If you thought Roon 1.2 was a hugh upgrade...you ain't seen nothing (V 1.3 is coming!)

[craighartley]

@craighartley, thank you for the elegant response. At the end of the day, it comes down to user preference, what he/she values and what he/she sees this software application to be. For me, as much as I like the eye candy and all the music background info and cross references, I dont value it and do not believe these features add to my overall user experience. I just want software that manages my library and makes it easy for me to play music. I am a bit of a data mining nerd so all the features Jriver has really appeals to me. To be 100% honest, if Jriver integrated with HQP I would never have purchased Roon. At the end of the day, to each their own. Clearly there is space in this hobby for both Roon and Jriver.

 

Thank you. Yes, I agree there is room for both Roon and JRiver. For me the best combination at the moment is Yate (to edit metadata) and Roon (to present my library elegantly - especially as it has an increasingly intelligent handling of classical music); and HQPlayer to upsample the stream from Roon. I don't like eye candy; but then I don't find any in Roon, only good design. (JRiver looks awful - but that's another matter!).

[craighartley]

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I look at JRiver Media Center as an app that enables the user to have full control over everything and see "how the sausage is made." I look at Roon as an app where the user gives up control to a team that eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff and presents one's collection in a way that nobody else does. Sure, there are many little points to be made within these ideas, but this is kind of the gist of it.

 

I used to feel that way about Roon - which was why I gave up on it at first. But it's changed a lot since then and you can opt out of letting it make a lot of the decisions. I feel I'm more in control of how my music will be presented because I understand how Roon will handle what I feed it (and I edit the metadata accordingly, and choose which fields I want Roon to handle, and which to base on my tagging); for me it's more sympathetic in that respect than JRiver (which I haven't used for years, so shouldn't comment, but I did find it infuriating for presenting Classical music on the app, which they'd given up on developing despite complaints from users).

 

Why go and watch a butcher making the wrong sausage when you can be enjoying your favourite recipe in the delicatessen?

[Keith_W]

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I look at JRiver Media Center as an app that enables the user to have full control over everything and see "how the sausage is made." I look at Roon as an app where the user gives up control to a team that eats, sleeps, and breathes this stuff and presents one's collection in a way that nobody else does.

 

I don't want it to present my collection in a way that "nobody else does", because that results in disasters like this:

 

 

(Note, the albums are presented in a random order with no option to sort by composer).

 

Or this:

 

 

Dozens of Bach cantatas with the same icon and not enough text space to identify which one it is. Good luck choosing the correct one by accident.

 

The strength of Roon is that it is supposedly the best library manager in the business? It is a far way from it. If it gives you screens like that, it is useless. They charge you hundreds of dollars for the privilege of completing screwing up your collection and turning it into an incomprehensible mess.

 

I want it to present my collection the way I want it to be presented. IMO, that is everything that is wrong with Roon.

[The Computer Audiophile]

I want it to present my collection the way I want it to be presented.

Very good point. Near 100% of the time I want to tell pieces of technology what to do rather than have it tell me what to do.

[jtwrace]

Very good point. Near 100% of the time I want to tell pieces of technology what to do rather than have it tell me what to do.

 

Agreed but it needs to be intuitive. I find JRiver very difficult to use unless one wants to constantly sit there and learn it. I do that during the day and want to listen at night without too much dicking around.

[craighartley]

I don't want it to present my collection in a way that "nobody else does", because that results in disasters like this:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]32061[/ATTACH]

 

(Note, the albums are presented in a random order with no option to sort by composer).

 

Or this:

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]32062[/ATTACH]

 

Dozens of Bach cantatas with the same icon and not enough text space to identify which one it is. Good luck choosing the correct one by accident.

 

The strength of Roon is that it is supposedly the best library manager in the business? It is a far way from it. If it gives you screens like that, it is useless. They charge you hundreds of dollars for the privilege of completing screwing up your collection and turning it into an incomprehensible mess.

I want it to present my collection the way I want it to be presented. IMO, that is everything that is wrong with Roon.

 

Your first picture doesn't show a random order. You've selected the option to sort it by artist. Try sorting Works by Composer using Focus. But I agree handling of Classical works and Composers needs improving and I expect this to happen in 1.3. Given the vast change expected, I think its a bit pointless panning Roon until we see what changes.

 

Your second picture is an extreme example. Compare my similar search:

 

 

 

What do you mean by 'completely screwing up your collection'? Roon doesn't touch your files. How it presents your music depends on (a) the state of your metadata,(b) the choices you make about whether Roon uses its own metadata or the tags in your files, and © deficiencies and bugs that are still to be sorted. It almost presents my collection in the way I want it to be presented; it gets a lot closer than JRiver.

[craighartley]

Very good point. Near 100% of the time I want to tell pieces of technology what to do rather than have it tell me what to do.

 

Repeating myself, but you seem to ignore my response to the OP, so I'll try again:

 

Roon almost presents my collection the way I want it to be presented. JRiver couldn't come close. Roon doesn't take away all control and decision making. In what sense does it 'tell you what to do'?

[The Computer Audiophile]

Repeating myself, but you seem to ignore my contributions, so I'll try again:

 

Roon almost presents my collection the way I want it to be presented. JRiver couldn't come close. Roon doesn't take away all control and decision making. In what sense does it 'tell you what to do'?

 

I'm not ignoring any of your contributions, I just can't respond to each one.

 

I use Roon most of the time because I love the interface and how well the endpoints work.

 

Roon tells you what to do because you can't do what you want. Want to view music by folders? You can't. Roon tells you that you must do it their way without folders. Don't get me wrong, I love Roon and I have zero interest in browsing folders if I do t need to. It's just an example.

[craighartley]

I'm not ignoring any of your contributions, I just can't respond to each one.

 

I use Roon most of the time because I love the interface and how well the endpoints work.

 

Roon tells you what to do because you can't do what you want. Want to view music by folders? You can't. Roon tells you that you must do it their way without folders. Don't get me wrong, I love Roon and I have zero interest in browsing folders if I do t need to. It's just an example.

 

Point taken, and apologies that my post sounded petulant when I didn't intend it.

 

But Roon doesn't set out to let you view music by folders. Would you criticise a car for 'telling you what to do', because it won't let you use it like a bicycle?

 

 

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[The Computer Audiophile]

Point taken, and apologies that my post sounded petulant when I didn't intend it.

 

But Roon doesn't set out to let you view music by folders. Would you criticise a car for 'telling you what to do', because it won't let you use it like a bicycle?

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Computer Audiophile

 

Perhaps my differentiations were seen as criticisms, when they shouldn't have been. My fault. Lack of folder view is an asset to many and a limitation to others. I'm not knocking anything here, just noting differences.

[craighartley]

Perhaps my differentiations were seen as criticisms, when they shouldn't have been. My fault. Lack of folder view is an asset to many and a limitation to others. I'm not knocking anything here, just noting differences.

 

It's not that I took your differentiations as criticisms of Roon. It's that the simplification they present perpetuates what seems to me a misapprehension on the other poster's part that Roon is totally inflexible and dictatorial. That's not my experience; it depends how you use it.

 

 

 

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[Keith_W]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]32063[/ATTACH]

 

I don't know whether it was your intention to inadvertently support my point, but you did. Your search illustrates perfectly why Roon is useless as far as I am concerned. If I have a large CD boxed set (e.g. Harnoncourt-Leonhardt Bach cantata set has 60CD's), I want them to appear like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... etc. YOURS shows 32, 46, 26, 37, 45 ... and all over four pages. In other words, Roon thinks that you don't want to look at your large CD collection in a sensible way, so it comes up with a random way. So, how do you over-ride this? Are you able to make Roon display them in numeric order? Could you attempt it and post another screenshot?

 

Now, just imagine if Windows file explorer behaved like this. Microsoft decides that they want to present your hard drive to you in a "new way" and take away the browse by folder feature. Instead, you have to go tag every file on your hard drive. Your mother comes over and wants to cook dinner, and asks you to search your hard drive for "cream pie" ...

[esmit]

I am glad for my mother she will not search my hard drive for "creampie", she might get some unexpected results.

 

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[craighartley]

I don't know whether it was your intention to inadvertently support my point, but you did. Your search illustrates perfectly why Roon is useless as far as I am concerned. If I have a large CD boxed set (e.g. Harnoncourt-Leonhardt Bach cantata set has 60CD's), I want them to appear like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... etc. YOURS shows 32, 46, 26, 37, 45 ... and all over four pages. In other words, Roon thinks that you don't want to look at your large CD collection in a sensible way, so it comes up with a random way. So, how do you over-ride this? Are you able to make Roon display them in numeric order? Could you attempt it and post another screenshot?

 

Now, just imagine if Windows file explorer behaved like this. Microsoft decides that they want to present your hard drive to you in a "new way" and take away the browse by folder feature. Instead, you have to go tag every file on your hard drive. Your mother comes over and wants to cook dinner, and asks you to search your hard drive for "cream pie" ...

 

 

Roon isn't File Explorer. Nor will it cook cream pie. It's bloody brilliant for my music collection though. However, like you, I don't think it's perfect. I agree with you wholeheartedly that Roon does not presently have adequate sorting for album searches. But I think it's vastly improved, and based on my experience of Roon as a company I'm sure the upcoming 1.3 will solve a lot of the problems you are finding.

 

Until then there is not much point in me spending a lot of time trying to make my library look like yours. I don't have the Harnoncourt 'Boxed Set', and I can't second-guess how Roon will deal with it as I don't think I have anything comparable. My Suzuki Bach Cantata set is made up of separate albums. It isn't treated as a boxed set. All my box sets appear as one album, with the discs shown separately within that album, and that works fine. And with the Suzuki set, there is no reason for me to want it to appear in the numbered order, because I don't see why I would want to browse through it as an easy way to find something: that's because the Cantatas don't appear within the set in BWV catalogue order. I don't wake up one morning and think 'My God, I must listen to Bach Cantatas Vol 46 as soon as possible!'; but I might think 'I'd really like to listen to Cantata BWV 45'. So then I just search for BWV 45 and choose the work and performance to play. But I could search for Bach Cantatas Vol 46 (I won't, because I haven't memorised what is on each album, so it makes more sense to search for an individual cantata - then I can easily get the view of the album it's on, or just play the work direct).

 

Going back to sort order for searches. In the interim (until the 1.3 update) my workaround is simply to list the albums by album title. All my Classical albums have the main composer's name as the first word of the title. And I have preferences set so that Roon uses the file-tag Album title (and Album Artist). So if I filter the album view listed by title to 'Bach Cantata', I get this:

 

 

It's not perfect because Roon sorts the title alphanumerically, so the sequence is: ...47, 48, 49, 5, 50, 51... etc. This is very irritating and I hope I'll find a better alternative in 1.3. I'd be really happy to revisit this with you and share experiences when 1.3 appears.

[firedog]

I'm not going to get into the specific examples in this thread, but in general if you tell Roon to use your tags, and tag it in a way that differentiates discs, it will do so. Yes, sometimes you have to think/work a bit about what tagging to use to solve your problem, but it pretty much always can be done.

 

BTW, why don't you submit your set of 60 discs as a problem to be solved at the Roon Community Forum? Usually the Roon people monitor the forum and answer posts, or tell you they will work on a fix.

[Dan Gravell]

I see it a bit differently.

I have not so far judged Roon as a library management tool. It's not a good tool for librarians; but it's very good for readers.

 

Eloquently put; I do feel that labels are case around pretty loosely, and I have seen a number of articles refer to Roon as a music management tool so I can see why people come to this conclusion.

 

I see it as an abstraction layer over music libraries, local and streamed.

[Argopo]

I'm not going to get into the specific examples in this thread, but in general if you tell Roon to use your tags, and tag it in a way that differentiates discs, it will do so. Yes, sometimes you have to think/work a bit about what tagging to use to solve your problem, but it pretty much always can be done.

 

BTW, why don't you submit your set of 60 discs as a problem to be solved at the Roon Community Forum? Usually the Roon people monitor the forum and answer posts, or tell you they will work on a fix.

 

Let's say you post at the Roon forums about a specific metadata problem you have. And let's say they respond and tell you they "found" the cause of the problem. And it turns out that the problem lies with AllMusic (or whatever service they are using to link up the metadata) and that's that.

 

In some cases (like my case for a particular album/box set) Roon can't or won't fix the problem because it is not their problem to fix.

 

So, I wait and wait for a "fix". (And in some cases you as the end user cannot override certain of the fields by forcing Roon to only recognize your own metadata in your files.)

 

Do the good folks at AllMusic care at all about my metadata problem with my particular box set?

 

Or do they care that for one of the artists in my collection, the linked "artist description" is being pulled from the wrong artist? (Because sometime bands have the same name, although one may be a punk band from the 70s while the other is a pop band from the 90s).

 

It is easy enough to tell Roon end users to post at the community forums at Roonlabs, but ultimately if the Roon folks decide it is not their problem to fix, they will pass the buck to their "metadata service providers."

 

When I use JRiver, if there is a problem, it is between JRiver and me. I can go to their forums and complain or ask for a feature request, or software fix.

 

With Roon, you have a "third-party" to deal with.

 

Maybe 1.3 will correct some of the software user interface problems described in this thread, but I doubt it will solve/fix the "third-party" dependency.

[moko]

I haven't tried root yet...but it would be cool (since "they" are going to arrange your music for you)....if you could tell them to arrange it not by meta tags....by by a mood,or just a collection of genre's ....by decade.

[firedog]

 

It is easy enough to tell Roon end users to post at the community forums at Roonlabs, but ultimately if the Roon folks decide it is not their problem to fix, they will pass the buck to their "metadata service providers."

 

When I use JRiver, if there is a problem, it is between JRiver and me. I can go to their forums and complain or ask for a feature request, or software fix.

 

With Roon, you have a "third-party" to deal with.

 

Maybe 1.3 will correct some of the software user interface problems described in this thread, but I doubt it will solve/fix the "third-party" dependency.

 

At the Roon forum it works exactly like at the JRiver forum: users answer you and actual employees of Roon often answer you. I don't see any difference, other than that the folks at Roon are always polite and the JRiver team is often nasty their own users.

 

There are "artist equivalence" issues that Roon fixes and some others that they admit are more difficult to fix using their system. Over time it is clear the software is becoming more sophisticated, allowing more user control, and also using more than one source to catalog albums.

[firedog]

I haven't tried root yet...but it would be cool (since "they" are going to arrange your music for you)....if you could tell them to arrange it not by meta tags....by by a mood,or just a collection of genre's ....by decade.

 

You can do things like that with the "Focus" function. You can also save a specific focus (smartlist) for future use.