ROON

[Confused]

Roon thoughts? Yes, why not. First a bit of background information for context. I am currently considering options for a possible purchase for a streamer / music server, or similar. The intent, to ‘take the computer out of the chain’, as well as the eternal desire for ultimate sound quality. However, I am mindful that I actually like having a computer in the chain. A computer plus AIR offers the ultimate flexibility in terms of using any / multiple music player software options, full screen UI etc. etc. So the functionality of any potential streamer is important. I can see myself in a situation where I have a Melco or whatever, but use PC + AIR in parallel depending on the situation. So the closer a streamer or music server gets to doing all the things I want, the less need I will have for a PC + AIR in parallel. Then we have Roon. From what I have read, everyone is raving about Roon, best thing ever. So my plan was to sign up to Roon and give it a try, after all, if I find that Roon the route to how I want to listen to music and I will be using Roon most of the time, then there is little point spending lots of cash on a Melco or similar, that will sit on the shelf largely unused.

I was on the Roon trial over the Easter Holiday, so here are my early impressions:

Set up was easy, I had Roon downloaded, set-up, running and playing bit perfect in less than half an hour.
Sound quality was excellent, easily a match for JRiver WASAPI. (I have half convinced myself that Roon sounds better than JRiver, although I can see no reason why it should, I’ll do a back to back test when I have some time)

I was a little disappointed re metadata and album artwork etc. If I use iTunes or JRiver, I now have more or less 100% complete artwork (although this has taken some effort in the past). To be honest this is not a big deal, I’m sure a couple of rainy Sunday mornings would get this resolved. More of a metadata issue for me is that Roon appears to be very album centric, as opposed to track centric. So in a track listing view Roon will only show and sort on the album artist. So any compilation albums will come up as ‘various artists’ for every individual track. JRiver, iTunes and others will allow either album artist, track artist or both to be listed. Roon does not, so any artists buried in compilation albums become invisible. The ‘album centric’ theme continues with track ratings, which Roon does not support. Roon offers album ratings, but that’s it. So if you wanted to listen a particular album but filter out a couple of dire (low rated) tracks, this is not possible in Roon. Again, iTunes, JRiver etc. will oblige here.

It’s very slick, looks pretty etc., but I did find some aspects of the UI a little counter intuitive. Playing with tagging and metadata on a PC, I found that the play screen keeps appearing when I’m just trying to interrogate the track etc., this is a minor point though, I’m sure that after couple of weeks familiarity that usage would start to become second nature.

The lyrics feature is nice and good fun, although I was surprised by how much material that I have for which the little lyrics microphone was missing, so a bit hit and miss.

It is also good fun picking up the album and artist information, although you can of course simply Google ‘allmusic.com’, irrespective of if you are running Roon. The links to musicians and similar ‘music discovery’ features are outstandingly good, but I do think that to fully get the benefit of this you also need to have the Tidal subscription. I do not have Tidal and have no intention of subscribing to Tidal. I do sometimes use ‘free’ Spotify to try things I’ve stumbled across and I like it, I buy the CD, but Roon will not talk to freebie Spotify ……

I have noticed a couple of posts on this very forum praising the ‘Roon Community’ forum for it’s responsiveness and for the fact that it has regular input from Roon staff and experts. I have spent some time lurking on Roon community and indeed, some issues crop up and get super-fast attention and resolution from Roon staff, good stuff. This is not the full picture though, I have searched though looking at some features and topics that interest me and found old ignored posts, unresolved issues etc. So I think how good Roon Community is depends a little bit on the specific nature of the issue in hand. There is also an awful lot of stuff on Roon Comminity from people wanting thisnew feature, this change, this tweak etc., together with some folk demanding a simpler UI, so to be honest I have a degree of sympathy with the Roon guys who have to deal with it all. (the general public can be a demanding and unpleasant bunch)

So in conclusion, I can fully see why some people have fallen in love with Roon. If you are the kind of person with a Tidal subscription wanting to listen to new albums via the music discovery tools, then I can see that Roon is the absolute bees knees, both in terms of functionality and a beautiful UI. However, for me, I kept finding things that it can’t do. Things that are easy in iTunes, JRiver and co. It’s fair to say that they do give the impression that they are developing it like crazy, so it is reasonable to take into account how new Roon is. I’m sure that in the future Roon may well do all the things I would want and more, but at the moment it left me a little disappointed to be honest. Also, I have to be clear that all this is based on only two days with Roon. I have seen enough that has peaked my interest to keep my subscription live a little longer to see if I bond with Roon in time, maybe I will, I haven’t totally given up on it yet, although I do suspect I’ll get fed up and abandon it before too long.