Roon?

[stunta]

If you have done "add to library" for a tidal album it treats the same, the only real difference I have seen between local and tidal is the lack of DR number and the wave display progress bar.

Lack of DR number and wave display makes sense because its streamed. To support this, Roon would have to buffer the entire file and perform background processing. Buffering the entire file probably violates some part of the EULA with Tidal.

As for adding a Tidal album/track to Library, it defeats the purpose of radio which is supposed to explore things for you. Happy to hear they are working on this feature.

Tidal is in trouble though. I hope it survives and thrives. I will start the trial in Feb.

 

[stunta]

Roon needs to work on their Radio for better relevance/correlation.

Why does Cassandra Wilson radio give me Cake for the 2nd track and No Doubt for the 3rd? I couldn't find a way to provide feedback that the this is the wrong choice after the track has already started playing. The Windows Desktop UI does have a thumbs up/down (but no tooltip) for the upcoming track which is rather vague - what exactly am I giving a thumbs up/down for - the radio selection or the track itself in isolation?

 

[Frank Dernie]

I let Roon lapse last week. It isn't effectively much better for classical than anything else and it doesn't integrate with Qobuz, the only streaming service I use, and never will, apparently.
It didn't resolve the issue I have with streaming classical music.

 

[JBNY]

I like roon a lot too. I have used in the past, foobar, jriver, media monkey, kodi, and sonos. Roon does a lot of things well, integrates with Tidal nicely too. I bought the lifetime sub, I don't think the roon interface is as easy to use for causal users as the Sonos one is, but it is getting better. Tidal is losing money but so are all the other streaming services, I'm not too worried about them. If Tidal goes away something else will take it's place. Classical music is always a bit of a pain to get right in all the music players. I don't have that much classical, but I can see if you have lots it can be a deciding factor.

 

[Scott Borduin]

Roon lifer here, since it was in beta. I'd been using JRiver since 2005, and still use it as an audio processor like @dallasjustice. But Roon has now converted me to using it as my primary interface, mostly because of the cleaner, more modern, more metadata-rich experience, and IMO the superior remote app which I use on an iPad.

As a primarily classical listener, I'd spent boatloads of time getting to good metadata and navigation on jRiver, and jRiver is still more flexible and configurable in some ways. But Roon is much closer to a solution that "just works" out of the box, and it's gotten better and better over the time I've owned and used it.

 

[stunta]

I got sold on Roon because I really like how these guys think and design things. The architecture is simple and well thought out. They are active on their forums, feature requests are ranked and they actually go implement them. The KB is actually useful and well organized. The feature set goes deep - for instance, I had one album where the tracks were out of order and with a few taps, I was able to fix it right there in the app; it was unexpected, intuitive and quick. To me, as a profession software designer and engineer, this is a clear indication of good heads running things from top to bottom. For this, I have no problem paying top dollar.

jRiver is a bit of a mess and most of the time I am not sure if I did things correctly. I do like the tree view customization in jRiver.

 

[amirm]

I got sold on Roon because I really like how these guys think and design things. The architecture is simple and well thought out. They are active on their forums, feature requests are ranked and they actually go implement them. The KB is actually useful and well organized. The feature set goes deep - for instance, I had one album where the tracks were out of order and with a few taps, I was able to fix it right there in the app; it was unexpected, intuitive and quick. To me, as a profession software designer and engineer, this is a clear indication of good heads running things from top to bottom. For this, I have no problem paying top dollar.

Those are some of the most important reasons I adopted Roon. I indicated the same when I wrote my original review a couple of years ago: https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...er-and-library-management-software-review.18/

 

[kendall]

Well spoke to Martijn today and they are testing and everything looks very promising , so hopefully really soon, Dutch&Dutch have some really interesting developments planned for the 8C, it really will become the ‘perfect’ loudspeaker.
Keith

If I could get a 30-day trial of the 8c in the US, I’d order tomorrow.

 

[tim_j_thomas]

Those are some of the most important reasons I adopted Roon. I indicated the same when I wrote my original review a couple of years ago: https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...er-and-library-management-software-review.18/

The overall architecture appears to be very well thought out! The only two things that put me off are the cost as well as the need to have a dedicated PC / server to run their core. I only have laptops in the house. I don't see a "out of the box" solution available for Roon that doesn't cost close to a grand or more. I'd rather spend that on music, rather than yet another way to play it.

 

[stunta]

Those are some of the most important reasons I adopted Roon. I indicated the same when I wrote my original review a couple of years ago: https://audiosciencereview.com/foru...er-and-library-management-software-review.18/

That is a good review. I agree with everything you have written. You wrote it a while ago so what do you feel about the improvements they have made since then?

The ability to group zones is an awesome feature I don't have much use for but someday I might.

Integration with REW would be great. Even better would be a native solution in Roon where I plug a mic, click one big button and Roon auto-calibrates.

For their radio feature, I don't know if they use any ML algorithms; Google Play music does and it works okay but I am guessing Roon metadata is richer and may produce a better model. Also since Roon analyzes tracks, I wonder if there is potential for using waveforms as a sort of digital signature to identify the listener's likes/dislikes.

 

[Scott Borduin]

I got sold on Roon because I really like how these guys think and design things. The architecture is simple and well thought out. They are active on their forums, feature requests are ranked and they actually go implement them. The KB is actually useful and well organized. The feature set goes deep - for instance, I had one album where the tracks were out of order and with a few taps, I was able to fix it right there in the app; it was unexpected, intuitive and quick. To me, as a profession software designer and engineer, this is a clear indication of good heads running things from top to bottom. For this, I have no problem paying top dollar.

jRiver is a bit of a mess and most of the time I am not sure if I did things correctly. I do like the tree view customization in jRiver.

Yes. The interface in Roon has the feel of being designed by user experience professionals. The interface in jRiver has the feel of being designed by programmers. It's like MacOS vs. Linux: one allows you to do simple things simply, and get a lot of what you want without having to be an expert in the software, while the other can do remarkable things but requires you to learn a lot from various ad-hoc sources in order to use its full potential. One adds functionality in a way that feels designed-in, the other adds functionality that often feels a bit bolted-on.

At one point more than 10 years ago I embarked on an effort to build a client-server extension of jRiver, with the end goal being very like Sooloos then and Roon today. I could solve a lot of the technical issues, but the biggest problem of all was access to consistent, comprehensive, curated metadata to power the whole experience. Then as now, AMG/Rovi dominate that space and they know it - their product doesn't come cheap. So when you buy Roon you're paying for that premium data license as well.

And speaking of metadata further, this is an interesting read that speaks to the judgment and hard-won experience of the system architect(s):

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Metadata_Model

BTW, the above should be read as the opinions of one person and not a slam on jRiver per se. If it had not been for jRiver, I would have given up on the idea of computer audio 13 years ago, when the pathetically incapable iTunes was the primary alternative. And the people at JR seem genuinely nice and have made huge contributions to advancing computer audio.

Scott

 

[stunta]

The overall architecture appears to be very well thought out! The only two things that put me off are the cost as well as the need to have a dedicated PC / server to run their core. I only have laptops in the house. I don't see a "out of the box" solution available for Roon that doesn't cost close to a grand or more. I'd rather spend that on music, rather than yet another way to play it.

The way I see it, a cloud-based solution would be the best option where both storage and compute are in the cloud. You would upload your library to the cloud and then your library is made available over a streaming solution. Of course, this also comes at a cost but I would pay for it, especially if my library also backups in the cloud. Google already does this but your files are converted to lower bit rate.

Its really hard to get away from needing compute at home without the streaming solution. DACs don't have the processing power and even if they did, they would outdated very quickly.

What would be really cool is a program gave me a diff of what I have in my library and what is already available via a streaming service like Tidal. Then I could only upload what is only in my library use the streaming service for the rest. This is a hard problem if metadata is not standardized.

 

[tim_j_thomas]

The way I see it, a cloud-based solution would be the best option where both storage and compute are in the cloud. You would upload your library to the cloud and then your library is made available over a streaming solution. Of course, this also comes at a cost but I would pay for it, especially if my library also backups in the cloud. Google already does this but your files are converted to lower bit rate.

Its really hard to get away from needing compute at home without the streaming solution. DACs don't have the processing power and even if they did, they would outdated very quickly.

What would be really cool is a program gave me a diff of what I have in my library and what is already available via a streaming service like Tidal. Then I could only upload what is only in my library use the streaming service for the rest. This is a hard problem if metadata is not standardized.

Agreed! All in the cloud would be worth paying for!

 

[Frank Dernie]

Funny how different we are. If cloud service were available free I wouldn't use it!
I have plenty of storage here on my home network so don't use cloud services for anything

 

[Kal Rubinson]

The way I see it, a cloud-based solution would be the best option where both storage and compute are in the cloud. You would upload your library to the cloud and then your library is made available over a streaming solution. Of course, this also comes at a cost but I would pay for it, especially if my library also backups in the cloud. Google already does this but your files are converted to lower bit rate.

Never. One would be at the mercy of the longevity, pricing and policy changes (in bit rate?) of the company, even if it is Roon themselves. I have invested a lot in my library and it is too precious for me to trust it to others.

 

[tim_j_thomas]

Never. One would be at the mercy of the longevity, pricing and policy changes (in bit rate?) of the company, even if it is Roon themselves. I have invested a lot in my library and it is too precious for me to trust it to others.

I see the cloud as an "addition to" / augment to the local library. I would never use the cloud as a replacement.

 

[Thomas savage]

Can you not stream audio from your home drive/server when your away from the home?

 

[Rodney Gold]

What exactly do you mean?

 

[Purité Audio]

Roon is just a web page so you can ‘sign in’ anywhere, exactly like Tidal.
Keith

 

[Frank Dernie]

Can you not stream audio from your home drive/server when your away from the home?

I can but I don't.
I may be paranoid but I have my mobile data turned off all the time I am not actually using it. Streaming from home would mean leaving it on. I am not sure how reliable it would be either. Pretty well everything I want to listen to on the move is already on my phone.