Your experience with Roon

[simon g]

I love Roon and use it every day, but it's clear that their objectives are not my objectives, and they won't budge, so it will probably gradually deviate from what I want.

I wanted a good stable system running my own audio files in my own house, and the ability to manage my collection of music. They want something more like a cloud system with lots of information about the music, and seem quite uninterested lately in the basics of playing files. I have allowed myself to be led by them, and I enjoy the features they've added but I really just want something rock solid.

My main bones of contention have been:

* Roon ignores folder structure, so I've carefully arranged my files into genre/artist/album folders, but it will disregard in favour of its own metadata (which is often wrong)
* Roon will stop working if the internet goes down - this is a new "feature" and they don't care that some of us feel like we've lost something quite important here
* Roon has up until very recently had a delay of up to 30 seconds when switching from one album to another - they took AGES to fix it and never really acknowledged it

If they continue in the direction they're going, it's going to be hard to justify Roon over just switching to something like Spotify. Don't get me wrong, I love it, and it's helped me discover music in my own collection. I bought a lifetime license at a very fair price a very long time ago, but at the current price, with the current direction of development, I think I'd be looking at something else (Audirvana or LMS probably).

I've never had the problem of Roon taking 30 seconds to change albums. That's ludicrous. Mine change more or less instantly. That will most likely be a problem with your Roon set up and LAN.

My Roon is super stable and very quick.

Never bothered with ARC as I don't need that.

I'm not concerned about not being able to use without the 'net. My internet very, very rarely fails. Were it to do so I can always play CDs, SACDS and files from my back up portable SSD, or files I've downloaded to my iPad. This is really a big non issue, from my perspective.

 

[garyi]

Logitech Media Server has always done multiroom and optional syncing of devices to play the same across the house since way before Roon was invented.
It's also free and used in conjunction with Pi based streamers using Picoreplayer is very cost effective. The optional material plugin gives you Roon like info on music even giving Lyrics of track playing. It will work with all the streaming services by installing the appropriate plug in.

Its not in the same league sorry, I know this because it's what I used before (actually Daphile), its cludgy and my family hated using it so never used it. Roon in this regard is superb, the wife and the kids use it all the time, same interface on any device, killer. The thought of going back to iPeng literally sends shivers down my spine

 

[slavedata]

Don't judge LMS from using Daphile which in my considered opinion is a piece of s**t thrown together by a total amateur.
My LMS runs on an HP Microserver running Vortexbox an integrated setup of server, music server and easy to use backup routines. This server doubles as my house server for all material needing backup.
LMS properly implemented and customised to your needs meets all the criteria for an integrated music system seamlessly combining ripped material (PCM and DSD) downloads, all streaming services, Bandcamp and radio. Controlled by the free Squeezer app on an Android phone it is very simple to use.

But each to their own I tried Roon and thought its subscription cost was not justified by supposed added value of Web material.

 

[Hound]

For me having given roon ago twice now, I found that it just didn't sound quite as good as qobuz, then add in the much larger monthly fee or the ridiculous life fee, and it becomes an even easier no for me.
As someone else pointed out above, other apps are catching up fast these days, and I wouldn't want to pay the new life fee, as how long will it actually be until roon is free, or even disappears if more and more leave

 

[evand]

When I first came upon Roon it had not yet been released and they were fully in startup mode - fresh out of Meridian, full of ideas and promise - and to a large extent these self proclaimed music lovers seemed to have read my mind in terms of what I’d wanted from a music server since the early 2000’s. There were a few systems in existence that followed a similar path to Roon back then (incl Roon’s predecessor by the same crowd - Sooloos). All suffered the same shortcomings - cost (not insurmountable) and hardware lock-in - which was for me a non-starter. Not a chance I was going to lock my music into someone else’s ecosystem so I could be held ransom to their foibles. So I remained on LMS and set about leveraging tag-based metadata to the extent LMS could at the time leverage it (which was and still is pretty well as far as artists, composers and genres is concerned). LMS has had multi room playback capability from the outset (and frankly it’s as good as anything Roon has to offer on that front). So whilst not as metadata rich/driven as Sooloos and one or two others at the time it enabled me to explore my music leveraging metadata I’d added and enjoy multi-room/location playback, synchronised or independent.

In any event, I’d gotten involved with Roon early in the piece, testing pre-launch Roon, RAAT etc and had direct interaction with the founders including influencing some of the features that were available when Roon first went live - being able to play to Squeezebox and Squeezelite devices among them. It was accommodated because it was seen as a way to make it easy for LMS users (who were early adopters of streaming local content) to make the switch without having to reinvest in further hardware.

At that time I think it felt to most people participating in a similar manner that there was a strong alignment with what they as users valued and wanted in a music server and Roon’s stated intent re direction of travel. I championed Roon to everyone I knew that had more than a passing interest in music, and bought a discounted lifetime license whilst they were running a promotion to drive uptake (which in hindsight I didn’t have to as I had testing licences).

I’ll admit, I am likely a bit of a fringe personality insofar as I truly want to explore and discover my music in interesting ways. If there’s a song I like I quickly want to find all instances in my library, sorted by performer so that I can easily find what I’m looking for. If there’s a drummer I like I quickly want to find all albums in my collection that they perform on etc. Where Rovi metadata is full of holes I expect Roon to fill in the blanks, leveraging metadata sources such as discogs and musicbrainz. Where Rovi provides an inane Pop/Rock genre entry or no genre entry, I expect Roon to draw some inferences based on the artist in question. Where Roon doesn’t know the difference between two namesakes I expect it to provide a UI that makes it easy to sort that stuff out. I also expect it to draw some inferences from underlying metadata to figure out which albums are likely those of which namesake. 9/10 times there’s sufficient metadata in albums/ tracks from albums it has correctly identified that would allow it to infer correctly. But none of that usability and utility is important to Roon. They simply do not care for such improvements, nor the ability to make it easy for you as a user to deal with yourself. Equally, from where I’m sitting, music lovers care about things like which version/release of an album they listen to, whether for sentimental or sound quality reasons. So to call customers that have sought out and purchased particular releases of music they love “dinosaurs” is in my view 1) downright disrespectful and 2) a very clear indication that the founders are not the music lovers they profess to be. They are in it only for the money… and it is this that drives the direction they’ve taken the product in - that which they believe will attract the most customers. I’ve seen many complaints about Roon Radio doing a bad job, and I agree it doesn’t make for interesting listening. I recall suggesting at the time Roon Radio was being planned that it might be worth looking to some acoustic analysis techniques to help seed radio, and that idea being bluntly dismissed as incapable of outperforming machine learning algorithms. Plex has only recently begun to focus on audio, yet outperforms Roon Radio hands down. They’re a smart bunch of engineers at Roon, but they’re arrogant in equal measure and that arrogance will forever stop Roon from being great.

Its leadership team treat customers with disdain, threaten people that criticise their product with being banned, delete posts pointing out issues and generally have a low regard for their customers at large. They ignore bugs that don’t get widespread exposure and the product has evolved in a way that only vaguely resembles the marketing speak at launch. Their focus has shifted from music lovers to being a front-end for streaming services and mining listening habits of its users to serve up suggestions from the herd and feed their algorithms. Their search algorithm produces irrelevant tufts of crud and there are simply too many incomplete or poorly conceived features that any ‘power user’ looking to leverage the possibilities that the metadata brings will come up against. Their forum is toxic, support is in the main outsourced to customers, even adding artist images is facilitated by paying customers taking the time to upload images, conveniently ignoring copyright issues and leveraging the original work of others to enhance their product, knowing full well the rights holder cannot see the abuse unless they themselves are a Roon customer. Then of course, you need the bloody internet to listen to your music. My leisure time is limited enough that time and space for music is precious. I don’t need someone else deciding for no good reason whether or not I can listen to my music in the event my ISP has a hiccup or some dimwit pulls up fibre infrastructure on a construction site and leaves it unattended.

Consequently, Roon has become a product in which I’ve no further interest as a user, and I know I’m not alone in this. Not even a lifetime licence is enough to make me want to use it again. They’re truly lucky that open source developers follow their own muse where audio servers are concerned because a coordinated open source development effort would render Roon irrelevant in months. The bar is truly that low.

 

[AudioAl]

I've only been using Roon for a few months, and only 6 weeks ago bought a used NUC to serve as a Core. An the moment I'm still dazzled by the choice of music and the ability to search through different recording to find what you want, e.g. I had heard a version of Paint it Black by someone other than the Stones, Roon provided a list which I just worked through until I found what I was looking for. With classical music that's even more of a boon.

Roon Radio does get into a bit of a rut. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way get if to wand off track a bit.

For me it is VFM and keeps me trying new stuff. For hours on end.

This it ?

 

[wiresandmore]

I've found it generally excellent once I got to a stable set up (Dedicated NUC running ROCK); I use it mainly with my Devialets (using their AIR protocol rather than Roon Ready) and it makes the whole process a joy - easy to navigate my server library and to pull stuff from Qobuz. With the integrated volume control, it really acts as a complete remote for streaming from the Devialets.

That said, I struggle to see why ARC is really needed, I have Qobuz downloads on my phone which is really everything I need.

Why might I change? One would be if the pricing keeps increasing, it does make me pause each time the renewal comes around. Second, I have 2 Naim units here (an Atom and a QB) and I use the Naim app with them which is fine, not as good as Roon, but it allows me to switch sources etc easily. If I changed amps in the main system to something from Naim or Linn, I might reconsider keeping Roon.

 

[vacuum_tubes]

Its leadership team treat customers with disdain, threaten people that criticise their product with being banned, delete posts pointing out issues and generally have a low regard for their customers at large.

I've been using Roon since May 2015 and really liked it up to 1.8 (but still use it now)

Last year I questioned their security for ARC and asked why they weren't using WebRTC and TURN instead as this would avoid the need for inbound port forwarding. I wasn't alone, many people were questioning the security of port forwarding but the roon founder Danny just had a public tantrum and then banned me (and a few others)

I have a life time sub and earlier this year had issues after an update that caused it to constantly crash on my Mac mini. I signed back up with a new account and posted a thread in the support section, after support enabled diagnostics to look at it my account was banned again.

I then emailed Roon support and after 3 weeks got a response that "support is provided via the roon forum, raise your issue there"

Just a warning for people, Roon staff and volunteer mods know what your subscription is from a profile tag only they can see. The support staff respond in order of your sub i.e trial >> monthly >> yearly >> lifetime (yes they admitted this on a thread before it was deleted after an uproar)

I really like the Roon software but the staff and forum is a toxic cesspool of passive aggression where dissent or challenges to roon are deleted and punished.

 

[ricko01]

I trialed it for a week. Unlike most, I didn’t like all the extra info and curation

With you on that.

Aside from all the extra info that takes up too much space (why do I need a splash screen taking up half my available display to tell me what the Blues Genre is when I have been collecting Blues albums since 1970, as one of many examples), I found it very clunky to use and GUI object delineation very poor.

Plus stupid stuff like round artist images.... photo's are square, have always been so round is fine for a single artist but with a band you always have cut off heads.

Invents genres I havent got tagged (all my stuff is well tagged)... I have three genres (blues, jazz, rock) but Roon told me I had 25.... including childrens, reggae, show tunes ...****

Just a whole set of little annoyances that added up.

But I can see the attraction, especially with streaming, where you can discover new stuff and basically for zero cost add in an artist. But I am way past that stage (did that decades ago) and so have a very stable collection that I dont add much to...just fill in small gaps as needed.

Peter

**** just came back to add, before someone points out the obvious, but yes I setup the library options to state "use file" for stuff like genre, artist, album, year etc. I did raise this as an issue but as other have stated, Roon developers dont care about issues... every issue is a feature unless its related to Roon's reliability (but they also sat on obvious issues like memory leaks for years).

 

[RoA]

Works faultlessly for me and I've had not one issue so no need to use their forum (which by it's very nature is a place problems are discussed).

My use is probably more simplistic than that of some others. No app is perfect but developers should be open to constructive criticism.

However, the experience is really several levels up from native streaming apps.

I also use it for headphone listening. The ability to store profiles for several of them is fantastic.

 

[Del monaco]

Works faultlessly for me and I've had not one issue so no need to use their forum (which by it's very nature is a place problems are discussed).

My use is probably more simplistic than that of some others. No app is perfect but developers should be open to constructive criticism.

However, the experience is really several levels up from native streaming apps.

I also use it for headphone listening. The ability to store profiles for several of them is fantastic.

I think it is an impressive piece of developing software. I just didn’t use enough of its features to commit. LMS with Material Skin satisfies me enough.

 

[Del monaco]

 

[vacuum_tubes]

I think it is an impressive piece of developing software

It really isn’t a well developed or thought out bit of software now.

They have just taken Sooloos and tried to make it more open, unfortunately moving from an environment where you control the hardware and therefore things like drivers and software you lose that control and the decisions made when designing Sooloos don't work when it's opened up to wider options of hardware or operating systems.

OpenGL - very fussy about hardware and graphics drivers and is a very old design (still maintained though but not supported on MacOS anymore - replaced with Metal)

LevelDB - this is a noSQL key-value in memory database, it's very fast and good for specific uses but Roon isn't one of them. It is extremely vulnerable to corruption from power failures or not being shut down correctly. It becomes finicky with larger databases as it stores the data in individual files up to 2MB, a small size library can be up to 1GB and I've seen larger libraries (5000-50000 albums) that are up to 6GB and a few very large libraries that are 100,000+ albums. Throw in the memory leaks that have gone unfixed for years and you can have a roon server loading 6GB DB into memory + 2GB for the OS and then a memory leak on top and numbers of people start reporting very slow searches, an swithcing albums taking 30secs+ etc.

They no longer seem interested in fixing faults or bugs and I get the impression they are now trying to move entirely to a cloud solution.

 

[Del monaco]

Hence my ‘developing’ description.

 

[andrewd]

Couldn’t imagine having a library of 100,0000 albums! Even if bought at reasonable price thats a £1M collection and 27 years to rip/download if doing 10 per day. I always hated the file management side of computer audio so now happily outsource that to Tidal.

 

[Zombie]

Tried Roon, no smooth integration between local library and online libraries. Went back to LMS, for free and better.

 

[Salamander]

@Zombie How smooth do you want integration, we just go to artist, pick an album, most of the time you don't know whether it's being played from your library or Qobuz.

 

[Zombie]

@Zombie How smooth do you want integration, we just go to artist, pick an album, most of the time you don't know whether it's being played from your library or Qobuz.

Oh, Roon finally got there. Good, but LMS is still for free.

 

[Guinnless]

Works fine for me. DSP is really useful, particularly for my slightly awkward room.

I play albums in the same manner I did when I played LPs i.e. select album and play.
I sometimes check whose playing what instrument or if there is a guest vocalist and this may lead to new things to listen to. Filter works great for locally stored music when needed.

Volume levelling is good for occasional playlists (Qobuz or Tidal) if I've only got 20-30 minutes to spare and a full album would be too long. I've found new albums to listen to like this too.

 

[garyi]

When I boil it down if a software allows me to control multiple end points from
Pi through to pc through to streamer etc from most any device such as pc, Mac, phone etc, with same interface throughout, with dsp and seamless integration with online and home files, I’ll move from Roon.
I have not found anything else yet.

Music discovery etc all seems to be mostly bollocks so my above criteria is all I need from a software solution