• WANTED: Happy members who like to discuss audio and other topics related to our interest. Desire to learn and share knowledge of science required. There are many reviews of audio hardware and expert members to help answer your questions. Click here to have your audio equipment measured for free!

Roon cannot queue more than 5100 tracks at a time - is this a bug?

PHD

Member
Joined
Mar 15, 2023
Messages
91
Likes
181
Hi

I’m on the latest version of Roon and Roon server running on a 12th gen i7 32GB PC with Windows 11. I have about 103000 tracks in my library. ANY other software such as Foobar2000 or Jriver MC can play all of my tracks in sequential or random order w/o a problem, but Roon will only load about 5050 tracks to the queue no matter what I do. In sequential playback, this gets me to the letter A.

Is this a bug? I already tried clean Windows 11 and Roon installations. But the problem persists.
Roon is also very sluggish to respond (unlike Jriver which is capable of browsing through my entire 100K+ tracks within seconds).

Why would Roon refuse to load all of my tracks like Jriver? Please see a video screen capture of the issue. Anyone else is experiencing such strange behavior?

(Please open the video in fullscreen)


I have posted this issue on the Roon community twice but never any help from their tech support... I really feel cheated and scammed for $750.

Thanks
 

Yasuo

Active Member
Joined
Jan 10, 2021
Messages
215
Likes
351
That's some advanced AI hearing protection - if they can't fix the bug, then make it a feature. Just kidding. :)
 
OP
PHD

PHD

Member
Joined
Mar 15, 2023
Messages
91
Likes
181
OK, they told me that 5000 tracks is the queue limit. It may vary a little to avoid discarding tracks from albums, but they have no plans of changing this limit because, unlike Jriver, Roon must remain compatible with many platforms, not just Windows...
 

JP

Major Contributor
Joined
Jul 4, 2018
Messages
2,273
Likes
2,449
Location
Brookfield, CT
That's a cop out. They just don't want to refactor code to be more resilient for such a narrow use case.

I like their product but think their code is likely a mess. I don't know if they fixed it yet, but after ~9 months of a rather horrific memory leak I had to reset to kicking over the process every night - they'd denied there was any problem at all.

lPOmw56iFafautaz.png
 

Jimbob54

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Oct 25, 2019
Messages
11,065
Likes
14,695
OK, they told me that 5000 tracks is the queue limit. It may vary a little to avoid discarding tracks from albums, but they have no plans of changing this limit because, unlike Jriver, Roon must remain compatible with many platforms, not just Windows...
I havent used it for a year or so but must confess i never noticed a limit (but doubt I would have ever got to the end of a 5000 queue anyway). I listen similarly to you - mostly on full library shuffles so as long as each shuffle presented a different (or at least random) 5000 it wouldnt bother me.
 

RayDunzl

Grand Contributor
Central Scrutinizer
Joined
Mar 9, 2016
Messages
13,198
Likes
16,981
Location
Riverview FL
Make two queues?
 

RayDunzl

Grand Contributor
Central Scrutinizer
Joined
Mar 9, 2016
Messages
13,198
Likes
16,981
Location
Riverview FL

subframe

Active Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2023
Messages
128
Likes
191
That's a cop out. They just don't want to refactor code to be more resilient for such a narrow use case.
Not wanting to refactor your entire codebase to address what is likely an edge case, is not a cop out, it's a reasonable strategy from both the business and engineering perspectives. I guarantee that nobody on the business side wants to spend a bunch of money for relatively small gain, and nobody on the engineering side has the time to address what is surely a low-priority issue compared to other bugs + roadmap.

Whether this points to their code being a 'mess' is much harder to assess. Adopting limits to ensure continued compatibility with a wide range of platforms makes sense, provide the company is willing to communicate with and support customers that are impacted. It's also a reasonable short-term solution if there were a known severe issue (eg a massive memory leak), to ensure customers can keep using the software while the real fix is implemented. Do we know if either of those is happening here, or if their code is indeed a 'mess'? We don't, and unless someone from Roon comments, anything said here is speculation.
 

JP

Major Contributor
Joined
Jul 4, 2018
Messages
2,273
Likes
2,449
Location
Brookfield, CT
Not wanting to refactor your entire codebase to address what is likely an edge case, is not a cop out, it's a reasonable strategy from both the business and engineering perspectives. I guarantee that nobody on the business side wants to spend a bunch of money for relatively small gain, and nobody on the engineering side has the time to address what is surely a low-priority issue compared to other bugs + roadmap.
That's basically what I said.

Whether this points to their code being a 'mess' is much harder to assess. Adopting limits to ensure continued compatibility with a wide range of platforms makes sense, provide the company is willing to communicate with and support customers that are impacted. It's also a reasonable short-term solution if there were a known severe issue (eg a massive memory leak), to ensure customers can keep using the software while the real fix is implemented. Do we know if either of those is happening here, or if their code is indeed a 'mess'? We don't, and unless someone from Roon comments, anything said here is speculation.

There are many, many signs. Do we know for an absolute fact? Of course not. Having ran dev teams for decades I'm inclined to trust my spidey-sense.
 

subframe

Active Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2023
Messages
128
Likes
191
That's basically what I said.
Except you called it a cop out. Having also run dev teams for decades, I understand that it may look that way to the outside, and may even feel that way to the team. But it's also a likely reality of business and software engineering, rather than a shady attempt to avoid responsibility, which 'cop out' implies imo.

There are many, many signs. Do we know for an absolute fact? Of course not. Having ran dev teams for decades I'm inclined to trust my spidey-sense.
Always a good idea to trust your instincts, especially when born of experience. Personally, my experience including two decades of rigorously tracking customer feedback suggests that nobody on the outside actually has anything like a big picture understanding of the code base. But I agree, we don't know, and it's of course possible you're correct.

Anyway, I'm not here to defend Roon. Just sharing my experience with development. I find that the vast majority of people (understandably) don't know how software development actually works. Much like how most people don't understand how digital audio actually works. There's no reason they should of course, but it's worthwhile sharing knowledge about these things - otherwise you end up with $60k network streamers or whatever.
 

JP

Major Contributor
Joined
Jul 4, 2018
Messages
2,273
Likes
2,449
Location
Brookfield, CT
Except you called it a cop out. Having also run dev teams for decades, I understand that it may look that way to the outside, and may even feel that way to the team. But it's also a likely reality of business and software engineering, rather than a shady attempt to avoid responsibility, which 'cop out' implies imo.

I don't think cross-platform compatibility is the core reason. More likely they made some structural decisions early on that have boxed them in - cross-platform compatibility issues due to poor architecture decisions is more likely.

I can't say I'd have anticipated someone wanting make a playlist that large, but I also avoid arbitrary limits that are low by today's standard. Roon isn't that old where one would expect this kind of stuff.

Cop out is broad, but does not imply shadiness - just an avoidance of a "problem".
 
Last edited:

Moderate Dionysianism

Active Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2020
Messages
286
Likes
469
I really feel cheated and scammed for $750
That's an important point. One could brush this off as a minor inconvenience or an edge case, but taking price into consideration, the perspective should be a bit different imho. It's an expensive piece of software, and it is annoying to see how it can't deliver stuff you get for free elsewhere (unlimited queue, but also no Wavpack support, no CUE sheet support, no auto-gain for DSP, no mix level adjustment for the Convolver...). And the support forum is largely useless, because everyone is more interested in another shitstorm about Hegel not being 'certified' or something:facepalm:

Complain to Roon and not to us?
There's hardly a week without a new 'if a $100 DAC is sufficient, explain the existence of $10,000 DACs' topic. How about crusading against those? This here could be some valuable info for ppl considering a Roon subscription.
 

elvisizer

Active Member
Joined
Sep 16, 2018
Messages
257
Likes
197
you don't need to have everything in the queue all at once- just set it to play your library in order and as it moves through the queue new tracks will be added and it will play everything.
as far as sluggish response, never run into that, but I don't use windows for the core or endpoints anymore. I definitely DID have more GUI issues with a windows endpoint than mac/iOS/raspberry pi back when I was using windows a year ago or so. it wasn't sluggish, but the GUI did freeze up completely pretty often, never seen that outside of windows!
 

Joachim Herbert

Senior Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 20, 2019
Messages
452
Likes
670
Location
Munich, Germany
Try before you buy. If there is something you really want, make sure it's there. Don not complain after the fact.

If you feel cheated for playlists being limited to 5000 tracks, you must have known about that requirement before and had plenty of time to find out.
 
OP
PHD

PHD

Member
Joined
Mar 15, 2023
Messages
91
Likes
181
you don't need to have everything in the queue all at once- just set it to play your library in order and as it moves through the queue new tracks will be added and it will play everything.
as far as sluggish response, never run into that, but I don't use windows for the core or endpoints anymore. I definitely DID have more GUI issues with a windows endpoint than mac/iOS/raspberry pi back when I was using windows a year ago or so. it wasn't sluggish, but the GUI did freeze up completely pretty often, never seen that outside of windows!
It does not load more tracks once all 5000 tracks were played or skipped. If you have the radio feature turned on, it will play more tracks based on the last one played... But only one track at a time will be added.
 

Joachim Herbert

Senior Member
Forum Donor
Joined
Jan 20, 2019
Messages
452
Likes
670
Location
Munich, Germany
@PHD May I kindly ask what those monster playlists are good for. Just to better understand the "issue".

I for one have been using jriver for many years, have bought into audirvana and of course hade my share of winamp, foobar and you name them*. All of them play audio, and all of them offer a different feature set. These days I use jriver to organize, dbpoweramp to rip and roon to listen, according to their strengths, not to their weaknesses.

I gave up on asking roon for vst3 plugin support and never cared that it does not do directory browsing. Would I have felt strongly for any of these I would have looked somewhere else.

*Sqeezebox/Logitec Mediaserver being the closest to roon but never worked at all in my setting.
 

Jimbob54

Grand Contributor
Forum Donor
Joined
Oct 25, 2019
Messages
11,065
Likes
14,695
@PHD May I kindly ask what those monster playlists are good for. Just to better understand the "issue".

I for one have been using jriver for many years, have bought into audirvana and of course hade my share of winamp, foobar and you name them*. All of them play audio, and all of them offer a different feature set. These days I use jriver to organize, dbpoweramp to rip and roon to listen, according to their strengths, not to their weaknesses.

I gave up on asking roon for vst3 plugin support and never cared that it does not do directory browsing. Would I have felt strongly for any of these I would have looked somewhere else.

*Sqeezebox/Logitec Mediaserver being the closest to roon but never worked at all in my setting.
I think this is about the play queue- not established playlists. So if you tell it to play all your albums in whichever order you select, it will only queue the first 500 or so. If you ask it to shuffle ALL your music- it will queue up a selection(hopefully randomised) of only 5000 tracks.

I think if it was only 500 or a thousand tracks I could see an argument for getting upset but I'm not sure 5000 is a real problem for anyone.
 

Moderate Dionysianism

Active Member
Joined
Aug 27, 2020
Messages
286
Likes
469
Try before you buy. If there is something you really want, make sure it's there. Don not complain after the fact.

If you feel cheated for playlists being limited to 5000 tracks, you must have known about that requirement before and had plenty of time to find out.
I agree that we should refrain from throwing scam accusations around, if that's what you mean, but if ppl didn't make crappy purchase decisions that they regret, there wouldn't be much stuff for Amir to test;) The whole premise of this forum is to offer customer advice based on objective testing and the members sharing their experience. Otherwise Amir could just run a blog.
 
Top Bottom