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Why do people like/use Roon?
- Thread starter Mariner9
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I use Bluesound Node2i, two Bluesound Flex speakers and a PC to create four zones in my house. I tried Roon+Tidal but it didn’t really give anything new to me so I switched back to just Spotify. Multi room works now great and Spotify has superior algorithms in suggesting new music compared to Tidal. Roon would probably make sense if I had a large own music library, then again Bluesound handles those as well.
Roon offers a unique combination of services. If you need enough of those services then it's worth the expense, if you don't then it isn't.
I use it because it integrates DSP with Qobuz/Tidal and offers a good, all-in-one library. The listening notes (and lyrics when I suddenly wonder what the singer has just sung!) are also useful. For me, all of this is worth the cost of a couple of beers a month!
I use it because it integrates DSP with Qobuz/Tidal and offers a good, all-in-one library. The listening notes (and lyrics when I suddenly wonder what the singer has just sung!) are also useful. For me, all of this is worth the cost of a couple of beers a month!
have used LMS in the (admittedly long, but through its abandonment) past and I never saw federated search or anything remotely like Roon’s artist metadata.
And I found LMS group casting to be quite buggy, but there may have been other causes of that.
As I think Amir once said, it has enhanced my enjoyment of music more than many components with far greater cost.
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Can't speak for lms as never tried it. But I'd agree with the Roon part.
Side question for any roon and qobuz (maybe even tidal too), anyone noticed any playback stops since around Christmas (orange message pops up, xxx media is loading slowly)?
It's either a roon update, windows update or possibly my network that's causing troubles. If others experiencing its more likely a Roon issue. I note its also become a real RAM hog.
Roon also does selective downsampling better than LMS and...I forgot the big one:
As a classical music buff, I had to do an enormous amount of tagging of my files to get composer/artist right, and I chose minimserver because it could use these tags for reading my library. But there were often still different spellings or accents on composer and performer names.
Roon finally relieved me of that. If you search for Dvorak, you get all the variants of his first name. You can filter for chamber music and get chamber music. What a relief.
As a classical music buff, I had to do an enormous amount of tagging of my files to get composer/artist right, and I chose minimserver because it could use these tags for reading my library. But there were often still different spellings or accents on composer and performer names.
Roon finally relieved me of that. If you search for Dvorak, you get all the variants of his first name. You can filter for chamber music and get chamber music. What a relief.
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Not a roon hater as such, but whatever it’s strengths Roon does seem to suffer from the seemingly unsolvable problem afflicting all music library software, which is that the quality of metadata sources is highly verifiable. I don’t see that roon has cracked that. The approach that I chosen to take is to set my own metadata conventions with a strict limited number of genres and enforce them on my stored media library using beets. This was initially labour intensive but the only job that remains is to import any new music on this basis. I currently use moode audio, which handles my library very well. This doesn’t give me qobuz integration as I need to use it through upnp, but my library meta data is maintained to a better standard than it would be with any automated process, at the price of more direct intervention and having to skip between interfaces. It’s going to take a good ai to fix this, but I don’t see a commercial reason to develop one. Totally fine with paying real money for a solution, but not one that chokes on metadata.
I have not noticed anything consistent. When I have had issues recently, it is usually when my network was under strain from a combination of work/school video conferences.
It’s a common phenomenon in all IOT I’m afraid. As a case in point, what hardware/software to you use to connect to give you WAN access?-if you are like 99.99% of home users you are using an absolutely hideous solution.
Many technology companies aim for a platform to be something that the user can’t get off of. Projects like volumio will never achieve elegant integration of qobuz and tidal because those platforms don’t want them to have it-if you follow volumios development cycle you’d probably notice that most of their problems are derived of the overhead of polishing the tidal/qobuz integration turd. It’s probably understandable but it all leads to the inevitable walled garden in the end. I’m going to stay on the outside of that wall, accept the clunkier user experience but be safe in the knowledge that I can really leave if I want to. My personal view is that volumio or similar should seek a more visionary partnership with bandcamp and draw the battle lines there.
Good idea. Although I've found Volumio pretty bad, overall. The iOS app works well, but the android app uses browser simulation, and becomes disconnected and unresponsive.
It's true, walled gardens can offer better experiences (I'm typing this on a MacBook M1, which I love), and open standards tend to be chaotic. But Roon isn't particularly walled today. It keeps its metadata to itself, not enforcing any tagging or folder structure on your music like some other systems. And the streaming integration works really well. A few glitches with playlists and sometimes pointing to old/protected streams, but otherwise, preferable than switching between, and searching across, services.
I do think the advantages for classical fans are greater in Roon. It wouldn't be as compelling if I didn't have a huge classical collection.
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Just watching that from my email too.EDIT- sorry, Roon sent me an email advising of the update and I watched the video in that.
1.looks like they are trying to address weaknesses with jazz /classical and improve recommendations. Good
2. When did a major update not bring major issues for some users?
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If I decide to go with Roon this will be my reason. Read Amir's review of Chromecast Audio, and even outputting a digital stream it's a mess, except when used as a Roon endpoint, then it's perfect. Given I already own a Chromecast audio, and I'd like to take my PC out of the equation when I play streaming music on Qobuz, and I'm not particular the stream be higher than 24/48, I'm at least willing to try Roon.
Anyone know why it cleans up Chromecast audio, is there some thing cheaper that can do the same thing? I definitely don't seeing myself paying $700 for a lifetime subscription, but I can see using Roon as a temporary expedient while I work on something better.
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See later posts. Apps that use chromecast properly (like the music service aps) should already be fine. It was chrome browser to chromecast that was horrid. Amir updated later on.
BillG
Major Contributor
If you read his review again, you'll see that only when streaming content from the Chrome browser was the output suboptimal, and that was the fault of the browser not the device. All of the numerous other apps that access it do so just fine.
If you're looking for a less expensive alternative to Roon as a client-server package for Chromecast, there are many. My favorite for the last several years is Emby. While it is multimedia focused, it is more than sufficient for audio only, and it's freeware version so feature complete that one could use it exclusively without feeling crippled in any way.
gfinlays
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I see loads of users on the Roon Community forums having issues with Roon that are related to poor network topology and frankly, awful hardware. Then there are those who claim that an audiophile network switch, an optical link between devices or some new-fangled hideously over-priced Cat8 cable sprinkled with pixie-dust "lifted veils" from the sound of their hi-fi system. Many of them don't have the slightest concept of how networks actually operate.
Reading through the Roon Community Forum is certainly an eye opener! I don't think people (well, some people) seem to understand that they're setting up a series of networked connections. When things don't work (Android devices, in particular), people seem to become defensive and aggressive.
In my set up I've assigned static IP addresses to ever every device that I use for Roon and I keep things as simple as possible. Works a treat. My network is filled with contended devices all chatting away to each other!
gfinlays
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There seem to be a lot of 'audiophiles' on there who reckon they know a thing or two about networks. When you try to help them, they aren't capable of giving the most basic information about their network setup. They don't realise that Roon, especially when streaming to multiple endpoints, can place a heavy load on network resources and they have no idea how to set up their topology to leverage the best performance for Roon.
I'm probably guilty of wading into the fray on some of these discussions around Android devices.....
I should remember some sage words of wisdom given to me by an old mentor: "Never argue with an idiot, he'll drag you down to his level and beat you with experience"
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