore it if you dont like it
[/quote]For the most part I agree, but I can see how it might be very annoying to be confronted with someone elseās music when youāre trying to browse things from your own collection. Separate libraries for separate profiles would be much preferred and probably not that hard to achieve if users are prepared to keep their music segregated in storageā¦
I wouldnāt take it that far. I would like the ability to sync roon content onto an iPhone for offline playback someday.
As in a Roon app for your iPhone into which selected albums and Roon metadata are copied?
Me too.
I also donāt see how it would hurt to be able to rip via Roon - sure there are other ways to do it, but that takes what could be a lovely seamless experience, and makes it more complicated and reliant on other software and possibly even other computers in a headless server mode.
Ripping is annoying in my house, and mostly I have to do it because it involves a couple of computers and network copying and faffing. Just having the CD attached to the Roon server, and everything taken care of there would be awesome. IMO.
I know even I agree Roon doesnāt necessarily want to try to be everything , but ripping a CD is about as close to the heart of a music system as I can think of (in my house).
My husband and I share most of the same musical tastes, so a single library works for us; however, he is not very computer literate and is pretty embedded with iTunes. Moreover, iTunes makes it easy to rip on one PC and transfer to another, central PC via home sharing.
So if we buy a CD, we rip it to iTunes, manage tags via iTunes, transfer it to the home āserverā via iTunes, etc. Once itās all on the server, we point Roon at the iTunes directory (and add another pointer to my DSD and other high-res downloads), and we have a joint library of ~90k tracks.
We also use iTunes to sync music to his iPod and my iPhone for listening on the go.
Until Roon can rip, manage tags, sync to iDevices, and consolidate tracks like iTunes, weāll have to use iTunes + Roon.
Yes, thatās exactly what I meant. All done over wifi.