Roon 1.8 Discussion

firedog · February 13

Here's the light theme. I again changed the purple for blue, and made the background a few shades less bright.

Foggie · February 13

Purple is quite nice IMHO, especially with the dark theme. It must be a MN thing 😉

firedog · February 13

26 minutes ago, Foggie said:

Purple is quite nice IMHO, especially with the dark theme. It must be a MN thing 😉

Didn't hate the purple. Prefer the blue. Must be a Dallas thing. Lived there a long time ago.

k6davis · February 13

On 2/10/2021 at 6:08 AM, ssh said:

Why is shuffle only shuffling 5,000 tracks?

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/why-is-shuffle-only-shuffling-5-000-tracks/141103

On 2/10/2021 at 6:39 AM, firedog said:

to each his own. I'd like to have the option to have it pick only a random 20 or 50 or 100 tracks. That's all I need at any one time, and thousands of tracks just means the actions of the program are slower.

What people are saying in the Roon forum is that if you have, say, 10,000 tracks, shuffle will sort them alphabetically (by artist, I presume) and only play music from the first 5,000. So you'd never hear music from the second half of your library. Which is not the desired effect for this function at all.

Sounds like a bug that I'm sure they'll fix.

k6davis · February 13

I hate it. I couldn't really stand to even look at it or use it after a while. I used a clone I made of my hard drive to revert back to 1.7 and I couldn't be happier.

It's genuinely fascinating how people can look at the same thing and feel so differently about it. Doesn't make anybody right or wrong, of course.

Roon 1.8 has been controversial. Based on a poll in the Roon forum, over 30% of the users agree with me. Not a majority, but not an insignificant number either. The people who like it or feel neutral about it don't understand the vitriol of those of us who don't. Somebody asked, "What are they even complaining about?" So I happily informed him.

This is what I wrote. My post was enthusiastically received (28 hearts and a few complimentary replies) by those with like-minds and even referred to the Roon CEO. That felt nice, to be honest, though I'm not sure anything will come of that. We'll see.

Sorry for the length, but I had a few notes:

Quote

Here is a partial list of things the “complainers” liked about 1.7 that are broken in, missing from or made harder to use in 1.8. I’m referring to the desktop experience, as it appears that the app has now been optimized for phones and tablets.

The waveform is too small to be used as waveform. It’s just a progress bar now.

The sidebar with album recommendations and the artist discography is gone. You have to scroll or go to a different page to find that information.

The album title font is both strange and needlessly gigantic. The first song on the album is at the bottom of the page. This focus on massive headers is literal form over function.

The song titles, which you actually need to read, are too small. In fact, most of the buttons and text are smaller, but there’s a huge amount of empty space everywhere.

The current song title and artist information on the bottom left of the playback bar often has to be truncated because it shares space with the too small waveform.

Album covers are too big, showing too few albums on the screen, once you scroll past the huge headers.

Tagging is much more difficult to use.

Shuffle is limited to 5,000 tracks, which means it’s broken.

Focus uses “AND” for criteria instead of “OR”, which it should not do and did not do before, so bookmarks are broken. Focusing on “Jazz” and “Blues” eliminates all albums that are not marked as both.

Album star ratings have been removed from where they were most helpful.

The indication of whether a song has been added to a playlist has been removed.

Albums are shown based on “popularity” criteria, which has rarely has anything to do with the quality of their content.

The dark mode is too dark and the light mode is too light. Small white text on a fully black background is headache inducing. Especially when it’s interrupted by flashes of Electric Purple.

The “queue” button has been moved too close to the transport controls.

The album title (and other text) exhibits weird line breaks. Pat Metheny’s album called “Day Trip” puts “Day” on one line and “Trip” on another. For what reason, I’ll never know.

The distinction between albums you own and albums from streaming services has been made less clear.

Half of the home screen says “Hi Keith” and prominently features a huge graphical display of time usage stats. I don’t know who that’s important to.

Dates for albums: We used to get date recorded, date released and date added. That was great, given how many reissues and remasters there are. Now we just get one ambiguous date.

On multi-disc albums, you used to have individual links for each disc. Now they’re in a menu. So more clicks.

There’s a startling lack of symmetry and congruence to the visual design. It’s nice to have a mostly fixed place for things to be. A good analogy would be a dashboard in a car. Roon 1.8 it’s just messy. Depending on the metadata received, the arrangement of items on the album screen changes radically. There are square images, big round images, small round images, huge round circles with artists initials in them. Orange backgrounds. Blue backgrounds. And did I mention the purple?

charlesphoto · February 13

I really wish I'd made a backup of 1.7....

The overall design is a mess. Kind of like the first time somebody decided to design something in Word or Pagemaker and are like - wow, I can make this big, and this a different font and this a different font and move things all around - without thinking of why do those and what do those changes bring to the big picture. I've worked with some great designers and frankly would be embarrassed to show them this design. No idea if it's laziness, ignorance, an outside designer they couldn't back out of, or what???

The big problem is that as a culture, we've dumbed down our ability to discern good design and art from all the 'noise' out there. Modern fonts, bright colors, unreadable text (who reads these days anyway) and lots of random stuff going on everywhere - then it must be good!

ssh · February 13

k6davis,

You nailed it! All of the criticism is on point.

The shuffle mode problem is the biggest problem for me. I used to be treated to a track by Lefty Frizzell followed by Mary Halvorson piece than pivoting to Max Richter. Not anymore. I hope the fixes come soon.

charlesphoto · February 13

14 minutes ago, ssh said:

k6davis,

You nailed it! All of the criticism is on point.

The shuffle mode problem is the biggest problem for me. I used to be treated to a track by Lefty Frizzell followed by Mary Halvorson piece than pivoting to Max Richter. Not anymore. I hope the fixes come soon.

Easiest workaround for now is go to your album page and select all, and then make a bookmark (label it something like Shuffle Albums, etc). That works.

ssh · February 13

I get to "select all" but I can't find the "bookmark".

charlesphoto · February 13

2 minutes ago, ssh said:

I get to "select all" but I can't find the "bookmark".

Upper right hand corner? I'm on Mac.

ssh · February 13

yeah, don't see it.

k6davis · February 13

1 hour ago, charlesphoto said:

The overall design is a mess. Kind of like the first time somebody decided to design something in Word or Pagemaker and are like - wow, I can make this big, and this a different font and this a different font and move things all around - without thinking of why do those and what do those changes bring to the big picture. I've worked with some great designers and frankly would be embarrassed to show them this design.

I couldn't agree more. The white huge font (for things I don't need to read) combined with the white tiny font (for things I do need to read) on the (literally) black background along with smaller icons, waveform and the vast amount of empty space... I just can't. It hurts my mind. And that's just the look of it, let alone the changes to the way things work.

It's like they asked me to tell them everything I liked about Roon and then said, "Great! Okay. We're gonna move or remove all of that. And then change the way nearly everything works, in ways that no one was asking for!"

I've already seen posts from the Roon team to the effect of: "Most people like it". Even worse (for me), that seems to actually be true. What's certain is that the Roon team likes it, or they wouldn't have done in the first place.

Such is life. Things don't always go your way. But what I really learned from this is to be very careful when it comes to "software as a service". You pay for it, but you don't own it. They can do anything they want to with it at any time. I bought lifetime, and tomorrow, they could decide to make it have an orange strobe-light background and remove all of the "play" buttons and there wouldn't be a damned thing I could do about it.

Foggie · February 13

I think a lot / some of it is getting use to doing things a new way. I don't discount bugs, loss of functionality and or a specific function changing etc.. But on the flip side there are also a lot of new things that are also pretty cool as well.

I don't jump to immediately hating this or any version after 10, 20min of use. I use it for awhile (days/a week), take it all in, figure out what's new, what's cool, what sucks, what isn't working and then sort of take an overall snapshot. Sure one can find out a lot in a short amount of time, but after living with it for a bit, your outlook can change. A major rev almost always brings a whole slew of things - good, bad or indifferent, and over time many things get worked out. That's why I always wait to migrate to a major rev. However, much of the severe negativity, doesn't line up thus far with what I'm experiencing. The personal decision to become unhinged is an option I suppose.

I had some immediate impressions / feelings some of which were, "hmm not too sure about this". Much of that has been put to rest already. I just updated yesterday and have about 4 hrs with it. In that time I mostly played music, since THAT is the most important thing and trying to figure out any SQ changes. Beyond that I got familiar with all that is new, tried a few things and will start digging in this eve.

1.7 was the same freaking thing. Minutes after being released it was the end of the world and was a pile on shit fest. Again, nothing wrong with disliking it and having / sharing opinions and real use cases of how things are or aren't working.

It isn't perfect and won't please everyone.

One thing I do love about this version is in credits, it lists the artists track contribution (multi musicians)! I discovered that accidentally and have always disliked (with a passion) why meta data isn't full and complete. I would always have to go to discogs to find out bass player #1 is on tracks 4+5, drummer #2 is 8+12 etc.. Not sure if it works on all albums but anyway thought is was a nice function.

DancingSea · February 13

3 hours ago, k6davis said:

I hate it. I couldn't really stand to even look at it or use it after a while. I used a clone I made of my hard drive to revert back to 1.7 and I couldn't be happier.

I have a lifetime subscription, but am holding off to upgrade to 1.8 until the bugs are fixed, thus have no direct experience or opinion on 1.8.

That said, I wonder how 1.8 detractors would view 1.8 if they had never experienced 1.7? How much of the consternation is derived from comparing the two versions, and being upset about the differences? What if the comparison mindset was set aside? What if 1.8 could be seen totally fresh, without any notion of comparing it a past version? And when 1.8 is evaluated on its own, I wonder what the results would be? Would the consternation temperature be lowered?

The point being, how much of the dissatisfaction revolves around the act of comparison, rather than on the actual 1.8 upgrade?

This is from my new book, "Zen And The Art Of Roon Upgrades" 😆

R1200CL · February 13

Interesting results already 😀 Majority like 1.8.

https://audiophilestyle.com/forums/topic/62005-the-small-roon-poll/

Why not share your data. (Anonymous).

jacques_racine · February 13

On 2/12/2021 at 12:39 PM, charlesphoto said:

Here's a mid-gray theme. So much better imo and readable. Just need to work out a few things like the name hyperlinks.

@charlesphoto

1) Your post made me stop dead in my tracks (pun intended)

2) First, I am a huge Anouar Brahem fan.

3) Second: seems you like Vibvaldi as much as I do... I have all album in that collectio

4) Now, the most important: can you share the recipe for your colour scheme? It is very beautiful. Tx.

jacques_racine · February 13

The Problem with Roon.

Keep in mind I am myself a software developer of web-based applications and native mobile apps.

I have 4 UX/UI staffer onstage. Our software also tries to get user to organize content and "get things done".

Problem is... Listening to music is a VERY personal thing. All members of AS love to tinker with everything, and be in control of things, etc.

Just look at the number of elements we use to weak our system to _our linking_.

The Roon team makes decisions for us - and we are stuck with them. They force change upon us (like vertical scrolling and many more items to long to mention).

Yes, I complained in the early days horizontal scrolling, but then realized I have vertical event more, because I cannot go back to "about 6 pages ago when I started to add some specific albums to my library). Again, that's personal.

Roon is not cheap, which adds another layer of frustration. Do they have a user group? Do they consult us?

I'm asking because I have never seen any request for help/feedback.

Would love to take part.

Might write an essay on Roon and people one day...

For now, my biggest gripe is that "Tags" seems to not display anymore...

But there is an easy cure..... Pick an album and press "Play".

firedog · February 13

Changed the font, too:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/customizing-the-roon-theme/142548/42

R1200CL · February 13

56 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

I have a lifetime subscription, but am holding off to upgrade to 1.8 until the bugs are fixed, thus have no direct experience or opinion on 1.8.

It’s really not bugs. Rather features 😂

Unless there something special you’re after, I don’t think the upgrade would harm your music experience. Rather the opposite.

If you have an available PC, just install and test it out.

k6davis · February 13

54 minutes ago, DancingSea said:

That said, I wonder how 1.8 detractors would view 1.8 if they had never experienced 1.7?

This is a key point. Depending on your control device, the use cases are wildly different. For example, users who only use Tidal/Qobuz have never seen a Roon waveform before. So the fact that it's small now has zero impact on them. People who use it on a phone have never seen the sidebar before. So its absence means absolutely nothing to them.

It used to be that the desktop app was primary and the mobile apps were secondary, but it appears that Roon has gone mobile first. Fonts are smaller, images are bigger, everything requires scrolling now and there are wide open empty spaces everywhere when you have a large, landscape screen.

They should have optimized small portrait screens vs large wide landscape screens, but they did not.

R1200CL · February 13

2 minutes ago, firedog said:

Changed the font, too:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/customizing-the-roon-theme/142548/42

This telling me that upcoming Roon updates will be very promising.

The ultimate choice for me is to chose only bit or sampling rate. (From Tidal and Qobuz).

firedog · February 13

There were a couple of stylistic things that weren't my taste. Apparently a lot of others felt the same way. But there are already unofficial fixes for them.

There are several other common complaints that the Roon team has already said they will address.

Overall the new version is good.

A couple of serious bugs were already fixed in an update-they didn't affect everyone, but were pretty major for those they did.

There are only a few actual bugs left - pretty minor and many people won't notice them.

k6davis · February 13

3 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

It’s really not bugs. Rather features

I agree with this. They had some issues out of the gate, but things seem to be working fine. And things that are obvious bugs (shuffle, etc) will get fixed.

4 minutes ago, R1200CL said:

Unless there something special you’re after, I don’t think the upgrade would harm your music experience. Rather the opposite.

I don't agree with this. But that's a matter of taste and opinion. Some of us find the new UI to be very unpleasant to use compared to 1.7, but we are not the majority. You may love it. I'm using 1.7 until it stops working or 1.8 moves more in my direction, which I don't think it will.

R1200CL · February 13

19 minutes ago, k6davis said:

Roon waveform before

Can you show me a picture of this so I’m 100% sure what we’re talking about.

This one ?

Why not add a request for VU meters 😀
or vst plug-ins

The Computer Audiophile · February 13

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. To me, every Roon upgrade has brought more complexity. I still love the app, but it’s long past user friendly.

Roon 1.8 Discussion

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