Why Roon?

[Karister]

The answer is: flexibility. Roon works perfectly out of the box if you just want to plug'n'play. But it allows endless customization without interfering to my files and offers tons of features:

• It has a huge music database. It will link albums, artists, performances and other. But it is one click to use own tags. If I want to override particular tag - piece of cake. Roon will store it in the local database without spoiling my files
• Volume normalization makes wonders to playlists composed of new and old recordings. Again, Roon can use own data for it or my tags
• Working with zones is super-easy
• Parametric EQ is unmatched and can be set separately per each zone
• Crossfeed!
• Artists bios, live lyrics and other cool stuff
• Focus offers brilliant music library filtering
• Activity summary
• Live radio when I am bored with own music library
• GUI is more than ok, but was better in 1.6 IMHO
• Brilliant playlist management - Roon can show in album view if a particular song is added to a playlist
• Migration of Core between PCs is a piece of cake. Normally I run Core on Intel NUC. Before longer travels I just copy music to USB stick, create backup, load in on my MacBook and done. Migration between different OS is seamless
• No lags, dropouts, etc
• It manages flawlessly multiple versions of the same album
• It uses tags to organize library instead of folders structure which allows to avoid a lot of bugs present in DLNA solutions

 

[contium]

I used Roon for 2 years and JRiver for like 15 years before that. Currently using LMS. Roon is beautiful eye candy but I don't like the way it presents music. It's not how my brain works. Searching was very inconsistent. For instance, often when searching an artist, Roon would return the same artist name multiple times with albums split between them. Or return nothing at all. I assure you it's not my tags. Often I had to fire up JRiver to find something. Ultimately, all I used in Roon was playlists imported from JRiver as Roon's playlist functionality is terrible at least compared to JRiver. Roon was 100% reliable. Something I can't say about JRiver. I would probably still use JRiver except for the reliability and the poor attitude of the management. They blame poor reliability on everything but their product yet other music players like Roon and LMS are completely reliable. LMS has been perfect for the 6 months or so I have used it. And I don't find Roon to be flexible at all. Rather it's pretty locked down IMO. I just thankful we have so many options to choose from,

 

[awdeeoh]

Roon has to improve its metadata service.

Pretty subpar for a $700 app.

 

[awdeeoh]

???

someone paid it for me

 

[elvisizer]

For instance, often when searching an artist, Roon would return the same artist name multiple times with albums split between them. Or return nothing at all. I assure you it's not my tags.

this is 100% tags

 

[Wicky]

Alongside the benefits of using Roon others have mentioned, I very much like the link you get on tracks to see all the other versions/performances of that track.

Hopefully they add more metadata in future, for example being able to search by record label.

 

[contium]

this is 100% tags

Whatever. Nothing else does it. JRiver, LMS, BlueOS, or any of the other half a dozen pi based servers I have tried.