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Roon Labs Software


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Hi Guys - This is pretty big news. I received a demonstration of this software at CES and was extremely impressed. The Roon Labs guys have built a software app that will challenge all existing apps. The ability to navigate one's music collection by almost any piece of metadata and to click on, for example, a mastering engineer and display all his/her music you own is so cool. It will support TIDAL as well and a host of other really cool stuff. I'm really looking forward to getting this asap.

 

http://roonlabs.com

 

 

 

 

 

Meridian Audio has announced that it has agreed a deal to transfer the company’s software applications business to a newly established entity, Roon Labs.

 

Explaining the spin-out dealer Meridian CEO John Buchanan said ‘We entered the music streaming market in 2009 with the best-in-class music server combining Meridian’s legendary audio quality with the unique and intuitive user experience we had acquired with Sooloos. As the market for streaming products continues to boom, and with the introduction of higher quality music services, Meridian continues to grow its business in this area by investing in developing our award-winning range of high performance audio and home theatre products and focusing on the specific needs of music lovers and the dealers who serve them.’

 

Commenting on the future relationship between Meridian and Roon Labs, Buchanan said ‘Having fully absorbed the Sooloos experience into Meridian’s hardware product offering, this deal enables our software applications team to establish a separate company, to address specialist software requirements for other consumers. We are now two independent companies focused on our own successes but Meridian Audio and Roon Labs will continue to collaborate and work closely together into the future.’

 

Describing the vision for his new company, Roon Labs Co-Founder Enno Vandermeer said ‘Roon Labs produces software that lets music enthusiasts interact more deeply with their collections, by exploring the music, the people who composed, performed, and recorded it, and the multi-dimensional connections between them.’ Commenting further Vandermeer said ‘We are excited by the opportunity to reach a broader audience and support their choices, both in terms of music content and audio hardware. We look forward to making important partnership and product announcement to the market very soon.’

 

The transfer is effective from 1st February 2015. Meridian Audio retains the Sooloos brand name and the Cambridgeshire company remains fully committed to the award-winning Meridian Sooloos system – and its thousands of satisfied customers – including the ongoing development of new features, such as the recent system integration of TIDAL’s high fidelity music streaming service.

Founder of Audiophile Style | My Audio Systems AudiophileStyleStickerWhite2.0.png AudiophileStyleStickerWhite7.1.4.png

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Chris, do you know what OSes/platforms this is going to run on?

 

--David

Listening Room: Mac mini (Roon Core) > iMac (HQP) > exaSound PlayPoint (as NAA) > exaSound e32 > W4S STP-SE > Benchmark AHB2 > Wilson Sophia Series 2 (Details)

Office: Mac Pro >  AudioQuest DragonFly Red > JBL LSR305

Mobile: iPhone 6S > AudioQuest DragonFly Black > JH Audio JH5

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Chris, as the metadata guy for NativeDSD I play with tags/metadata a lot. A vast majority of available tracks do not have things like even composer (we do, but it's a manual process I go through), let alone mastering engineer, captured in their metadata. ID3V2 and even mts or lbm files (authoring files for SACD) do not have a rich metadata history of capturing much beyond the consumer's big 6 (album, artist, title, track number, genre, year) with uninteresting things like ISRC included for royalties. Where would Roon expect to get this additional consumer-friendly metadata info? I'd love to sort on lead guitarist but that stuff doesn't exist today. This will be interesting.

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Chris, as the metadata guy for NativeDSD I play with tags/metadata a lot. A vast majority of available tracks do not have things like even composer (we do, but it's a manual process I go through), let alone mastering engineer, captured in their metadata. ID3V2 and even mts or lbm files (authoring files for SACD) do not have a rich metadata history of capturing much beyond the consumer's big 6 (album, artist, title, track number, genre, year) with uninteresting things like ISRC included for royalties. Where would Roon expect to get this additional consumer-friendly metadata info? I'd love to sort on lead guitarist but that stuff doesn't exist today. This will be interesting.

Good point Ted. The Roon app will combine with online services. It will be like AllMusic.com and your own collection combines. Way cool.

Founder of Audiophile Style | My Audio Systems AudiophileStyleStickerWhite2.0.png AudiophileStyleStickerWhite7.1.4.png

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It will be like AllMusic.com and your own collection combines. Way cool.

 

Interesting concept, especially since I'm frequently hitting AllMusic.com and Wikipedia for metadata and background info on what I'm listening to. I'm looking forward to seeing how it works in practice.

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

—David

Listening Room: Mac mini (Roon Core) > iMac (HQP) > exaSound PlayPoint (as NAA) > exaSound e32 > W4S STP-SE > Benchmark AHB2 > Wilson Sophia Series 2 (Details)

Office: Mac Pro >  AudioQuest DragonFly Red > JBL LSR305

Mobile: iPhone 6S > AudioQuest DragonFly Black > JH Audio JH5

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Well, to get ready for it folks probably need to look at their Album titles. Many of us have added pre and post descriptions in our album titles to differentiate versions (i.e Kind of Blue-DSD vs Kind of Blue-24/192 vs Kind Of Blue-RVG remaster vs Kind of Blue-vinyl rip). Most online services (like cover art finders) skip past those titles cuz they don't line up. It would be great if Roon was intelligent enough to see the general pattern.

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Eloise

---

...in my opinion / experience...

While I agree "Everything may matter" working out what actually affects the sound is a trickier thing.

And I agree "Trust your ears" but equally don't allow them to fool you - trust them with a bit of skepticism.

keep your mind open... But mind your brain doesn't fall out.

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Any idea what part of the market they are going to try and capture? Rather, what the prices will look like? I am not clear if this is a software, hardware, or appliance like thing they are talking about. :)

Paul; as I read it its a software version of a Sooloos controller / file manager.

Eloise

---

...in my opinion / experience...

While I agree "Everything may matter" working out what actually affects the sound is a trickier thing.

And I agree "Trust your ears" but equally don't allow them to fool you - trust them with a bit of skepticism.

keep your mind open... But mind your brain doesn't fall out.

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Paul; as I read it its a software version of a Sooloos controller / file manager.

 

Thanks for that link Eloise - it made it a lot clearer. :) Now a new hunk of software I can get really excited about, just so long as it has a Remote Control app to go along with it. :)

 

-Paul

Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat DAC.

Robert A. Heinlein

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Chris ... not sure how much you know and how much you can say ... but are they looking at full integration with things like TIDAL and Spotify as well so if (for example) you wear to search for "Mark Knopfler" it would show you the CDs you had ripped as well as high def downloads (as any current system would) , but then also show you music available from TIDAL and Spotify you don't own, as well as your Dire Straits music and the Princess Bride soundtrack off TIDAL and it will all be transparent except (perhaps) showing a TIDAL log next to some tracks.

Eloise

---

...in my opinion / experience...

While I agree "Everything may matter" working out what actually affects the sound is a trickier thing.

And I agree "Trust your ears" but equally don't allow them to fool you - trust them with a bit of skepticism.

keep your mind open... But mind your brain doesn't fall out.

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Hello All,

 

I just wanted to say hello from the team at Roon.

 

We are excited to be telling everyone at last about something that has been years in the works, and we will have lot more to say as we lock down our launch features in the next week or so.

 

In the mean time, keep asking questions so we know what everyone wants to see from us.

 

To answer some of the questions here...

 

We will be making software that users download and install.

It will be a single piece of software that acts as either a server or a remote.

As a server it will run on Mac and PC.

As a remote it will run on Mac, PC, IOS and Android.

 

All of the awesome things that we are known for- from simple and utlra-reliable auto-discovery and inter-device communications to the metadata-driven user interface- will be part of what we do.

 

We are in beta on an incredibly solid platform, testing for coverage across platforms, resolutions, and form-factors, and confidently intend to launch in the second quarter.

 

Thanks,

 

- Rob Darling, Roon Labs

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Rob, can you reveal what will the server "play to". I.e. will it be limited to directly connected DACs such as USB or SPDIF; or will it also support UPnP players?

Eloise

---

...in my opinion / experience...

While I agree "Everything may matter" working out what actually affects the sound is a trickier thing.

And I agree "Trust your ears" but equally don't allow them to fool you - trust them with a bit of skepticism.

keep your mind open... But mind your brain doesn't fall out.

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Rob--

 

Thanks for making yourself available on this forum -- your product sounds like it could be fantastic and fill a real niche. Could you explain how your app would work with the Aurender and Aries interfaces? How tightly integrated would it be? Maybe a simple example of how you could use your app to find out more about an artist in your Aurender and/or Aries library that you'd like more information about?

 

Thanks!

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Since Aurender and Aries both use their own apps to browse and manage files (forgive me if I'm wrong), I'm not aware of any off-the shelf way for us to communicate with them.

 

This is a difficult but sensible decision for manufacturers to make... open protocols are enticing in theory, but can be really flaky and if they want to make devices they can support in the wild, taking control of the whole environment makes sense.

 

But do not fear, we will have a program to interoperate with third party hardware manufacturers. We will have an announcement about the mechanics of that soon, and are already working with some manufacturers.

 

We would love to have feedback... what devices do people use and who would you like us to communicate with?

 

Rob--

 

Thanks for making yourself available on this forum -- your product sounds like it could be fantastic and fill a real niche. Could you explain how your app would work with the Aurender and Aries interfaces? How tightly integrated would it be? Maybe a simple example of how you could use your app to find out more about an artist in your Aurender and/or Aries library that you'd like more information about?

 

Thanks!

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There's a server piece to install in a computer and a remote app for iOS / Android. I believe it will cost around $100 per year.

Chris you mention a server piece, so even with OS X you'd have to be running on a computer you could easily open and install components on?

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@ Always.Learning...

 

The second part of your question... how could you use Roon to learn more about your collection?

 

That is really the magic.

 

When you install the server app, you tell it all the places where your storage lives. Then we pull down a TON of data about it, from a number of different sources.

 

We then weave all that data into an interface that is like a web magazine about your collection... album and track credits, artist and performer bios, composers, related musicians, influencing musicians, photos... with hyperlinks to let you surf it all.

 

So all the relationships and contexts that used to make albums and album art an essential part of music are presented not just as eye candy, but as something you can actually interact with and explore.

 

To top it off, this data is all dynamic. So when a new album comes out by an artist, the bios and artist info update. If there are guest players on the album, then the info about those guest players changes too. Very cool stuff.

 

It is the result of 15 years of work and is pretty awesome.

 

We can't wait for everyone to start using it.

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@ Always.Learning...

 

The second part of your question... how could you use Roon to learn more about your collection?

 

That is really the magic.

 

When you install the server app, you tell it all the places where your storage lives. Then we pull down a TON of data about it, from a number of different sources.

 

We then weave all that data into an interface that is like a web magazine about your collection... album and track credits, artist and performer bios, composers, related musicians, influencing musicians, photos... with hyperlinks to let you surf it all.

 

So all the relationships and contexts that used to make albums and album art an essential part of music are presented not just as eye candy, but as something you can actually interact with and explore.

 

To top it all off, this data is all dynamic. So when a new album comes out by an artist, the bios and artist info update. If there are guest players on the album, then the info about those guest players changes too. Very cool stuff.

 

It is the result of 15 years of work and is pretty awesome.

 

We can't wait for everyone to start using it.

Wow, I can't wait to learn more Rob. Thanks for coming on here and participating. It's much appreciated.

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So if I understand you correctly, Rob, then it sounds like the Roon Labs app would not need to "integrate" with an app from Aurender or Aries to be of value to a user of one of these devices. Instead, you would point the server app towards your collection and it would create data that would be accessed through the Roon Labs app. The Roon Labs app could live side-by-side with control apps like Aurender's Conductor app. Sitting in your listening chair with an iPad, you could access both apps during a listening session, accessing your music and playlists from your control app, and then switching to the Roon Labs software to learn more about your collection. Did I get that right?

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