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Roon 1.8 Discussion


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16 minutes ago, katools said:

  

 

Let me share just how wonderful the Roon experience is at delivering: "Immerse yourself in photos, bios, reviews, credits, lyrics, tour dates, and more…"

 

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There's no reason most of this 8.5% should be unidentified and unless I go in and manually identify them one by one this is how they'll remain, meaning they don't have any of the relatable metadata because Roon isn't handling these in the same way it handles albums it's identified.  Before you go there, they're not unidentified because the folders or files aren't named according to Roon's requirements or because box sets aren't named 1-01, 2-01 or CD1, CD2 etc.

 

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14% of my albums won't show up in genre related browsing and filtering, won't get picked by Roon Radio or will be picked completely out of context.

 

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Roon knows these albums, hasn't/can't assign genres. Won't get picked by Roon Radio or will be picked completely out of context.

 

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42% of albums have no review.  Can't add one from public domain, can't add my own, can't annotate.

 

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12% of albums assigned Pop/Rock only - a meaningless genre assignment on its own.

 

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There a quick way of making or undoing this selection?  Nope!

 

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Great,  40% of the time I'm staring at two letters instead of a picture of the artist.  50% of the time that there is a picture it's chinless, a forehead, the wrong face in a band pic rather than the artist in question.

 

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11% of the artists in my library won't make any appearance in a genre filter, or genre browse.  They're unlikely to be picked for Roon Radio and won't be picked for any genre based shuffle.

 

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37% of the artists in my library have no bio.  They're not obscure.  Can't add a bio either, can't annotate.

 

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14% of artists are assigned Pop/Rock only - a meaningless genre assignment on its own.

 

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There a quick way of making or undoing this selection?  Nope!

 

 

So yes, whilst Roon's under the hood architecture for getting music from A to B, C, D, E, F etc. is great (and it's not a standout in this dept.) its front-end is nowhere near as great as the marketing would have you believe.

 

In short, you haven't set up your collection the way Roon recommends. I'm not sure that's a great ground for your complaints. 

You're just another user who can't get over the fact that Roon doesn't work the way he, as an individual, wants it to.

 

You can add any picture or pdf to your album folder and it will be available with one click in Roon. I've made all sorts of extra info available to look at while I'm listening that way.

Main listening (small home office):

Main setup: Surge protector +>Isol-8 Mini sub Axis Power Strip/Isolation>QuietPC Low Noise Server>Roon (Audiolense DRC)>Stack Audio Link II>Kii Control>Kii Three (on their own electric circuit) >GIK Room Treatments.

Secondary Path: Server with Audiolense RC>RPi4 or analog>Cayin iDAC6 MKII (tube mode) (XLR)>Kii Three .

Bedroom: SBTouch to Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Setup.
Living Room/Kitchen: Ropieee (RPi3b+ with touchscreen) + Schiit Modi3E to a pair of Morel Hogtalare. 

All absolute statements about audio are false :)

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9 minutes ago, firedog said:

In short, you haven't set up your collection the way Roon recommends.

With all due respect you have no idea what you're talking about and you're just putting ignorance on display.

 

Apart from adding album covers where I have none on file and adding unidentified albums to Musicbrainz, which of the matters I've pointed out is within the gift of a user to able to resolve?

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I looked at my own collection: almost all the unidentified albums are either off label/bootlegs, a version that doesn't exist in the marketplace (generally an old LP version that was never released in any digital format with the same content), or tiny exclusive private label/Bandcamp Only releases. 

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Roon can't really be expected to identify albums that haven't supplied data to publicly available databases.

Main listening (small home office):

Main setup: Surge protector +>Isol-8 Mini sub Axis Power Strip/Isolation>QuietPC Low Noise Server>Roon (Audiolense DRC)>Stack Audio Link II>Kii Control>Kii Three (on their own electric circuit) >GIK Room Treatments.

Secondary Path: Server with Audiolense RC>RPi4 or analog>Cayin iDAC6 MKII (tube mode) (XLR)>Kii Three .

Bedroom: SBTouch to Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Setup.
Living Room/Kitchen: Ropieee (RPi3b+ with touchscreen) + Schiit Modi3E to a pair of Morel Hogtalare. 

All absolute statements about audio are false :)

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1 minute ago, katools said:

With all due respect you have no idea what you're talking about. 

 

Apart from adding album covers where I have none on file and adding unidentified albums to Musicbrainz, which of the matters I've pointed out is within the gift of a user to able to resolve?

you wrote that you don't have your albums/folders setup the way Roon says you need to for it to read them properly.

Main listening (small home office):

Main setup: Surge protector +>Isol-8 Mini sub Axis Power Strip/Isolation>QuietPC Low Noise Server>Roon (Audiolense DRC)>Stack Audio Link II>Kii Control>Kii Three (on their own electric circuit) >GIK Room Treatments.

Secondary Path: Server with Audiolense RC>RPi4 or analog>Cayin iDAC6 MKII (tube mode) (XLR)>Kii Three .

Bedroom: SBTouch to Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Setup.
Living Room/Kitchen: Ropieee (RPi3b+ with touchscreen) + Schiit Modi3E to a pair of Morel Hogtalare. 

All absolute statements about audio are false :)

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1 minute ago, katools said:

Re-read, I wrote the opposite.

Okay, I didn't understand what you wrote before.

But again, I've added all sorts of pictures and also material stored as pdfs to my album folders. It's all catalogued and available with a click from within Roon. 

Main listening (small home office):

Main setup: Surge protector +>Isol-8 Mini sub Axis Power Strip/Isolation>QuietPC Low Noise Server>Roon (Audiolense DRC)>Stack Audio Link II>Kii Control>Kii Three (on their own electric circuit) >GIK Room Treatments.

Secondary Path: Server with Audiolense RC>RPi4 or analog>Cayin iDAC6 MKII (tube mode) (XLR)>Kii Three .

Bedroom: SBTouch to Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Setup.
Living Room/Kitchen: Ropieee (RPi3b+ with touchscreen) + Schiit Modi3E to a pair of Morel Hogtalare. 

All absolute statements about audio are false :)

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31 minutes ago, firedog said:

But again, I've added all sorts of pictures and also material stored as pdfs to my album folders.

And how does that address the matters I raised?  Sure I can go add 1000's of artist images and a few hundred album covers... one by one... but most apps do a better job at a fraction of the cost or even  free.

 

That also does nothing do deal with missing genres - adding your own is pointless because Roon Radio ignores them and you cannot add genres to artists.

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34 minutes ago, katools said:

And how does that address the matters I raised?  Sure I can go add 1000's of artist images and a few hundred album covers... one by one... but most apps do a better job at a fraction of the cost or even  free.

 

That also does nothing do deal with missing genres - adding your own is pointless because Roon Radio ignores them and you cannot add genres to artists.

have you tried the genre mapping function?

Main listening (small home office):

Main setup: Surge protector +>Isol-8 Mini sub Axis Power Strip/Isolation>QuietPC Low Noise Server>Roon (Audiolense DRC)>Stack Audio Link II>Kii Control>Kii Three (on their own electric circuit) >GIK Room Treatments.

Secondary Path: Server with Audiolense RC>RPi4 or analog>Cayin iDAC6 MKII (tube mode) (XLR)>Kii Three .

Bedroom: SBTouch to Cambridge Soundworks Desktop Setup.
Living Room/Kitchen: Ropieee (RPi3b+ with touchscreen) + Schiit Modi3E to a pair of Morel Hogtalare. 

All absolute statements about audio are false :)

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1 hour ago, firedog said:

have you tried the genre mapping function?

I'm relying on Roon to assign genres to albums it recognises. Genre mapping enables you to map file based genres to Roon's genre schema.  Problem is their own metadata lacks the genre assigments.

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On 5/16/2021 at 3:33 AM, katools said:

Let me share just how wonderful the Roon experience is at delivering: "Immerse yourself in photos, bios, reviews, credits, lyrics, tour dates, and more…"

That's interesting and unfortunate.

 

How did you get that display? I've tried it with my copy of Roon and can't find it. When I select "My Albums" from the left menu, then Focus, I can't find a way to display those without Genres or other tags.  A hint, please?

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7 hours ago, Mike48 said:

 

How did you get that display? I've tried it with my copy of Roon and can't find it. When I select "My Albums" from the left menu, then Focus, I can't find a way to display those without Genres or other tags.  A hint, please?

If you go into focus and select the genre Pop/Rock, a little button appears with +Pop/Rock.  Click on that little button and it changes it to -Pop/Rock, which means without the Pop/Rock genre

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On 5/17/2021 at 10:37 PM, PunkRockDoc said:

If you go into focus and select the genre Pop/Rock, a little button appears with +Pop/Rock.  Click on that little button and it changes it to -Pop/Rock, which means without the Pop/Rock genre

Yes, and thanks for that. Still, that doesn't give what @katoolsis showning, which was to identify albums with no genre. I mean, to identify those without having to "-" every genre listed.

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@katools - I checked my file library against Roon, and about 10% of the discs were unidentified by Roon. For some, that was expected, as they are my own recordings or downloaded from the Internet Archive. For others, this alerted me to missing files in my library. For a good number of others, the Roon metadata was missing timings, which Roon interpreted as conflicts with my files, requiring manual intervention. Others are missing from Roon's database for no obvious reason (which might have, say 45 of the 50 volumes of a series, with the omissions hit or miss). It is a bit disappointing to see so many releases unidentified that could have been identified easily.

 

The most problematic issue for me is that for certain large multi-disc sets, I changed the disk/track numbers upon ripping (long pre-Roon) to a more logical order -- say Symphonies 1-9 in that order, not in the order they would fit onto the minimum of CDs. Roon does not recognize the release then, or matches it wrong, and the Roon tools for getting metadata and files to match up are so laborious, I have decided against trying.

 

I do enjoy Roon, but it's clear that they are depending on what can be done automatically, leaving a lot of work for the user at times.

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Like a number of people here, I have a lifetime Roon subscription, but because of the SQ issues I now only use it for background and discovery. In my case, I've instead used Euphony Stylus for serious listening on my optimised NUC (note that Euphony can kick off and partly optimise Roon as well (e.g. ramroot and core isolation)). And occasionally I retry new Roon versions on the same NUC and am continually disappointed by its SQ.

 

But recently I tried the latest 1.8 build 795 and was somewhat surprised that it sounded rather different to its usual slightly flat, smeared and over-smoothed sound: Now it sounded quite clear and alive - almost too alive. Still not as good as Stylus which has a more full-bodied, organic presentation, but at least Roon is showing some promise now that can maybe be refined by further tweaking. Anyone else noticed this?

 

The Roon change log has no indication that there were any SQ-related changes - more a case of following the Law of Unintended Consequences. So who knows what will happen at the next build?

 

Apart from the SQ, I'm disappointed that, after all the complaints about the original 1.8 release, the Album View still has so much wasted space and no option to reduce the size of album icons - I can only get 5 albums per row on my 14" screen (Stylus gives me 3 choices of icon size). And Roon also insists I have to go to Full Screen mode or change my screen resolution (the same resolution that works perfectly well for all my other apps). So despite Roon's undeniably swish and modern UX, and many positive features, there are still details that really grate. So close, yet so far...

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There is now an option in Settings > General > Allow for more covers and photos, that will decrease the size of the album art, thus allowing for more albums per row. 

 

Though the choice is good, the implementation isn't. With that on, artwork is too small, and the text below too clunky, so I just use the default (larger) setting. Most apps allow folks to resize the album art at will, but alas, not Roon.

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, asiufy said:

There is now an option in Settings > General > Allow for more covers and photos, that will decrease the size of the album art, thus allowing for more albums per row. 

 

Though the choice is good, the implementation isn't. With that on, artwork is too small, and the text below too clunky, so I just use the default (larger) setting. Most apps allow folks to resize the album art at will, but alas, not Roon.

 

 

 

 

That option has been there since at least early 1.7, which is as far back as I remember it being there.

No electron left behind.

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Okay, I stand corrected. With that setting, plus disabling the permanent sidebar, I can now get up to 9 albums per row - and both cover art and text look fine. Still too much wasted space at the top though, which could have made way for 1-2 extra rows of albums on the initial screen.

 

I don't know how I missed those settings options - they're pretty obvious on reflection.

In general, I've found that some Roon settings and behaviours are highly intuitive whilst others are infuriatingly obscure. I think this is partly due to Roon's ability to independently control multiple profiles and playback systems and other clever stuff that I have no interest in.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Does anyone here know enough about Mac  programming and Roon's programming language to know how to fix this issue.  When Roon is set to dark mode, the title bar remains white, which is very annoying.  To get it to turn dark, you can disable the NSrequiresAquaSystemAppearance setting though terminal, or by changing it in Roon info.plist (found by exploring contents of Roon on Mac).  The problem with this is that the search field turns black so you cannot perform a search and see what you are typing.  I have gone through every color "atom" in the dark theme's color file and none of the listed atoms changes the search fields's color.  I also cannot find where these "atoms" are referenced in Roon's code or in any of the other files it installs.  So does anyone know a way to turn the search field back to white when the AquaSystemAppearance is disabled, or a way to just turn the titlebar dark without affecting the search field?  Any help and suggestions is much appreciated!

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  • 4 months later...

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