A lover spurned or why I made the switch from roon to Plex ...
I've been in love with roon for some years. Loved the look & feel, loved the way roon enriches my music with content & meta tags & cross linking and loved the way roon let me discover pearls hiding deep, deep down in my music collection.
But with the release of roon 2.0 my love grew cold for these three reasons:
- Total cost of ownership: With an annual subscription fee of US-$ 149,88 roon itself is not a bargain. Add to this the cost of upgrading your NAS or NUC or whatsoever every three years to satisfy roon's ever growing greed for ressources at another US-$ 200 per year and you end up with an annual bill of approx. US-$ 350 - money I prefer to spend on music.
- Mandatory internet connection: Since roon 2.0 internet connectivity is mandatory to use roon, even if you do not use roon Arc, their software to listen to your music while being away from home. Yes, you read that right: With roon you need to be online to stream your very own music from your very own hard drives to your very own DAC.
roon argues this decision was made to improve the search functionality - but roon isn't yet able to find "David Bovie" so I kind of mistrust this argument. My 50 cent: roon is about to upload their users' listening pattern into their cloud to improve their recommendation engine. Their company, their decision. But I'm either paying with money or with data, not with both - my money, my decision.
- roon's handling of user feedback: roon users have been pretty upset about the forementioned decision. Some, because they have unstable connectivity, some due to privacy concerns. roon's replies summed up: "Well, take it or leave it."
So I left.
With the availability of headless PlexAmp for the Raspberry Pi I decided to go for Plex. That way I did not have to change my overall set-up: A NAS storing and serving the audio files and a Raspberry Pi as endpoint to stream the audio data connected to an RME dac via USB.
Some very first impressions of my experience with Plex:
- Installation: While installing the Plex server was easier than the roon installation on my Asustor NAS the installation of the PlexAmp endpoint on the Raspberry was a little adventure. As of now you need to be able to type a few Linux command lines. Most of them are "copy-and-paste" from documentations available on the web, but there's always the final 1% that make things a little difficult.
- Sound quality: Not into talking about listening tests, promise. The PlexAmp is bit-perfect, though it's noteworthy that when running PlexAmp on a Windows device as endpoint it is - as of now - limited to 44.1 kHz / 16 bit.
- Look & feel: The PlexAmp iOS App as remote control for the Plex server / PlexAmp end point combination has it's flaws. Some functions are not where you would expect them to be, some functions are not obvious to the beginner and the documentation is pretty thin. But after almost two weeks I finally found my ways around the flaws and PlexAmp lets me do what I want it to do: enjoy my music.
- "Music" mining: To me the most important part of a streamers' job is to help me find the music I want to listen to and to help me discover music that I forgot or didn't know about. Plex' enrichment of my audio files is by far not as exhaustive as roon's. Tagging is mostly happening on album- and not on track-level. Multiple album artists e.g. are not supported, neither is the composer tag which is pretty important to people who listen to classical music.
On the plus side: PlexAmp offers more recommendation mechanisms than roon does, so I do enjoy various "discovery trips" with Plex.
Do I miss roon? Yes, a little. I miss the beauty and the flawlessness of the UI. And I miss the cornupia of content roon adds to my music.
Do I love Plex? Not yet. I like it, though. And I'm pretty sure PlexAmp will improve - a look at
PlexAmp's release notes gives me the impressions that Plex is putting a lot of ressources into their dedicated music player.
My NAS btw., which was too old & too slow for running the roon server software since rel. 2.0 is idling along when I play my music with Plex. And the annual fee for the Plex Pass required to run PlexAmp is US-$ 39,99 - a fraction of roon's annual subscription fee.