Roon 1.8 first impressions

[mdconnelly]

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.