We want Spotify, we want Tidal ....... We want Roon

I heartily agree. The team at Roon just seem to get it! My only concern is the reluctance of the streaming companies to grant Roon the kind of access they have to the Tidal database.

Yes - a big thumbs up for Roon. 

I wasn't aware of Roon but just took a quick look and it does appear to be interesting - but I guess the next step up has to be something which combines Spotify, in particular, with UpNp content, and it appears Roon doesn't do this.

I use MediaMonkey to maintain my music library as I have a first generation Netgear ReadyNAS duo as my media server, and its music library software is not too good. I'm also using Spotify connect with my NAC N172 XS, so see the frsutration of two separate libraries. Agreed Tidal is a better stream but its library doesn't compare to Spotify, who will surely release hifi 44khz streaming at some point!

Now where does my Neil Young signed Pono fit in......

Hi SJB

I recently spoke with Naim's Marketing Director, who was enthusing about the user experience of the Naim App, re the limitations of the Unitiserve (a great concept, but with implementation gaps) for managing hi-res collections, and Roon.  I was not encouraged.

re the 'Serve, the position was "our competitors work off a NAS so why should we do any more? That we have the 'Serve is a bonus"

re possibility of seeing Roon sometime soon, the position was a very definite "NO".

I suspect Naim has invested heavily in the current Naim App (which is proprietary) and believe this is a wonderful thing that gives them a marketing advantage.  Time will tell, I personally think this is a shortsighted strategy...

Since Roon now has an iPad client, and it's layered metadata management is exactly what I'm looking for, I am going to investigate further myself.  Personally I think Roon's concept is great, and over time it will develop a critical mass, we should see a good range of clients to feed a DAC of our choice.  As I recollect, Martin Colloms didn't assess the NDS' inbuilt streaming engine to be significantly better than its SPDIF input.

It's early days for Roon yet but already for me it may become the deciding factor in buying an NDS or going another route. 

The Naim app is essential as one cannot even expect 10% of Naim streamer users would pay for Roon anyway. I agree though that it would be shortsighted to rule out Roon (unless it's for a technical reason) as it is so much more than a control point for a music collection. For me it's putting more value back into my music collection than many an upgrade.

SJB

Has anyone tried Tomahawk, which does seem to include Spotify, which could potentially be a step up over Roon:

https://www.tomahawk-player.org/

It's discouraging to hear the attitude of Naim's Marketing Director, as I was hoping that Naim might be one of the companies that would be working with Roon.  Despite it's current limitations, most of them acknowledged by a very responsive development team, Roon is streets ahead of its rivals.  

My collection is mostly classical and I've never found it easier to find and select works.  Being able to select a single Bach cantata to play, without having to click a dozen or so individual tracks, is only one if its advantages.

ChrisByrd posted:

 

My collection is mostly classical and I've never found it easier to find and select works.  Being able to select a single Bach cantata to play, without having to click a dozen or so individual tracks, is only one if its advantages.

I have meanwhile added a "work" tag to my music collection. I had from the very beginning multiple values for the "genre" tag for describing a period (baroque, romantic, modern, high modern, contemporary, etc.), a type of music (chamber, concerto, violin, piano, vocal, etc.) and a few more traits. And, of course, I had composer and conductor tags.

With this tagging scheme in place and Minimserver, I can get to a specific interpretation of a specific work in 4 clicks. For instance, if I want to get to Vivaldi's "Concerto in D major RV 234 'L'inquietudine'", I first select genre=baroque, then composer=Vivaldi and finally work=Concerto in D major RV 234 'L'inquietudine'. After 3 clicks I am done assuming that I only have one interpretation of the concert. Otherwise, I need a fourth click to select a specific interpretation. The first click (genre) is just to get a short list of composers in the second step and could be avoided.

My guess is that if it takes you about a dozen clicks to select a single Bach cantata, there is something wrong with your tagging scheme or with your UPnP server.

My understanding is that, currently, Minimserver is the only UPnP server that supports searching and browsing classical music collections.

It does it very well, however, and if you are interested in classical music there is really no reason not to use Minimserver, see also https://forums.naimaudio.com/topic/minimserver-upmpdcli-and-mpd-thanks-to-eloise-and-andrew-everard.

PhilipH posted:

Has anyone tried Tomahawk, which does seem to include Spotify, which could potentially be a step up over Roon:

https://www.tomahawk-player.org/

No, but what they advertise

"Stop chasing music across the web - to services you don't use, or sources you don't have access to. Given the name or link to a song, album or playlist, Tomahawk will find the best available source for you and just play it."

is not what I am interested in. Also, it is not obvious to me what "best available source" does mean.

@NBPF  Yes, I should have acknowledged the excellent minimserver, which I've being using for  about two months.  Its composition and group tags do solve the problem I mentioned above of having to select individual tracks of a work for playback.  It is also very well suited for classical music.  The main problem is that it will take me months of work to tag my ~2000 CDs to get to a similar level of organisation created automatically by Roon.  I've been holding off, but if Roon is not to be for Naim streamers I'll probably have to make this commitment. 

A feature of Roon that I've not found a way to replicate in minimserver is a way to display the overall timing for a work - I use this a lot to make a selection to play by a particular time.  Also, there is no play history in minimserver, but I understand that Simon has this on his list of future developments.

A very dumb question, but how to you insert a quote in a reply using the new forum software.

ChrisByrd posted:

A very dumb question, but how to you insert a quote in a reply using the new forum software.

 

Click on the "Take Action" link below the post you want to quote and select "Reply with quote".

sjbabbey posted:

ChrisByrd posted:

A very dumb question, but how to you insert a quote in a reply using the new forum software.

 

Click on the "Take Action" link below the post you want to quote and select "Reply with quote".

Ah, thanks.

I just bit the bullet and went for a Lifetime Roon purchase/subscription.

I find myself rushing home form work to put on some music, haven't felt this way in quite some time.

The iPAD GUI is about the best I've seen. I love the shuffle and "radio" feature - scans your collection for songs or albums similar to what you are playing.

Roon scans your files and I really find the graphical representation of the music files enlightening. It really explains why I never could get into Imelda May's album

brick-walled into submission, such a shame.

The little microphone, gives you lyrics and all the blue text are hyper-links which will show you everything from your collection along with a synopsis  and /or connect to TIDAL.

A game changer for me.

SJB

Looks good, but what am I  missing is it like Minimserver and scans your collection to present in a GUI for you to use but adds in streaming services as a source?

Downloading the 14 day trial, but for me I just want to serve the music up from my own HiRes storage, not a Tidal streaming junkie as yet, does it scan you library to serve up?

Is it Melco like but software only with no hardware? $499 for lifetime use.

Sorry I can find out later but just asking as its a thread right now.

Strangely it's very hard to comprehend until you try it. It's the metadata attached and how it is integrated that is the key difference. 

It feels dynamic and alive where iPeng or the Naim app feel static. 

I wish it was around when I started ripping, as I spent quite some time getting genres correct and year of release, whereas tonight I just let dbpoweramp use its first found result knowing that Roon would insert correct genre, date of release, label etc. data. It also allows you to amend metadata while listening, through your iPad, if you have an issue with any of Roon's metadata, which I find a great advantage, it's a pain to have to go on the PC with mp3tag.

Roon won't be for everyone, but I'm smitten.

SJB

So as a 272 user how would I be able to integrate this? I assume I would need to connect a different source (mac mini etc)?

Well as a UniQute and Superuniti user I would hope Naim might look seriously at integrating Roon. 

Until then yes it's use another end point as Roon confusingly call them, apparently there will be announcements shortly. 

At the moment and I'm open to correction as I'm quite new to this, it's a Mac, PC, Auralic Aries or Squeezebox ( Logitech Media Server to be precise - so there are raspberry pi options )

SJB 

Dan43 posted:

Looks good, but what am I  missing is it like Minimserver and scans your collection to present in a GUI for you to use but adds in streaming services as a source?

Downloading the 14 day trial, but for me I just want to serve the music up from my own HiRes storage, not a Tidal streaming junkie as yet, does it scan you library to serve up?

Is it Melco like but software only with no hardware? $499 for lifetime use.

Sorry I can find out later but just asking as its a thread right now.

You can have Roon either 'watch' or 'manage' your music library folder. I have it 'watch' my Vortexbox files. It leaves the VB files intact but builds it's own database using Roon metadata, which you can tweak if desired. If you have it set to 'manage' then it will change the files themselves. 

With reference to the title, i was taught as a little kid "I want ... Never gets".

However although of no interest whatsoever to me, it would seem to make business sense if nothing else for any renderer supplier to enable online streaming as clearly some people find that desirable, similarl to internet radio, and to as many suppliers of streaming services as possible because each will have different appeal to different customers, as long as there isnt significant cost to so doing. And there shouldnt be significant cost as the suppliers should be falling over themselves to encoyrage as many music system suppliers to help customers of one become customers of the other. Im assuming the technical difficulties arent great once it is done for one. But is that right about the technical aspect, and do the streaming services charge ridiculously.

Sorry for the very basic questions but I'm trying to understand how to implement Roon in my system, if I were to try it.

I currently have a Unitiserve SSD, Synology NAS and NDS. 

Am I right to understand that Roon does not work with streamers like the NDS?

So in order to try it, I would need to get a separate DAC?  And I would need to connect the Mac/Windows machine that I have Roon on to the DAC in order to use it?

Innocent Bystander posted:

With reference to the title, i was taught as a little kid "I want ... Never gets".

Its funny - I got taught this as well and thought the same when originally seeing the thread  - and when ever I see or hear someone say 'I want' - its a real turn off...

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Innocent Bystander posted:

With reference to the title, i was taught as a little kid "I want ... Never gets".

Its funny - I got taught this as well and thought the same when originally seeing the thread  - and when ever I see or hear someone say 'I want' - its a real turn off...

 

Me too. Then again, if you don't ask, you don't get....or as Mick Jagger put it, 

We went down to the demonstration
To get your fair share of abuse
Singing, "We're gonna vent our frustration
If we don't we're gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse"

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes well you just might find
You get what you need

Wasn't the title of the thread meant to be just a bit ironic?

My grandmother used to say "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with" - or was it Steven Stills?

The title of the thread evokes protest. 

"They voted with their feet" also comes to mind. 

PhilipH posted:

Has anyone tried Tomahawk, which does seem to include Spotify, which could potentially be a step up over Roon:

https://www.tomahawk-player.org/

It's a shame nobody seems to have tried Tomahawk as it does seem to have a key advantage over Roon - i.e. the inclusion of Spotify in a unified library, which Roon doesn't seem to be suggesting is coming in the near term. It's clear that there are some users who are very keen on Roon, but does it replace both library management and rendering, or is it primarily a renderer? There's a fast pace of change in this space, I can appreciate the attraction of a unified library, but to do that it has to be unified, not unified except for Spotify!

At the end of the day, being a Naim customer since 1973 my start point is always the sound itself. Walking to the shelf and finding an album, or a CD was never an onerous task, so waiting for these new apps to mature before commiting to them isn't a big deal.

I realise that doesn't accord with my use of Spotify, but that's just a great way to listen to a lot of new music, and download for the car/portable use, as far as I am concerned.