I have had it with Roon, their lack of support, their user forum, and it's users...

[AudioDoctor]

I guess you can read the cleaned up version after all

 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/delay-all-background-processes-while-music-is-playing/164561/10

[AudioDoctor]

On 7/6/2021 at 7:33 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

That would be great. I’ve run into issues with music stuttering, only to see Roon maxing out my CPU for some reason. 

 

Chris, I appreciate you posting this so that it doesn't look like I am the sole crazy person experiencing a problem no one else is.

[AudioDoctor]

You guys can go and read it for yourselves, but this was my initial post, word for word exact copy from the Roon forum.

 

"Currently, Roon will do its background processing whenever it feels like it, whether it be in the middle of music playback or not. I can hear when Roon starts this process in the quality of playback. Roon already has issues with sound quality, this isn’t helping. Maybe this should be looked at and made a setting where the user can decide if they don’t care, or if they would rather Roon do its processing overnight or while music is not playing."

 

That was my feature request...

[mitch751]

Relex !! Music listening is for the purpose of RELAXING ... 

 

Why not leave your precious time more on listening music ....

 

[wklie]

58 minutes ago, AudioDoctor said:

EVEN IF MY DAC WAS CONNECTED TO THE CORE, REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF PROCESSING DURING MUSIC PLAYBACK WOULD STILL BENEFIT THE QUALITY OF THAT PLAYBACK...

 

I'm sure you know this, but for completeness sake for this discussion, this is why Roon stated this Rule 1 for SQ:

Quote

Rule 1: Core and Output on separate devices

 

[AudioDoctor]

Just now, wklie said:

 

I'm sure you know this, but for completeness sake for this discussion, this is why Roon stated this Rule 1 for SQ:

 

 

Yes, I am aware and I do that. However, that doesn't make my feature request invalid if it is still noticeable.

[R1200CL]

@AudioDoctor

Impossible to read your feature request post. Text is vanishing. Can you repost ?

Has Roon moderators delete it, or you have a link ?

Edit: I see now it’s the first post in the tread you posted a link to. 
 

If this poll is representative, you’re among the 16% users 😀

 

 

[R1200CL]

Reading that tread, I think the other guy was a bit provocative. He should be suspended too. 
I’ve already told the Roon moderator.

 

Also using an endpoint or not, won’t change the fact you’re addressing. 

[feelingears]

I just want to say I appreciate people posting their experiences w/ Roon here. Thank you all! 

 

I am so glad I did not get into that (not really for me anyway), and especially since I work in software–I know all too well the kinds of personalities that can take over.

 

Good luck, all.

[The Computer Audiophile]

4 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

 

Chris, I appreciate you posting this so that it doesn't look like I am the sole crazy person experiencing a problem no one else is.

Here was my attempt to get help from Roon for this same issue, using the official support forum. I’m not one of those guys who likes to use unofficial channels, so I don’t. 

 

Roon response took 24 days. 
 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-restart-casing-100-cpu-utilization/159544

[lucretius]

20 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Here was my attempt to get help from Roon for this same issue, using the official support forum. I’m not one of those guys who likes to use unofficial channels, so I don’t. 

 

Roon response took 24 days. 
 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-restart-casing-100-cpu-utilization/159544

 

It looks like Roon staff responded on June 10th but you have not responded back?

[The Computer Audiophile]

6 minutes ago, lucretius said:

 

It looks like Roon staff responded on June 10th but you have not responded back?

After nearly a month, I wasn’t willing to do the try this, try that dance. 

[AudioDoctor]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Here was my attempt to get help from Roon for this same issue, using the official support forum. I’m not one of those guys who likes to use unofficial channels, so I don’t. 

 

Roon response took 24 days. 
 

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-restart-casing-100-cpu-utilization/159544

 

I have that exact same start up issue and my drives are inside the machine mounted as a ZFS pool.

[R1200CL]

3 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

After nearly a month, I wasn’t willing to do the try this, try that dance. 

Well, maybe you should answer her anyway. At least you now have contact with the Roon team. 

I don’t think it looks good if you don’t reply, and maybe, just maybe, we can hope that Roon team look into this without you dancing to much 😀

[k6davis]

Roon lost me at version 1.8 when they deliberately changed from being (primarily) a desktop app (widescreen) for curating and exploring your own library to being (primarily) a mobile-first (portrait) app to use with streaming services. This was the ultimate example of how they just do whatever they feel like doing with little to no regard for how their customer base feels about it. If it had been up to me, I would have preferred that 1.8 be a mobile and tablet version and that they had mostly retained the 1.7 layout for widescreen devices. At a minimum, it should have been named 2.0 as the changes were anything but minor. I had to restore 1.7 from a cloned hard drive backup just to go back to the experience that I paid for. 

 

I realize that many people love the new Roon and that's great for them. But Roon's fanatical "we know best" attitude extends to areas such as the ridiculous search that gives you what it thinks you mean instead of what you asked for and goofy home screen options that you are forced to scroll past to get to anything of value. It goes on and on and these things have already been discussed ad infinitum.

 

I am a long time user and I remember the days when the only options to play music were to play a track or play an album - and stop & replace what was currently playing. The pull-down menu next to Play Now didn't used to exist. You literally could not Add to Queue, or Play Next (choose a track to play next without interrupting the current track), etc. As bad as that was, what was even crazier was that getting those features added was a battle. The Roon team was resistant to the users input and acting as though we were being too demanding to request functionality as basic as that!

 

There's just a pervasive, almost needy, attitude at Roon that their product is awesome no matter what they do (or don't do) and that if you're not happy then you're the problem. So I've completely checked out of the "community" (which is of course what they wanted) and will use 1.7 for as long as it works. It as shame because there is so much that it does well, but I too have had enough of trying to deal with them.

 

Any viable competitor to Roon will certainly have my attention. 

[kennyb123]

21 hours ago, botrytis said:

 

our ears are not sensitive at all - we are sensitive in the 2K-5K region.

 

Equal Loudness Curves (gsu.edu)

A single parameter alone isn’t enough to tell about the sensitivity of our hearing.  We can perceive timing & pitch - and we have the ability to determine placement with really good accuracy.

 

This is a fascinating anecdote about sensitivity to timing:

 

I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums,” Eno told me. “ ‘All That You Don’t Leave Behind,’ or whatever it’s called.” Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track—a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. “I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ”

 

Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”

I think too many try to reduce hearing down to a single dimension - frequency response.  Hence the canard about older ears being not as adept at detecting differences.  Obviously that’s true outside our frequency range.  But for sounds still within our range, since hearing is more about ears+brain older ears can match or even outperform younger ears.

[feelingears]

2 hours ago, kennyb123 said:

I think too many try to reduce hearing down to a single dimension - frequency response.  Hence the canard about older ears being not as adept at detecting differences.  Obviously that’s true outside our frequency range.  But for sounds still within our range, since hearing is more about ears+brain older ears can match or even outperform younger ears.

 

Thank you for this anecdote! Reminds me of the late Neil Peart writing about how much practice it took between shows to keep the band together live with sequenced bits coming in mid-song at the "right" tempo (lest the sound degenerate into out-of-sync rubbish). Gotta love the high standards musicians like Larry and Neil strive for.

 

Also, I was reading about Gordon Rankin (also a musician, and EE) recently and in an interview at Stereophile he recounted that some tubes are slow sounding and others are fast sounding. Nice to know there are people with ears that work who are building the gear(s) we use to enjoy the magic of music.

 

 

[lucretius]

Apparently, Bob Stuart is listed in the credits for Roon:

 

[One and a half]

2 hours ago, lucretius said:

Apparently, Bob Stuart is listed in the credits for Roon:

 

To pass around the peanuts?

[katools]

23 hours ago, R1200CL said:

Well, maybe you should answer her anyway. At least you now have contact with the Roon team. 

I don’t think it looks good if you don’t reply, and maybe, just maybe, we can hope that Roon team look into this without you dancing to much 😀

 

Roon's support arrangements are a complete shitshow.  They deliberately rely on their customers doing the majority of first line support and if you ask questions their customers don't have answers to Roon either ignores them or they take months to come back.  Initially the team appeared quite a pleasant bunch, but as time has passed and their subscriber base has grown so has their indifference toward customers.  I avoid their forum now because support requests are pointless and between their fan base and their coo, I'm not sure which I find more vial and arrogant.

[The Computer Audiophile]

8 hours ago, lucretius said:

Apparently, Bob Stuart is listed in the credits for Roon:

 

He helped the company quite a bit back in the day. 

[rn701]

2 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

He helped the company quite a bit back in the day. 

 

That would follow. Roon is a spinoff of Meridian Sooloos.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

On 7/9/2021 at 7:05 AM, The Computer Audiophile said:

I’m not one of those guys who likes to use unofficial channels, so I don’t. 

 

Good attitude. You could have taken it a step further and signed on the forum under a false identity.😁

[austinpop]

I had the same experience in the Roon forums as you, @AudioDoctor, and left in disgust. Life's too short for that nonsense.

 

All one has to do is to listen to alternatives, like Stylus on Euphony OS, or HQPlayer 4 Desktop playing files directly, and the case is made.

 

I had a simple request to the Roon team. "Conduct listening tests on your competition." But one can't just go to them directly and ask them. No, you have to post on their forum, and then endure  the taunts and insults of the peanut gallery.

 

I accept my lifetime subscription is a sunk cost, but I do use Roon for noncritical listening and music discovery on Qobuz. Their UI and UX are excellent. Pity about the SQ.

[Mike Rubin]

3 hours ago, austinpop said:

I had the same experience in the Roon forums as you, @AudioDoctor, and left in disgust. Life's too short for that nonsense.

 

All one has to do is to listen to alternatives, like Stylus on Euphony OS, or HQPlayer 4 Desktop playing files directly, and the case is made.

 

I had a simple request to the Roon team. "Conduct listening tests on your competition." But one can't just go to them directly and ask them. No, you have to post on their forum, and then endure  the taunts and insults of the peanut gallery.

 

I accept my lifetime subscription is a sunk cost, but I do use Roon for noncritical listening and music discovery on Qobuz. Their UI and UX are excellent. Pity about the SQ.

I think that I am the only person alive who subscribed to Roon because he or she likes the sound quality more than the alternatives'.  I also like having the ability to broadcast on my network at DSD256, which makes my streamers and DACs sing (I don't connect my NUC to anything via USB) and the ability to create smartlists by record label(which I can't do elsewhere without adding a shit ton of extra metadata).
 

Unfortunately, however, that's it for me.  As someone with only a local library, who has lots of non-US and independent label classical and jazz, and who tags his classical music in an apparently non-standard way, I have come to despise almost every other thing about it.  It's not only not worth $120 a year to me, it's not worth anything.  As my annual subscription ends tomorrow, I have been uninstalling it from my devices the last day or so in anticipation of renewing my interest in Audirvana and JRiver.  
 

The former has promising SQ and the latter, which now can stream DSD64 over DLNA, always will be my library organization and metadata editing tool.  I can buy them both annually for a bit less than the cost of Roon alone. 
 

I too have been ignored by Roon when requesting help of any sort, with one exception:  Danny Dulai actually proved quite helpful when I had some issues with my NUC running ROCK. Otherwise, it's like talking to a wall at that forum, except when you dare voice disagreement with management's approach to anything whatsoever, in which case the Fanboy Brown Shirts jump down your throat, no matter how polite or even subserviently apologetic your post might be.  I remember my first "suggestion"'post there; I was way too stupid to realize it should have been my last.  (The only less pleasant audio community on the net is at ASR, which I actually wish I could like, but that one works way hard to drive dissent off the boards.)

 

If you stream a lot of Tidal or Qobuz, your collection is filled with the Eagles and Diana Krall, and you aren't the sort who cares about raising grievances to management, I imagine you can do okay with Roon, warts and all.  However, I know most of the influencers in the mainstream press, e.g., Stereophile and Absolute Sound, who have become almost shills for Roon, have local collections that require more sophisticated metadata than Roon can offer, have thoughts on how software should work, and have better playback equipment than I do.  

 

Man, I just don't get the unallayed love out there.