Roon 1.8 first impressions

[blair.athol]

It does clearly feel like this upgrade was not tested enough and that Roon has decided to join the ranks of the companies thinking that their paying customers can act as the facto beta testers.

The #1 reason I decided to settle on Roon instead of Audirvana is the combination of perfect stability and ease of music navigation. Both combined. I wouldn’t have considered Roon without the stability part.

I am not questioning the validity of the changes they are making but...
- having many users unable to access their files is a big no go
- application crashes in common scenarios is a big no go
- calling this 1.8 instead of 2.0 may be the worst part as it conveys the impression of a relatively minor and therefore safe upgrade
- the poor information density of the new UI is disliked by a majority of users it seems, testing should have revealed this
- there are many functional regressions

Cheers,
Bernard

I disagree that Roon treated testing any different on this release.  I spent my career dealing with software, databases and websites that worked great in a test environment but under full load revealed unforeseen issues.  What they did do differently this time was to announce and actually market the new release ahead of time. I have no doubt this generated a user load upon release way beyond anything they had seen previously and it broke a few things.  No new software release goes without some level of bugs and Roon is no different.  But their resolution of the server issues followed by a quick release of an update and informative acknowledgement of other issues is to be commended.

I get why they decided not to call this 2.0.   It got an extraordinary facelift but little in the way of new functionality or scope.  What was different was clearly the amount of marketing hype which ultimately got them in a bit of trouble.  My guess is that future releases will return to a more subdued launch.

We can agree to disagree on the strength of the new release, but IMHO, it is a big win.  The downside is that it is also a big change in UI and that has met with some resistance.  On the other hand, I’ve also seen a good bit of praise as well. Their forums give a lot of people a voice that gets heavily exercised. Roon will undoubtedly respond to much of the feedback and tweak the system accordingly.  

@bernardl - Can you site the functional regressions you mentioned?   Certainly there were on the day of release but much of that was due to their server overload and most of it resolved that night.   The one area that is still messed up is their change in Boolean logic in their Focus.  What they did is slick, but different from the previous incarnation and that broke user bookmarks and generated a lot of user frustration.  I’m amazed that wasn’t caught in testing.  My guess is that they’ll patch that soon.

Bottom line, no software is going to please everyone.  Personally, I somewhat feared the UI change because... well, I’m getting old and hesitant to change what has been working well for me.  But the more I use the new UI, the more I appreciate it.  Hey, it will continue to evolve and I know of no company that responds to users better than Roon.

[blair.athol]

+1
Thank you, Mdcconnelly, I can only agree. My experience is just the same and I had a long listening session last night wich I really enjoyed.

[K4680]

+1
Thank you, Mdcconnelly, I can only agree. My experience is just the same and I had a long listening session last night wich I really enjoyed.

Hi, blair.athol I can only confirm. At first I was skeptical about the new design and functions, etc. After two days I am fully convinced! I have no regrets that I bought Roon Lifetime.

[bernardl]

As mentioned my comments are not about the new UI.

I find it appealing which I decided to upgrade quickly after availability.

Here is the thread to read to understand the issues people are having: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-...40792/1132

Already 1600 posts, more than twice in 4 days than the level of feedbacks 1.7 generated in months.

Cheers,
Bernard

[K4680]

As mentioned my comments are not about the new UI.

I find it appealing which I decided to upgrade quickly after availability.

Here is the thread to read to understand the issues people are having: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-...40792/1132

Already 1600 posts, more than twice in 4 days than the level of feedbacks 1.7 generated in months.

Cheers,
Bernard

Hi Bernard, there are also positive reports about Roon 1.8!

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-...eat/141843

[mdconnelly]

There are certainly legitimate issues with 1.8 and I applaud those that raised them in that 1600+ post thread. The problem is finding the useful and valid posts through the vast number of pointless, negative comments. Don’t even get me started on the “1.8 is a Massive Failure” thread. I wish the moderators could simply delete the noise yet leave those posts with constructive comment so that Roon and users can learn from and respond to them. I suppose we can interpret this as a whole lot of Roon users who really care about this software, but reading through it was just demoralizing. Gotta think there’s a ton of pent-up anger out there.

Personally, I’m really enjoying 1.8. The more I use it, the more I appreciate what Roon is striving to accomplish. It’s clear that an immense amount of design effort went into this. So I think I’m just going to spend more time listening via Roon and far less time reading about it in their forums.

[K4680]

There are certainly legitimate issues with 1.8 and I applaud those that raised them in that 1600+ post thread.  The problem is finding the useful and valid posts through the vast number of  pointless, negative comments.  Don’t even get me started on the “1.8 is a Massive Failure” thread.  I wish the moderators could simply delete the noise yet leave those posts with constructive comment so that Roon and users can learn from and respond to them.  I suppose we can interpret this as a whole lot of Roon users who really care about this software, but reading through it was just demoralizing.  Gotta think there’s a ton of pent-up anger out there.

Personally, I’m really enjoying 1.8.  The more I use it, the more I appreciate what Roon is striving to accomplish.  It’s clear that an immense amount of design effort went into this.  So I think I’m just going to spend more time listening via Roon and far less time reading about it in their forums.

+1
Thanks for your comment!

[bernardl]

As mentioned my comments are not about the new UI.

I find it appealing which I decided to upgrade quickly after availability.

Here is the thread to read to understand the issues people are having: https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-...40792/1132

Already 1600 posts, more than twice in 4 days than the level of feedbacks 1.7 generated in months.

Cheers,
Bernard

Hi Bernard, there are also positive reports about Roon 1.8!

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-...eat/141843

Yes, certainly. My point isn’t that everything is wrong with 1.8 nor that Roon is a terrible company.

Those who wrote these 128 comments certainly have very valid points.

I am looking forward to the ability to use focus on both my local library and Quobuz for example.

That is as soon as I’ll be able to play music in my local library. For now Roon still can’t see it. Never has any music replay system caused such a disruption of service to me in the past. I am aware I could buy a NAS or use my back up one as a workaround and that most people don’t suffer from this issue.

As a software pro though I wouldn’t consider my job well done if 100% of my users weren’t able to use the most basic feature or my software.

Cheers,
Bernard

[mdconnelly]

@bernardl - Have there been others with the type of problem you've run into? I tend to gloss over linux posts since I don't use it for Roon, so I'm wondering if you've got a unique issue or if this has popped up for others also running Roon on Linux. Either way, that is totally frustrating. I have little patience for those ranting over a color change, but if you can't listen to your music, then that is just wrong and needs to be fixed. Hopefully someone at Roon can help. Best of luck with it.

[bernardl]

Thanks for your empathy. 😀

The same problem has been reported by others, there is a support thread over at Roon community. It seems related to a specific type of Linux file system. Mounting the local disk as a logical network share is a workaround but for reasons I won’t detail here not applicable for me unfortunately.

There are other ways around that I could deploy but it’s just tîme consuming and is 180 degrees away from the non complexity I like Roon for in the first place.

Cheers,
Bernard