Roon.... brilliant

Posted by: Granthar on 19 December 2018

I have just put Roon in, have to say this is amazing, why has no one else done this.

I have already listened to music I had forgotten I had. Have it linked to an Atom, Muso QB and a Sonus Play 1 (couldn’t justify the cost of another QB for the kitchen)

Its a shame that it can’t be used to store lists of your music such as a listing of your music you have on other mediums I.e. vinyl. Obviously not to play but just to have the info about an album would be great.

 

 

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by hifi-dog

good innit?- - ive used it for 18 months now and it makes all other apps etc look clunky

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by T38.45

:-)

 

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by Docv

Roon makes my music more accessible: using it regularly leads on to enjoyable discoveries. Probably my only disappointment is it’s unsophisticated approach to internet radio: fortunately the Naim app is excellent in this regard.

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by Zipperheadbanjo
Docv posted:

Roon makes my music more accessible: using it regularly leads on to enjoyable discoveries. Probably my only disappointment is it’s unsophisticated approach to internet radio: fortunately the Naim app is excellent in this regard.

Completely agree with the above. The other Roon weakness is how it handles really really large collections (box sets) from individual artists. I have a massive amount of live Grateful Dead... some of the live releases encapsulate 50-80 CD's. Roon doesn't know what to do with that stuff... so when I want to listen to my GD... I generally go into the Naim app. 

Love Roon in all other respects.

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by hifi-dog

I wouldn’t know what to do with either! ????

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by T38.45

guess the next thing is qobuz integration in roon.....

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by Docv
Zipperheadbanjo posted:
Docv posted:

Roon makes my music more accessible: using it regularly leads on to enjoyable discoveries. Probably my only disappointment is it’s unsophisticated approach to internet radio: fortunately the Naim app is excellent in this regard.

Completely agree with the above. The other Roon weakness is how it handles really really large collections (box sets) from individual artists. I have a massive amount of live Grateful Dead... some of the live releases encapsulate 50-80 CD's. Roon doesn't know what to do with that stuff... so when I want to listen to my GD... I generally go into the Naim app. 

Love Roon in all other respects.

Wow, reminds me of when my brother introduced me to the GD in about 1973! Love American Beauty; love Roon ????

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by Sloop John B

If the rumours are anything to go by I’d expect to see Qobuz integration in Roon early in the new year. I’ve been using Qobuz a lot on my Bluesound devices and must say it “feels” better than Tidal.  

Although the Irish Christmas collection would make me doubt the human curation aspect of Qobuz, if that was chosen by a human they should be sacked no matter what level of yellow vest protests it might generate. 

.sjb

Posted on: 19 December 2018 by Echolane
T38.45 posted:

guess the next thing is qobuz integration in roon.....

I am counting on this!!  I am trialing Roon later this week, partly because I got encouraging comments that Qobuz might happen.  

However, I am prepared for disappointment with the metadata.  I’m almost all classical and opera and I have been warned not to expect to be completely happy.  But then, I’m not completely happy with Naim’s management of classical either.  I have only the Uniti Core and it has a limited palette, to say the least.  I know I will have the box set problem because much of my Opera collection is two to  three CDs.  I also have  two or three multi-CD collections that are 10 CDs or so.  Naim does handle my full opera box sets perfectly.  The collections, not as well.

 

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Allan Milne

 

Unfortunately I do not know what any of you are talking about

 

My son found roon and loves it, when I was visiting, I tried it out using the iPhone app ...

… nothing, absolutely nothing …

… did I say nothing … well there is nothing ...

 

Why? ...

well I am blind and using the VoiceOver screen reader on my iPhone and, unfortunately, roon is an example of where accessibility has been thrown out of the window.

Roon uses no standard UI components at all, all the text is presented using low-level C++ (that's a programming language) to generate the text graphically.

This means that screen readers have no hooks on which to hang their text to speech behaviour.

This seems also true for the web based version of roon.

 

I am sorry, but in the 21st century companies should be making accessible products and this one doesn't even pass the switching on test!

 

My son was so annoyed he was going to cancel his roon subscription in protest but ...

… well it is a cool bit of software;

… and what would one protest do?

He did go as far as complaining to them and, to be fair, they did respond and admit they were aware of the issue.

 

The only way I might get my hands on roon is if all you subscribers protested on my behalf

… go on, you know you want to

 

Allan

 

 

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Sloop John B

The only way I might get my hands on roon is if all you subscribers protested on my behalf

… go on, you know you want to

Okay I’ve started the thread over on the Roon forum, so if anyone cares to support Alan, it’s easily done. .sjb

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Docv

Great stuff...I’ll support this on Roon

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Allan Milne

 

Thanks sjb, much appreciated.

Allan

 

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Innocent Bystander
Granthar posted:

I have just put Roon in, have to say this is amazing, why has no one else done this.

I have already listened to music I had forgotten I had. 

 

 

1) they have, and reported in the forum -  some people enthusiastically, for them clearly being the best thing since sliced bread, while others do not like it and abandoned after trialling. Horses for courses, perhaps,

2) I don’t Know how people forget the music they have! Mine has always been stotrd in a systematic and easily browsable way, originally as physical albums now as ‘electronic’ files.

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Bart
Zipperheadbanjo posted:
Docv posted:

Roon makes my music more accessible: using it regularly leads on to enjoyable discoveries. Probably my only disappointment is it’s unsophisticated approach to internet radio: fortunately the Naim app is excellent in this regard.

Completely agree with the above. The other Roon weakness is how it handles really really large collections (box sets) from individual artists. I have a massive amount of live Grateful Dead... some of the live releases encapsulate 50-80 CD's. Roon doesn't know what to do with that stuff... so when I want to listen to my GD... I generally go into the Naim app. 

Love Roon in all other respects.

How do you tag all that GD music to make it easy to find?  I have almost all of the Dave's Picks, Dick's Picks, and a bunch of other box sets.  I've not come up with a really great system of tagging the cd rips.  Probably the best one thing I did was to change the genre to "Grateful Dead Live" so at least I can do an initial sort.  But it's just a LOT of album art showing up in the app, not organized in a really useful way.

Posted on: 20 December 2018 by Pev

Hi Bart, my GD collection comes up in concert date order which I find the most useful. The studio albums seem to slot in amongst them and I generally have a good idea of when they came out. "Best ofs", "30 days of..", etc. are a bit of an anomaly but that's a small price to pay for having such good access to so much of the most wonderful music ever made 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by SimonPeterArnold

Welcome to the club. 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by SimonPeterArnold
Innocent Bystander posted:
Granthar posted:

I have just put Roon in, have to say this is amazing, why has no one else done this.

I have already listened to music I had forgotten I had. 

 

 

1) they have, and reported in the forum -  some people enthusiastically, for them clearly being the best thing since sliced bread, while others do not like it and abandoned after trialling. Horses for courses, perhaps,

2) I don’t Know how people forget the music they have! Mine has always been stotrd in a systematic and easily browsable way, originally as physical albums now as ‘electronic’ files.

With a large collection its very easy to forget and not everyone has the time or patience to systematically sieve through to find it. I personally forget titles and artists quite regularly. Roon presents all of your library in a much easier way to browse and find compared to other solutions I have tried and as a result you engage more with it. 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by Innocent Bystander
SimonPeterArnold posted:
Innocent Bystander posted:.

With a large collection its very easy to forget and not everyone has the time or patience to systematically sieve through to find it. I personally forget titles and artists quite regularly. Roon presents all of your library in a much easier way to browse and find compared to other solutions I have tried and as a result you engage more with it. 

Just curious: what does it do to present your collection that is easier to browse than basic genre then alphabetical by artist (composer with classical)? 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by SimonPeterArnold

Its just a nicer interface in general for searching, , the tag system is really powerfull as is the focus section to whittle down based on your listening habits, date added, genre, file format etc. Also the bookmarking for quick jumping is excellent. For those lost gens, the discovery section is great to remind you of albums, artists, labels of material you may not have played for a while and is similar to what you have been listening to, and I like the radio function to. 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by Innocent Bystander
SimonPeterArnold posted:

Its just a nicer interface in general for searching, , the tag system is really powerfull as is the focus section to whittle down based on your listening habits, date added, genre, file format etc. Also the bookmarking for quick jumping is excellent. For those lost gens, the discovery section is great to remind you of albums, artists, labels of material you may not have played for a while and is similar to what you have been listening to, and I like the radio function to. 

 I can see the potential usefulness of something reminding of music not played for a while, though in practice usually my mind is pretty good in deciding what piece of music it fancies to follow. Other more common things like favourites or bookmarking or playlists, I’ve not used even though available on other systems.

One issue I have is with a chunk of my collection having poor metadata: when I trialled Roon I hoped it might do better than Audirvana, but itdidn’t. My problem I know, just a pity that it seems unpopular to facilitate simple searching/ browsing by file structure in addition to reliance on metadata - something Naim did very well when I had an ND5XS, all my music being readily visible.

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by SimonPeterArnold
Innocent Bystander posted:
SimonPeterArnold posted:

Its just a nicer interface in general for searching, , the tag system is really powerfull as is the focus section to whittle down based on your listening habits, date added, genre, file format etc. Also the bookmarking for quick jumping is excellent. For those lost gens, the discovery section is great to remind you of albums, artists, labels of material you may not have played for a while and is similar to what you have been listening to, and I like the radio function to. 

 I can see the potential usefulness of something reminding of music not played for a while, though in practice usually my mind is pretty good in deciding what piece of music it fancies to follow. Other more common things like favourites or bookmarking or playlists, I’ve not used even though available on other systems.

One issue I have is with a chunk of my collection having poor metadata: when I trialled Roon I hoped it might do better than Audirvana, but itdidn’t. My problem I know, just a pity that it seems unpopular to facilitate simple searching/ browsing by file structure in addition to reliance on metadata - something Naim did very well when I had an ND5XS, all my music being readily visible.

Roon gets 99% of it correct from its metadata sources for my collection the rest I just edit in Roon or mp3 tag. It could do with a having a few more sources for metadata  but that comes at a cost.  I know classical is its downfall as metadata sources for this are not great especially box sets, But for me i have very little of it to care.  

I have used a lot of different library software and to me Roon comes out tops for managing my library.  + Tidal library integrated in to my own and its other features such as multiroom and support for a variety of hardware playback devices. 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by Echolane

Let’s talk about metadata for classical music lovers.  I happened to spot a Roon thread where posters were sneering at us old fogies for complaining about the problems we have with classical music, so there is feeling of being stigmatized every time it is mentioned.  And it doesn’t help that Roon doesn’t seem to improve it’s support of classical.

Is it really THAT difficult to improve support for classical music?  Or asked differently, what is so difficult about it?  I know Composer presents difficulties, but it seems fairly easy to set up a list of all known composers to use as a standard.  They certainly have plenty of data to begin a list like that.

And what does Roon have to do to support boxed sets?  What is so difficult that the problem persists?  Surely classical music isn’t the only genre that has boxed sets.

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by David O'Higgins
Echolane posted:

Let’s talk about metadata for classical music lovers.  I happened to spot a Roon thread where posters were sneering at us old fogies for complaining about the problems we have with classical music, so there is feeling of being stigmatized every time it is mentioned.  And it doesn’t help that Roon doesn’t seem to improve it’s support of classical.

Is it really THAT difficult to improve support for classical music?  Or asked differently, what is so difficult about it?  I know Composer presents difficulties, but it seems fairly easy to set up a list of all known composers to use as a standard.  They certainly have plenty of data to begin a list like that.

And what does Roon have to do to support boxed sets?  What is so difficult that the problem persists?  Surely classical music isn’t the only genre that has boxed sets.

I don’t know what precisely your gripe is, but I find Roon light years ahead of the Naim app on Classical. It recognises symphonies as symphonies and operas as operas, not just a list of tracks. Play a piano trio, for example, and if you have ‘Radio’ switched on, it will play further examples in full. 

More generally, while you are playing a track, it gives you thumbnail access to any other album in your collection by the same artist. You can pick up any of those thumbnails and explore your collection further, all without interrupting the music playing. 

Can anyone suggest another app capable of this type of opening a music collection?

 

Posted on: 21 December 2018 by Innocent Bystander
David O'Higgins posted:

 

I don’t know what precisely your gripe is, but I find Roon light years ahead of the Naim app on Classical. It recognises symphonies as symphonies and operas as operas, not just a list of tracks. Play a piano trio, for example, and if you have ‘Radio’ switched on, it will play further examples in full. 

More generally, while you are playing a track, it gives you thumbnail access to any other album in your collection by the same artist. You can pick up any of those thumbnails and explore your collection further, all without interrupting the music playing. 

Can anyone suggest another app capable of this type of opening a music collection?

 

I filed my classical music, including albums with no metadata at all, and albums with inconsistent meatadata, simply in the NAS in a simple but methodical way: file structure of genre (classical), composer (surname first), then album (Work name followed by conductor, orchestra (or soloist), date, resolution), then track filed commencing 01, or 101, 201 for double albums). Strangely when I had an ND5XS, playing first with Twonky on a Zyxel NSA325 NAS, then Logitech Media Server on the NAS, then Serviio on a Mac Mini operating as a NAS, and using the Naim app for control, I didn’t have any problem whatsoever finding, browsing or playing any album. Not so with Roon (not with Audirvana), which appear solely to rely on metadata, a real PITA - how I wish all library and control software would at least optionally allow browse and select based on file structure, which is so simple to set up and can be universal regardless of original source if the music and accuracy, consistency or completeness of metadata. Why is that such a difficult ask?