Roon 1.8 Discussion

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8 hours ago, katools said:

New here, but long time Roon lifetime licensee.  I find myself increasingly disinterested in Roon because it's buggy and lacking in some basic features.  Added to that, based on its history the developers/owners have no interest in addressing feature requests, often dismissing them and dismissing bugs as a problem on the user's side.

 

Things that have been missing forever:

• user ratings for tracks
• decent playlist management & generation
• track based genres
• useable user ratings for albums differentiated from editorial ratings
• ability to add artist biographies and album reviews where there are none
• ability to annotate an album or track or both
• per user library, interface & settings based on profiles
• party mode where users cannot change settings, override queue or delete your music
• proper library management workflows to deal with missing or incorrect content and unidentified files
• undocumented/incomplete tag support
• native input to enable playback of any audio stream through server / endpoint interface
• proper handling of box sets
• inability to browse classical music by period or instrumentation
• full boolean logic to filter content
• support for wavpack and DSD .ISO

Bugs:

• persistent memory leak -- denied
•  random lags in browsing the library, particularly entering an album view -- often a restart sorts this
• random lags in starting playback
• unidentified album tracks shown out of order when identifying albums
• returning to top of lists when browsing
• persistent misallocation of albums to artist namesake even when existing albums have been corrected and incorrect namesake had no associated content
• Roon sometimes applies new settings when adding music, exactly like it does if you change library import settings
•  

Annoyances:

• inability to customise content by switching order in which elements of the UI are presented or to turn off content you've no interest in
• Valence everywhere you look.  It's no longer about browsing your music in a magazine, it's like browsing an ad-sponsored website or spam littered inbox.
• poorly formatted artist images 
• many, many artists without images and no attempt by Roon to do better
• No viable workflow to deal with unidentified albums
• user experience impacted by Roon's cloud whether local or streamed content.

Technically Roon is a great product under the hood, but how it all comes together through the UI has become a bothersome mess I prefer to limit my exposure to, so rather than explore music I love, Roon has been relegated to a DJ I use to play background music when I'm doing other things.

 

In hindsight, if I were not a lifetime member I'd have abandoned it completely by now.

Nothing is perfect.

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My guess is that 90+% of Roon users are happy warts and all. There are other options for the rest.

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40 minutes ago, Jsmith said:

 

 

I would like to offer a different perspective.  I work for a large multinational software company and my job is managing customer accounts post sales which includes defect resolution, feature requests, release readiness and rollout, as well as organizing user group events, customer innovation days, and many other ongoing customer adoption interactions.

 

One of my biggest challenges is working with customer and developers to prioritize what actually makes it into the product from both a fix and feature perspective.  We can host the same customer feedback event in different areas across the globe, and what they want in the U.S. is completely different than Germany, and then completely different from Japan.  This does not even get into within the U.S. what different industries like consumer goods, retails, oil & gas and high tech all want.  

 

It is impossible to develop software that can be everything to everyone, especially with a mass product like Roon that is not completely custom to the user.  This is why I quoted @bobflood because I suspect he is right and they are happy targeting that 90%.   

 

 

 

  

Thanks for your perspective. If Roon was a product that people expected to pay a lot more for then I am pretty sure that they would be able to ramp up to service more of the things people say they want. But, alas we are not that kind of market. Price is a very sensitive issue  in this hobby, especially for software. Just look at the thread where another provider just instituted a subscription based model. 

 

I have been with Roon from the beginning and I deliberately chose to pay annually instead of doing the lifetime payment. I wanted them to have the revenue needed to grow the business and improve the product over time which they continue to do.

 

I agree that that there is still room for improvement but for the people who use Roon in a more or less straight forward manner, my guess is that as I said 90+% are pretty happy.

 

Roon has got a lot going for it. I doesn't look like a 90s Power Point presentation tied to a spreadsheet. Streaming integration and the ability to link effortlessly to HQPlayer are the things that I value most.  Search could still be better but the metadata is good.

 

I am certain that it will only continue to improve.