Article: Roon 1.3 Major Update Coming Today

[jhwalker]

I used Roon for a year and then gave up on it. Access to Tidal and my 3tb collection in a single screen was great, but I found the interface quite irritating. I went back the MC and the Tidal app. The features of v 1.3 are impressive, but many of them are of little interest to me. I would really appreciate someone giving a thorough comparison of the new to the old interface. There is a claim for faster searches, which is a start, but the first version felt like an impediment between me and the music that I knew I should have easy access to.

 

The interface is exactly the same.

 

Search is approximately 10x faster, which makes a big difference with my underpowered Mac Mini (2011).

[jhwalker]

Anyone using headroom and, if so, why would one employ this?

 

Any time you're using DSP (especially equalizer), you have the potential to boost signal up to (or past) clipping threshold.

 

"Headroom" is to allow a few dBs of headroom so that you don't clip the output.

 

I found it useful when employing even mild Parametric Eq - I actually reduced gain on the Eq by 1dB, but still needed another 1dB of headroom in the Headroom section to completely avoid clipping.

[jhwalker]

If I'm up sampling, would you recommend using it?

 

I'm certainly no expert, but I suspect PCM upsampling probably isn't risky that way.

 

If you're upsampling to DSD, though, take advantage of the dB offset in the Upsampling section, because DSD is especially susceptible to issues here (if you put in the offset in the DSD section, you don't *also* have to include it in "Headroom", though).

[jhwalker]

I'm certainly no expert, but I suspect PCM upsampling probably isn't risky that way.

 

If you're upsampling to DSD, though, take advantage of the dB offset in the Upsampling section, because DSD is especially susceptible to issues here (if you put in the offset in the DSD section, you don't *also* have to include it in "Headroom", though).

 

Looks like I am wrong:

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/clipping-indicator-when-only-upsampling/20143

[jhwalker]

It took 5 hours to scan and add almost all files (153 files are maybe missing; 95822 files on JRiver vs 95669 on Roon) and it is still at 8155 files analysis after 5 hours...

 

I did switch to 4 cores so maybe it did help.

 

I guess I was wrong after all about it taking days but I'm pretty sure I read that a few times in the past and thought It was a bit odd.

 

I like it so far, lots of great options and stuff to look at but it is quite different from JRemote... Quite a few more clics than JRemote to get to the music... Then again, I am an old fart and been using JRemote since day 1 so old farts usually don't like change that much!

 

Thanks to all for the help!

 

I have just over 100k tracks, directly attached via Firewire to 2011 Mac Mini (2.5Ghz i5, 8GB RAM). Initial scan (i.e., adding / verifying files) took minutes (far less than 30 minutes), but the DR scan, etc., took the better part of a week, running on 3 cores most of the time (if I switched to 4 cores, it started interrupting playback).