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Is Roon player getting too bloated and buggy too???

dmac6419

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I have had the idea that Roon was going to be this amazing media player that would be the end all, that it would replace JRiver as my source. My first trial over a year ago didn't go well because most of my music on my Nas drive was in ape format and Roon didn't see recognize them. 2 weeks went by and I canceled.

Since then I converted much of my music over to flac and the second trial I got extended to a month and about the same time they raised their rates to $700. That saved me from what I feel would have been a expensive mistake! There are a few things that I like about Roon, it's Roon radio being the biggest one, but the cumbersome interface just gets my hackles up every time I try to use it!

I decided to give it a year anyway , at which time I could either figure out what others are seeing in it, or dump it it. That hasn't worked out well so far either due to the issues with everything, from not being able to connect (and stay connected) with Qobuz reliably, to other issues with the connectivity to my other pc and my android phone. I can usually get a to work but I don't like fighting it. I need to have something that works every time. When I read about the issues on their forum, I'm not the only one. For the money charged, why would anyone put up with this?
I like Roon radio as well,give musicbee a try it's free
 

JohnKay

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I like Roon radio as well,give musicbee a try it's free

I was looking at MusicBee this morning and i am quite impressed. Smart playlists, UPnP streaming (with the appropriate plugin), remote app on iOS.. really nice and I have kept it on my PC. I don't think it does multiroom though. If I ever stop using Roon, MusicBee will be on top of the list.
 

Alobar

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I like Roon radio as well,give musicbee a try it's free
I have heard good things about MB. If I were just now looking for a media player I might have chosen that. But I have been running JRIVER for going on 6 years now and I have never regretted it or wished to go with a different player, with one caveat. It doesn't stream qobuz/Tidal like Roon (or Audirvana) does. As for simultaneous playback in multi rooms, I never would need that personally, but certainly can understand that need for others. I tend to be more of a critical listener and as such remain planted in my listening chair listening to my main rig.
 

Worth Davis

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All bugs I have had with Roon have been over Win10 security changes due to hotfixes and patches - Set everything to private and possibly need to readd them to application firewall filter - its very buggy from Microsoft these days. Basically if the client wont connect to the core - this happened to your windows machine running core.
 

wtsz

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It all seems to be related to network settings on both the core and the client system. I don't have a 100% handle on it but setting the network properties to private/public, etc. eventually gets it going. Windows update seems to be changing this setting making the problem come back.
From what I know, Roon wrote back and the problem was successfully resolved. Roon, however, treats customers very well. Thank you Roon.
 

JohnKay

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just wanted to add a quick update... in my setup, Roon continues to present quirks / bugs quite regularly. Some get fixed over time, others remain and some new ones appear. For example (experience over the past 2 months): I started getting the Tidal issues reported in the forum, requiring me to login every other day to get it working. About a month ago I started getting the 'Unable to start Roon Radio' message (limiting radio to local library). This appears to be reported in the forum every now and again. After about a week this issue disappeared and things went back to normal. Following that (a few days ago), a new problem appeared with Live Radio. Some radio stations stopped working. When I hit play, I get the message: 'Playback was interrupted because a file failed to load'. These stations work well when I access them via Tunein but the same link fails when trying to play them via Roon. Overall I am finding that life with Roon is a bit... high maintenance and tricky.

Just my bad luck I suppose.
 

dmac6419

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Roon uses a lot of memory I mean a lot CPU as well
 
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amirm

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I started getting the Tidal issues reported in the forum, requiring me to login every other day to get it working.
I have had that happen from time to time as well.
 

stunta

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SPOautos

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If like to try Roon since I have a Chromecast Audio coming. BUT its SOOOO hard to justify paying the ridiculous prices the better music management software's charge. With a streaming service like Tidal its $10-$20 a month but your paying for all the music in the world! A LOT of your fees goes to the artists....I believe I saw that somewhere between 60-80% of your Tital fees ends up in the hands of the artists you listen too. That means your paying very little for the platform itself.

Where these managenent platforms are charging the same money (or more in some cases) as Tidal and giving NOTHING but the platform.....its pretty crazy.

Tidal and others in comparison should be twice as expensive as they are......they are probably looking at this saying "you mean we could have got away with letting them use the app with no music for the same price!" Heck Tidal should just charge another $5-$10 and let you upload your own music along side theirs.
 

JohnKay

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If like to try Roon since I have a Chromecast Audio coming. BUT its SOOOO hard to justify paying the ridiculous prices the better music management software's charge. With a streaming service like Tidal its $10-$20 a month but your paying for all the music in the world! A LOT of your fees goes to the artists....I believe I saw that somewhere between 60-80% of your Tital fees ends up in the hands of the artists you listen too. That means your paying very little for the platform itself.

Where these managenent platforms are charging the same money (or more in some cases) as Tidal and giving NOTHING but the platform.....its pretty crazy.

Tidal and others in comparison should be twice as expensive as they are......they are probably looking at this saying "you mean we could have got away with letting them use the app with no music for the same price!" Heck Tidal should just charge another $5-$10 and let you upload your own music along side theirs.

It does look like Tidal is better than Spotify in terms of how it pays artists per stream but it still is $0.00876 per stream. Interestingly, amazon music unlimited pays artists $0.01123 per stream. This is 2019 data as presented here:
https://thetrichordist.com/2020/03/...ible-youtube-is-still-the-1-problem-to-solve/
The per stream payout is of course not the only metric that matters... market share of listeners differs a lot and it will affect the total number of plays per song and hence total revenue payout to the artist. From the above data though, I can see Tidal pays more per stream but we are still talking about 0.8 of a cent per stream. Amazon unlimited appears to pay more than double that.

I can see what you mean regarding using the streaming service app alone. It is simple, does not require additional software / subscription and kind of works. These services do indeed offer access to almost all the music in the world. Having said that, they make it hard for you to sort / organise and access all the music in the world. Take Spotify / Tidal for example. I can build a wonderful playlist with say 500 tracks of what I like. Spotify / Tidal then makes it difficult for me to listen to what I want. I can shuffle that playlist of 500 tracks in hope that I will listen to all the tracks gradually. Unfortunately Spotify will repeat a lot of the tracks and others will almost never play. The bigger my library the worse this becomes.

With Tidal / Spotify, I have the potential to access all the music in the world but the streaming apps won't let me choose what to listen. Instead they 'shuffle' for me... meaning that part of my library becomes 'lost' and inaccessible while other tracks repeat frequently.

Apple Music is great at solving the above with dynamic playlists which are brilliant. Unfortunately I don't like the way Apple Music sounds (listening fatigue within 5 mins).

Then we can consider DSP and multiroom. Sonos ensures good multiroom sync with their own speakers but try to integrate an AVR and you will soon realise that you cannot adapt timing for multiroom sync (AVRs introduce a processing delay which causes multiroom playback to be out of sync).

Roon solves the above and allows you to organise and listen the way you want + it allows you to sync multiple rooms + adapt the sound using DSP.
Sadly, Roon adds complexity, it is expensive, it does not work as smoothly as the stock apps (no lock screen widget, no volume up down with the phone buttons, takes time to reconnect to core every time you access it). It also requires a bit of regular TLC. Updates bring in bugs as they solve old ones (check the latest QNAP issues reported in the Roon forum). The UI is unpleasant for some people and generally speaking non tech people (i.e my family) do not like to use it.

I don't know which is better to use... simple yet limited streaming apps ... or... powerful yet complex and demanding Roon / LMS.
 

Jimbob54

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Regarding the price increase, It's explained in this thread, specifically this post:
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/lifetime-price-increased-499-699/84083/93

Basically, the annual subscription is what they're aiming for which does make sense from a longterm sustainability point.

Totally understandable from a business perspective. I'd rather an upfront software fee then smaller annual subs for updates and access to the metadata etc. At the minute I'm going to have to make an annual assessment of perceived value and the competition. A smaller fee would lessen my need to think as much, especially if I've sunk more in a year or 3 ago.
 

JoachimStrobel

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I like jazz and organize everything by albums, no playlists. Count Basie by playlist and not by album ... naa. So far, only Roon allows me to sort and organize albums, via bookmarks. That is reason enough for me to stay and pay.
 
OP
amirm

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Amir, out of curiosity, have you experienced any crashes of the roon remote app?
Cheers
Not the remote. But *every day* the core silently exists when I shut down my client/remote PC. I have to go in there and start it manually half a dozen times a day! I can't believe how fragile this software is getting. I mean it is one thing to crash but another to not even report it.

And this is a standard Windows 10 machine running the main/core software.
 

SKBubba

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Something weird is going on at roon. I'll stick with it until something better comes along, but I'm starting to wonder if they are still a going concern.
 

Jimbob54

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Something weird is going on at roon. I'll stick with it until something better comes along, but I'm starting to wonder if they are still a going concern.
Care to elaborate?
 

SKBubba

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Care to elaborate?

No major new features since valance/recommendations months ago (which was actually pretty nice and I use it all the time), no major advancements in a year or so before that, every new update seems to fix a few bugs but introduce more, long ignored ui problems and glitches that seem to shift with every update and that they blame on opengl, long missing and frequently requested features (like mobile sync or any other sort of portable solution, user edits/additions of bad metadata, goofy, poorly cropped or otherwise inappropriate artist photos, etc.), constantly blaming playback problems on network issues (which no other playback or streaming apps seem to have on the user's exact same setup), and generally deteriorating stability and reliability. Their support response is always tell us about the details of your cpu and the chips and firmware version in your switches and routers and turn off your firewall and we'll get back to you, but they never do. Something's wrong over there. Maybe they have bit off more than they can chew. Promise less and deliver more might work better for them.

All that said, RAAT is brilliant. Their streaming integration with Qobuz and Tidal is brilliant. Their "radio" feature is the cat's pajamas. Their android remote control app is the bomb (except for the lack of portrait orientation). Those are the things I value and that keep me hanging around. The other creeping problems are starting to test my patience, although I have to say it still works mostly ok for me. Others, not so much, judging from their support forums. I keep crossing my fingers that it won't become unusable for me. And that's a pretty low bar.
 

JoachimStrobel

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No major new features since valance/recommendations months ago (which was actually pretty nice and I use it all the time), no major advancements in a year or so before that, every new update seems to fix a few bugs but introduce more, long ignored ui problems and glitches that seem to shift with every update and that they blame on opengl, long missing and frequently requested features (like mobile sync or any other sort of portable solution, user edits/additions of bad metadata, goofy, poorly cropped or otherwise inappropriate artist photos, etc.), constantly blaming playback problems on network issues (which no other playback or streaming apps seem to have on the user's exact same setup), and generally deteriorating stability and reliability. Their support response is always tell us about the details of your cpu and the chips and firmware version in your switches and routers and turn off your firewall and we'll get back to you, but they never do. Something's wrong over there. Maybe they have bit off more than they can chew. Promise less and deliver more might work better for them.

All that said, RAAT is brilliant. Their streaming integration with Qobuz and Tidal is brilliant. Their "radio" feature is the cat's pajamas. Their android remote control app is the bomb (except for the lack of portrait orientation). Those are the things I value and that keep me hanging around. The other creeping problems are starting to test my patience, although I have to say it still works mostly ok for me. Others, not so much, judging from their support forums. I keep crossing my fingers that it won't become unusable for me. And that's a pretty low bar.

I guess everybody has different experiences. My Roon is rock stable and I run it on a simple Win10 PC. I have never seen a piece of software where everything is done so nice and neat and thoughtful. Just yesterday I hooked up a couple of IPhones and pads with attached speakers, an Raspi4 and another two WinPC for a multi room test, adjusting individual delay settings - marvelous. Working on the core from an Ipad and streaming via another device is simply great.The problem is the horrible Windows landscape that makes any professional use away from systems under admin lockdown a nightmare.
 

Jimbob54

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No major new features since valance/recommendations months ago (which was actually pretty nice and I use it all the time), no major advancements in a year or so before that, every new update seems to fix a few bugs but introduce more, long ignored ui problems and glitches that seem to shift with every update and that they blame on opengl, long missing and frequently requested features (like mobile sync or any other sort of portable solution, user edits/additions of bad metadata, goofy, poorly cropped or otherwise inappropriate artist photos, etc.), constantly blaming playback problems on network issues (which no other playback or streaming apps seem to have on the user's exact same setup), and generally deteriorating stability and reliability. Their support response is always tell us about the details of your cpu and the chips and firmware version in your switches and routers and turn off your firewall and we'll get back to you, but they never do. Something's wrong over there. Maybe they have bit off more than they can chew. Promise less and deliver more might work better for them.

All that said, RAAT is brilliant. Their streaming integration with Qobuz and Tidal is brilliant. Their "radio" feature is the cat's pajamas. Their android remote control app is the bomb (except for the lack of portrait orientation). Those are the things I value and that keep me hanging around. The other creeping problems are starting to test my patience, although I have to say it still works mostly ok for me. Others, not so much, judging from their support forums. I keep crossing my fingers that it won't become unusable for me. And that's a pretty low bar.
Your experience doesn't reflect mine but there are ciearly quality issues across the user base. However, we need to take care concluding they have financial stability issues.
Of course, if the performance issues become too severe and widespread, the finances will suffer as users don't resubscribe but I don't think either of us knows the company well enough to say that now.
 
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