Roon From Roon Labs - A Video Run-through

Roon + TIDAL is magical

I have listened to more great music new to me in the last week than in the last few years combined

Roon seems promising but I am finding the incidence of dropouts with TIDAL is high and annoying...I use a MacMini as a headless server and am interested in Roon as an alternative to Screen sharing with my laptop...that part works fine, once I had figured out exactly how to set it up but playing TIDAL tracks results in dropouts...playing TIDAL on the Mini through screen sharing is fine but I am reluctant to reduce the TIDAL quality settings so that it works seamlessly with Roon....anybody also having that problem or have experience to share? Unless I can get this to work, I am reluctant to commit to the annual or lifetime subscription and I do find that model weird for a new service....

Roon seems promising but I am finding the incidence of dropouts with TIDAL is high and annoying...I use a MacMini as a headless server and am interested in Roon as an alternative to Screen sharing with my laptop...that part works fine, once I had figured out exactly how to set it up but playing TIDAL tracks results in dropouts...playing TIDAL on the Mini through screen sharing is fine but I am reluctant to reduce the TIDAL quality settings so that it works seamlessly with Roon....anybody also having that problem or have experience to share? Unless I can get this to work, I am reluctant to commit to the annual or lifetime subscription and I do find that model weird for a new service....

At home in NYC, I've never seen this issue.. but I've had it happen in Bangkok, Paris, and Ukraine. My business partner Enno lives in Bangkok, and he said that since they "launched" in Thailand, things have stopped dropping out.

Where are you? i can report the issues to them.

Roon seems promising but I am finding the incidence of dropouts with TIDAL is high and annoying...I use a MacMini as a headless server and am interested in Roon as an alternative to Screen sharing with my laptop...that part works fine, once I had figured out exactly how to set it up but playing TIDAL tracks results in dropouts...playing TIDAL on the Mini through screen sharing is fine but I am reluctant to reduce the TIDAL quality settings so that it works seamlessly with Roon....anybody also having that problem or have experience to share? Unless I can get this to work, I am reluctant to commit to the annual or lifetime subscription and I do find that model weird for a new service....

You're not alone. Tried Tidal a couple of times over the past few months. Both instances I had dropouts. It appears to be their servers at fault, not software, hardware, or your network (I use numerous other services, Sonos, etc. and don't see such dropout problems). Suggest you try and contact Tidal for any support. But I wouldn't hold my breath getting help.

You're not alone. Tried Tidal a couple of times over the past few months. Both instances I had dropouts. It appears to be their servers at fault, not software, hardware, or your network (I use numerous other services, Sonos, etc. and don't see such dropout problems). Suggest you try and contact Tidal for any support. But I wouldn't hold my breath getting help.

Roon preloads the current and next track as quickly as servers/network permit and then play out of the buffer in memory.

Most tracks buffer within the first 10-15s for me, but sometimes I hit a slow one and it sucks. I've pinged our contact at TIDAL, and they are in the process of upgrading their network to be on a global CDN. My guess is that they haven't updated their entire library to be on that CDN.

Roon preloads the current and next track as quickly as servers/network permit and then play out of the buffer in memory.

Most tracks buffer within the first 10-15s for me, but sometimes I hit a slow one and it sucks. I've pinged our contact at TIDAL, and they are in the process of upgrading their network to be on a global CDN. My guess is that they haven't updated their entire library to be on that CDN.

I am in Champaign Illinois with the fastest service that Comcast can supply here via cable ( I realise that the words Comcast,fast and service dont often occur in the same sentence.... )...I occasionally get dropouts from TIDAL direct to the MacMini but much more frequently when accessing TIDAL via Roon...I have tried the same tracks direct and via Roon to make sure it isnt a particular album that is causing trouble...it isnt a delay in loading so much as a dropout whilst playing and once it has happened it gets progressively more frequent. Its a shame because TIDAL integration is very much a plus point for me, and likely to be even more so with MQA integration when that happens...soon? Will keep monitoring it to see if I can discern a pattern

Question is... do I want the new Auralic Aries mini to feed my Musical Fidelity M6si? Or should I just buy a Mac mini and install Roon?

I want to turn my M6si into a tablet controlled TIDAL player. Both of these seem like approaches for getting to that point. And both offer AirPlay for when friends come over - TIDAL through their own software and a Mac mini through Airfoil.

Question is... do I want the new Auralic Aries mini to feed my Musical Fidelity M6si? Or should I just buy a Mac mini and install Roon?

 

I want to turn my M6si into a tablet controlled TIDAL player. Both of these seem like approaches for getting to that point. And both offer AirPlay for when friends come over - TIDAL through their own software and a Mac mini through Airfoil.

What you want is a Mac mini w/ Roon and AirServer (far superior product to AirFoil Speakers) talking to your Aries feeding into your MF M6si

We don't have Roon -> Aries/AriesMini released at the moment, but they are in our first batch of RoonSpeakers partners.

:-)

@diw -- i will ping them, also, im going to get some diagnostics in the next build, so you can see why dropouts are occurring.

I must be the lucky one. Mac Mini, Roon and Tidal. I haven't had any dropouts in over a week since I began the Tidal trial. I do have a good internet connection with Comcast. 120-125Mbps down.

Or maybe I am, by luck of the draw, hitting only tunes that are on the goal CDN.

I must be the lucky one. Mac Mini, Roon and Tidal. I haven't had any dropouts in over a week since I began the Tidal trial. I do have a good internet connection with Comcast. 120-125Mbps down.

 

Or maybe I am, by luck of the draw, hitting only tunes that are on the goal CDN.

Sounds like you may be lucky...I turned Roon on today and the Macbook has stopped working as the Remote control and I cant find a way to re-establish it as a remote...I tried re-installing Roon on the Macbook but cant find the screen that enables me to select it as a remote...it has been looking on the Macbook (unsuccessfully) for Remote libraries but thats not the same thing. With screen sharing on the Macbook the Roon screen for the Mini is much more responsive than iTunes so thats a plus but not quite what I intended. And TIDAL direct to the Macbook is drop out free so far....but some advice on the simplest way to get back to the remote setup for the Macbook would be welcome.....the quality of the Roon interface is very good and I like the interactive elements and integration with TIDAL, but whenever I try out alternatives to creaky old iTunes, I cant help but feel considerable admiration for its robustness and ability to work with many different platforms, in its creaky and limited way. Roon with the bugs fixed would ( will?) be a good alternative

@diw - So the Mac Mini running Roon (core) is running and accepting remote connection? . When you start Roon on the Macbook it should give you a message - "Remote Connection - Waiting for remote library" if the Roon (core) machine is offline or for some other reason it cannot connect to the Core, is that what you are experiencing?

Maybe this link will help with trouble shooting?

Otherwise I would head over to Roon Communities and post your issue, they are very responsive.

I love your site, and your recommendations are usually great, but "the hottest thing in HiFi in recent memory"? For $1000, you and others have written about many items which would appear to be much hotter--Dragonfly and other low-priced DACs, Pono and other high end portables, Amarra HiFi and competitors....Roon is an interesting product, but it's really just an aggregator; it's price/performance ratio is going to keep it far down the shopping list.

I think that is just the tag-line being promoted by Roon PR.

Interesting? Maybe.

"The hottest thing in HiFi in recent memory"? I don't see it (even after watching the 30+ minute CA video of someone clicking around in the Roon application). The app scrapes a wall-of-text and album art from the Internet for an album and I'm supposed to be impressed?

I think that is just the tag-line being promoted by Roon PR.

 

Interesting? Maybe.

 

"The hottest thing in HiFi in recent memory"? I don't see it (even after watching the 30+ minute CA video of someone clicking around in the Roon application). The app scrapes a wall-of-text and album art from the Internet for an album and I'm supposed to be impressed?

No. That's my quote and I stand by it.

Danny,

How sturdy is Roon regarding bad library tagging?

In all examples shown, there seem to exist perfect tagging and 'no one' seems to bring the subject up.

Does Roon do library fixes during import/browsing or does it only update album art?

If not, when will your metadata editor be available (and will this be intelligent)?

Danny,

How sturdy is Roon regarding bad library tagging?

In all examples shown, there seem to exist perfect tagging and 'no one' seems to bring the subject up.

Does Roon do library fixes during import/browsing or does it only update album art?

If not, when will your metadata editor be available (and will this be intelligent)?

This is actually a strong point of Roon's feature set: metadata identification and improvement. That said, we won't get it all, and we wont get it perfect, but we'll do much better than anything else out there (except for the hand grooming that many of us have invested in). We also will grab stuff that no hand groomed collection ever would. For the hand groomers, some new features about preferring local metadata are in the works. Hopefully to be released in the next 2 weeks.

If you already keep decent tags in your files, or at least your files in directories as albums, we are going to nail most of western music, and some pockets of non-western music.

If we didn't nail it the first day, we may still nail it in the future, as our metadata keeps getting better.

There are some things you can do to help us -- keep files in directories w/ contiguous media and track numbers (disc number, track number), 1 album per directory -- keep some tags in your files, or have a sanely named directory structure for your wav files.

The identification and clean up system is FAST. What you might be used to taking hours or days, can be done in minutes or hours.

Grab a trial and give it a spin. If you need more time, message me. If you want to convert to a paid customer before your trial is over, I can offer you our introductory offer of 10% discount as well. If you choose to cancel before your trial, we won't charge you anything.

Our community site is very active, and I highly encourage visiting. People are usually more vocal when things go don't go perfect than when things go right, but we have about 600 users already (at 1 week post-launch) and most are beyond happy with the results.

I have a question regarding tagging of record labels. Am I right that Tidal doesn't tag the recording labels that albums were recorded on?

I haven't seen this mentioned but it seems like such an obvious feature that people would desire. To be able to view all Blue Note or Impulse records in one scroll. Or RCA Living Stereo, etc.

And if Tidal doesn't already catalog this info, is this something that Roon could make up for in the way it collects data from the web?

Hopefully I'm already missing something and can be set straight on this.

I have a question regarding tagging of record labels. Am I right that Tidal doesn't tag the recording labels that albums were recorded on?

 

I haven't seen this mentioned but it seems like such an obvious feature that people would desire. To be able to view all Blue Note or Impulse records in one scroll. Or RCA Living Stereo, etc.

 

And if Tidal doesn't already catalog this info, is this something that Roon could make up for in the way it collects data from the web?

TIDAL's metadata offering pales in comparison. We don't use anything from their metadata. They are very good partners, and were willing to give us the raw dumps that they get from the labels. It has allowed us to build our own mini-TIDAL inside our world using our own metadata. TIDAL still streams the content, but we own all the metadata.

You really have to try out Roon to see what it does with TIDAL. Our search is not as good, but it's getting better.... but the integration of TIDAL with your own local files is a sight to see... people have been commenting that TIDAL was not for them, until they saw what Roon did with it.

As for labels, we do what you want, if you've added those TIDAL albums to your library.

TIDAL's metadata offering pales in comparison. We don't use anything from their metadata. They are very good partners, and were willing to give us the raw dumps that they get from the labels. It has allowed us to build our own mini-TIDAL inside our world using our own metadata. TIDAL still streams the content, but we own all the metadata.

 

You really have to try out Roon to see what it does with TIDAL. Our search is not as good, but it's getting better.... but the integration of TIDAL with your own local files is a sight to see... people have been commenting that TIDAL was not for them, until they saw what Roon did with it.

 

As for labels, we do what you want, if you've added those TIDAL albums to your library.

Danny, again, your prompt feedback is awesome.

To respond, wanna let you know that I have signed up for a trial and have spent a bit of time, but not enough.

Your comment above, stating that I can filter and search by label, "if" I have added those albums to my library. But what I'm specifically talking about, is "discovery" of things NOT in my library or on my radar. I know you fully understand this concept. For example, if I click on a bio for an artist, let's say a Blue Note artist, the text will hyperlink many items such as similar artists. But I haven't seen an example where it will hyperlink a record label. And isn't that a very logical thing to want? The ability to explore something such as a labels catalog without having prior awareness? Whether or NOT it is currently in my library? I mean, the metadata is all out there to tag and reference. THAT would be a primary example of something I would get really excited about, and really "lost" in. That's the kind of "rabbit hole" that I have been looking for for a long time!

Thoughts?

That is coming in phase 3 of our TIDAL integration :-)

This involves a more generic browsing of the world of music, not just keyed off your library. We need to scale up our backend to allow for the volume of data this is going to generate.

Believe me, we want it too.

Hi Eli - The closest I've come to that ideal is by using the Discover feature in Roon. It will frequently highlight record labels. But, this is only the labels in my collection and can't be done while browsing through Bios (like you said). Here is a screenshot.

This is actually a strong point of Roon's feature set: metadata identification and improvement. That said, we won't get it all, and we wont get it perfect, but we'll do much better than anything else out there (except for the hand grooming that many of us have invested in). We also will grab stuff that no hand groomed collection ever would. For the hand groomers, some new features about preferring local metadata are in the works. Hopefully to be released in the next 2 weeks.

 

If you already keep decent tags in your files, or at least your files in directories as albums, we are going to nail most of western music, and some pockets of non-western music.

 

If we didn't nail it the first day, we may still nail it in the future, as our metadata keeps getting better.

 

There are some things you can do to help us -- keep files in directories w/ contiguous media and track numbers (disc number, track number), 1 album per directory -- keep some tags in your files, or have a sanely named directory structure for your wav files.

 

The identification and clean up system is FAST. What you might be used to taking hours or days, can be done in minutes or hours.

 

Grab a trial and give it a spin. If you need more time, message me. If you want to convert to a paid customer before your trial is over, I can offer you our introductory offer of 10% discount as well. If you choose to cancel before your trial, we won't charge you anything.

 

Our community site is very active, and I highly encourage visiting. People are usually more vocal when things go don't go perfect than when things go right, but we have about 600 users already (at 1 week post-launch) and most are beyond happy with the results.

Thanks for your elaborate answer.

I can confirm that most of my library consists of flac files in folders.

I will try it to see what it can do.

The major drawback is that the core needs to run on a computer demanding a decent amount of horsepower. I would rather prefere an SDK for embedding the Roon core in proprietary hardware, e.g. Aries, PS Audio Bridge, etc.

Thanks for your elaborate answer.

I can confirm that most of my library consists of flac files in folders.

 

I will try it to see what it can do.

The major drawback is that the core needs to run on a computer demanding a decent amount of horsepower. I would rather prefere an SDK for embedding the Roon core in proprietary hardware, e.g. Aries, PS Audio Bridge, etc.

We are doing this with some partners, but not the on the boxes you list above. Those machines not only lack the horse power to do what we need, but I wouldn't want electrically noisy CPUs inside those boxes. Let those devices keep the SQ great, and leave the data processing to computers or media servers.

We are doing this with some partners, but not the on the boxes you list above. Those machines not only lack the horse power to do what we need, but I wouldn't want electrically noisy CPUs inside those boxes. Let those devices keep the SQ great, and leave the data processing to computers or media servers.

Danny

Did my first listen of 192/24 files on a 13 inch MacBook Pro Retina acting as the core device wirelessly (very good bandwidth and was not the issue) connected to my NAS as the "watched folder" on a portable rig (HUGO) and got dropouts and stops.

Just curious if it is a horsepower issue with ROON as the core as playing the same file with JRiver accessing the same NAS wireless played flawlessly. Thanks

Not Danny - but as a data point, I have run Roon core on a 15" Macbook Pro Retina with 16 GB RAM, 2.6 Ghz Core i7. It is a Mid 2012 model. Using wireless with two watched folders on NAS. In storage settings for the Roon these two drives are connected via a network path using SMB.

With a DAC connected to this computer, no issues playing 24/192 files.

That said, my Macbook measures a TX Rate of 400Mbps with a 802.11n connection. My 5Ghz network is separated form my 2.4Ghz network, and I am connected to the former. The NAS is downstairs, connected via ethernet to my second Apple Extreme router.

My Internet speed is fast too at ~120Mbs down, but obviously that does not matter in this instance.

Not Danny - but as a data point, I have run Roon core on a 15" Macbook Pro Retina with 16 GB RAM, 2.6 Ghz Core i7. It is a Mid 2012 model. Using wireless with two watched folders on NAS. In storage settings for the Roon these two drives are connected via a network path using SMB.

 

With a DAC connected to this computer, no issues playing 24/192 files.

 

That said, my Macbook measures a TX Rate of 400Mbps with a 802.11n connection. My 5Ghz network is separated form my 2.4Ghz network, and I am connected to the former. The NAS is downstairs, connected via ethernet to my second Apple Extreme router.

 

My Internet speed is fast too at ~120Mbs down, but obviously that does not matter in this instance.

I have to try a different laptop as I no longer own one. It is my wife's with 4Gig of memory and an i5 chipset. I am using very fast wireless AC network. Maybe I will use my desktop PC as the core which is much faster and connect locally to the HUGO on the MacBook and see how that goes.