Why bother with Roon?

[wappinghigh]

Why not just add in a Spotify Connect endpoint into your streaming hardware and be done with it?

 

Thanks 

[trappy]

Yes, sometimes it's nice to actually look at your own collection, with your own tagging, etc. Although I've used Roon for well over a year now, I still go back to JRMC periodically, and sometimes with relief. And Spotify's interface (and Connect app) is still way better than Tidal (lazy bastards.) However, Roon does keep getting better, and, occasional reliability issues aside, the experience can be quite rewarding, and there's nothing else quite like it. Still bloody expensive, though.

[ShawnC]

2 hours ago, wappinghigh said:

Why not just add in a Spotify Connect endpoint into your streaming hardware and be done with it?

 

Thanks 

Do you use Roon?

[jhwalker]

4 hours ago, wappinghigh said:

Why not just add in a Spotify Connect endpoint into your streaming hardware and be done with it?

 

Thanks 

 

Brcause they are two very different experiences.

[crenca]

For me, Roon gives me HQPlayer & Tidal connectivity that I have not found elsewhere and that I am willing to pay for (for now).  Yes, the "experience" (i.e. the metadata, UI, remote control) is slick but that alone would not be enough for me in-of itself.  Roon would lose me if they lost the Tidal connectivity, most likely through Tidal going out of business or being bought by someone else who has no interest in Roon support. 

[Ralf11]

 

[jabbr]

I use Roon to control HQPlayer. I like the iPhone app. It allows use of any of AAIF, DSF, FLAC and M4A files (i.e. decodes Apple Lossless for HQP). Its the GUI that HQPlayer needs. iTunes doesn't do DSD/DSF nor FLAC nor does it upsample, nor does it allow me to stream to NAA.

[blownsi]

I have no experience with Spotify Connect but in order to compete with Roon it would have to do the following for me: 1) Allow Tidal lossless streaming (and hopefully not have to pay for spotify)

2) Allow lossless streaming from my own NAS (Vortexbox)

3) Merge both Tidal & my NAS into one large database that's easily searchable

4) Ignore all the bad tags, file names, folder hierachy etc on my NAS and just let me search for what I want to hear at the moment.

 

 

 

 

[Innocent Bystander]

On 4/17/2017 at 1:39 PM, blownsi said:

I have no experience with Spotify Connect but in order to compete with Roon it would have to do the following for me: 1) Allow Tidal lossless streaming (and hopefully not have to pay for spotify)

2) Allow lossless streaming from my own NAS (Vortexbox)

3) Merge both Tidal & my NAS into one large database that's easily searchable

4) Ignore all the bad tags, file names, folder hierachy etc on my NAS and just let me search for what I want to hear at the moment.

 

 

 

 

Re 4), if the tags are bad, or missing with perhaps just filenames and sorted into album folders to go on, does Roon still find the albums when you browse?

 

And what if Roon can't recognise them in its online database: can it still play them?

[blownsi]

56 minutes ago, Innocent Bystander said:

Re 4), if the tags are bad, or missing with perhaps just filenames and sorted into album folders to go on, does Roon still find the albums when you browse?

 

And what if Roon can't recognise them in its online database: can it still play them?

Yes Roon somehow finds them and makes them appear as if nothing is wrong.  I've purchased several programs over the years which were supposed to fix tags and all have been unsuccessful.  Some even overwrote what the other programs tried to correct.  At one point I even used software to just remove all tags and then rewrite them with filenames.  They looked really weird but were more helpful than what I had.  Roon just seems to handle all of this as if there is nothing wrong.

 

Honestly I don't know the answer to Roon not having it in it's database.  I don't think I have any CD rips which are not in it's database.  The only specific example I know of in my collection is vinyl rips which of course it cannot recognize the recording.  Roon seems to find these under the artist and then display them by track number.  It's probably pulling this info from the filename or tag but I'm not certain.  Perhaps someone else can chime in?

[firedog]

1 hour ago, Innocent Bystander said:

Re 4), if the tags are bad, or missing with perhaps just filenames and sorted into album folders to go on, does Roon still find the albums when you browse?

 

And what if Roon can't recognise them in its online database: can it still play them?

Roon will use either just your tags, it's database, or both. Depends how you set it up. 

Roon will play/find any album, it doesn't have to be in the Roon database or have good tags. But if it isn't in the database and doesn't have any  tags it may be difficult for you to locate from within Roon.  For Roon to work well you want an album to have some tagging: at least one of album name, artist name, song title, etc. 

[Innocent Bystander]

Thanks blownsi & firedog.  I feel a trial of Roon coming on, though it is somewhat pricey (though at least I can try first). Till now I've been wedded to Audirvana for its sound quality, but I'm sick of having to use work-arounds for 100s of albums with metadata that Audirvana either doesn't like, or in the case of ripped vinyl no metadata other than the file and nested folder names for tracks/album/genre.

[erniejade]

Jumping in on this thread. I keep reading about Roon but on the fence about the product. I am running a Lumin D1 that has tital and great streaming plus up sampling. What advantage would Roon give me?

[daverich4]

2 hours ago, Innocent Bystander said:

Thanks blownsi & firedog.  I feel a trial of Roon coming on, though it is somewhat pricey (though at least I can try first). Till now I've been wedded to Audirvana for its sound quality, but I'm sick of having to use work-arounds for 100s of albums with metadata that Audirvana either doesn't like, or in the case of ripped vinyl no metadata other than the file and nested folder names for tracks/album/genre.

 

One problem I had during my Roon trial was missing cover art, something that's never been a problem with JRiver. 

[DaQi]

I did a trial of Roon and it was able to recognize my vinyl rips that I had already split and tagged. It was pretty cool. I didn't like the experience enough to pay for it though and let my trial lapse as I went back to JRiver. I was using the new stream to Sonos capability but it was buggy enough and crashed or jammed so often that it just got annoying. On JRiver that just works well and the control seems pretty much bombproof. During the trial I kept finding myself dropping back to JRiver despite trying to be hard core about it and use Roon for 60 days. 

[Innocent Bystander]

Well, I started a trial of Roon yesterday, and at once found that it does not cope well with collections having missing or incomplete metadata. Partly that is ripped vinyl (no metadata, just track file names and album folder names, nested in composer (classical) or performing artist (non-classical) folders, all nested in genre folders. Ripped CDs are also a problem: whilst at least they mostly have some metadata embedded, there are many inconsistencies (ignoring genre which though the worst,  Roon has addressed with a work-around where I can 'map' metadata genre to my choice, a bit tedious but only about 150 to do), otherwise composers might be named Mozart, or Wolfgang Armadeus Mozart, or WA Mozart etc, while artist sometimes might be the recording artist or original release artist or composer -etc etc. Vinyl was ripped before I had any knowledge of metadata, and CDs before I had any inkling that inconsistencies were endemic, so now I have well over 1000 albums in total affected in one way or another. More recently downloading I have tried to check and adjust at the time, but as when downloading a box set of 30+ albums that was simply impractical.

 

Storage for all is identical to LP rips.  I know I'm not unique in having this problem with metadata, so it begs the question why can't Roon have an option to use the host filing system data? Yes I have set the option to use file names - but that clearly isn't sufficient, as it needs to use the folder structure as well.

 

Then on browsing things I could find, some albums weren't complete, with missing tracks, while individual tracks from some albums appeared under the artist, alongside full albums -very muddled, and difficult to just pick an album and play.

 

Aside from what are probably all metadata issues, or Roon's use of metadata, , a my first impression of Roon is too much additional info, though at least I found I could collapse some of the things that appeared first, like 'trending now' tracks or whatever it is called. Would be useful to also be able to collapse the artist's bio., and resize the artist 's image to the user's preference (maybe that's possible and I simply haven't found yet. Tidal integration is probably good for those that want to use it (I don't) - what about other online streaming services like Qobuz or Spotify? (Not that they are of interest to me either) 

 

I'm sure there's more to uncover, and I haven't tried sound quality yet, but unless there is a solution to the browsing limitations I won't be bothering. And before anyone suggests, trawling through and fixing all the metadata simply isn't going to happen: I'd lose the will to live long before getting even a quarter of the way through: all I want to be able to do is find my music and play it!

[ShawnC]

52 minutes ago, Innocent Bystander said:

Vinyl was ripped before I had any knowledge of metadata, and CDs before I had any inkling that inconsistencies were endemic, so now I have well over 1000 albums in total affected in one way or another.

I think the biggest problem most people have with computer audio in general, is that when they ripped there Discs or converted there vinyl they didn't consider how important metadata is.  I reripped all my discs because of errors I had in my metadata.  I have about 300 albums from 70s-80s,  I haven't considered ripping any of those because streaming services like Tidal offer everything I have on vinyl.  Certain genres like Classical and Jazz are harder to find on those streaming services so this can be difficult for those who exclusively listen to this.

 

You can't change the image sizes.  I wish we could.

[ElviaCaprice]

It's extremely easy to change metadata in software.  I like JRiver and DBPoweramp for just these purposes.  JRiver is very handy for changing metadata in large groups of files at the same time.  Yes, it's wise to use a uniform practice as one goes.

[JBNY]

Streaming is nice, I look at it more of a supplementary service than primary. I still don't think it is ready to be my only means of listening to music. I have been subscribing to various streamers for well over 15 years and they are great but just finally getting to where you have decent quality audio files. Also they lack any decent tagging and artist and album info. Also the constantly pull albums form their catalog due to licencing issues that come back a few months later. Roon offers a much better experience and I get to hear my hires and DSD files too. If you are looking at Spotify Connect why not look at Sonos? It will give you a ton more features.

[The Computer Audiophile]

On 4/16/2017 at 5:05 AM, wappinghigh said:

Why not just add in a Spotify Connect endpoint into your streaming hardware and be done with it?

 

Thanks 

 

 

For many people, this is all they need. For many others, this is blasphemous :~)

[miguelito]

On ‎4‎/‎16‎/‎2017 at 6:05 AM, wappinghigh said:

Why not just add in a Spotify Connect endpoint into your streaming hardware and be done with it?

A few reasons:

1- Metadata and information - Roon provides a world of links, performance/performer/composer data that is unavailable anywhere else

2- Completely seamless integration of local and streaming (TIDAL) libraries

3- TIDAL is lossless, and it does sound better than Spotify (although Spotify sounds better when the album is not available on TIDAL... )

4- Audio distribution in your LAN is unparalleled

5- DSP and overall quality of playback engine

6- Handling of all audio formats - I use AIFF, AAC, MP3, FLAC, WAV, DSF (unclear to me if Spotify post processes high resolution files - I certainly don't want high res to be downsampled to 320kbps before playing. I have not checked).

 

Spotify has the advantage of running anywhere anytime on any device. BUT you still lose access to your local files unless you carry them with you (which would require me to carry a 2TB drive around all the time, no thanks).

[miguelito]

8 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

 

For many people, this is all they need. For many others, this is blasphemous :~)

Insulting...

[Innocent Bystander]

15 minutes ago, ElviaCaprice said:

It's extremely easy to change metadata in software.  I like JRiver and DBPoweramp for just these purposes.  JRiver is very handy for changing metadata in large groups of files at the same time.  Yes, it's wise to use a uniform practice as one goes.

Ease, and the time taken to do it on 1000+ albums are two different things... At one point I tried two or three different editors that were claimed to be good for large numbers but gave up after  just a few. Yes, I could probably add my choice of genre that way, but not go though everything else used by Roon (Ditto Audirvana that I presently use and which gives similar difficulties with my music - though it manages better than my first impression of Roon.)

 

Actually, when I ripped my LPs it was first to .wav from which I burnt CDs. Later I converted the .wav files to .flac with dBpoweramp, and because it was an automated option I had it find whatever it could to supplement my naming. (In my last post a I had forgotten this), however I wasn't bothered if nothing was pulled up from the internet, nor did I check or edit anything, other than the names of files and album, because as indicated I was blissfully unaware that one day it would become essential.

[miguelito]

8 minutes ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

 

 

For many people, this is all they need. For many others, this is blasphemous :~)

Well, no seriously - To me the two absolute killer features of Roon are:

1- Metadata - I've discovered SO much music by following the links; and

2- Seamless integration with TIDAL - just fantastic, including the TIDAL app: If I favorite an album on the road, it gets automatically added to my Roon library - this is killer for me.

[miguelito]

49 minutes ago, ElviaCaprice said:

It's extremely easy to change metadata in software.  I like JRiver and DBPoweramp for just these purposes.  JRiver is very handy for changing metadata in large groups of files at the same time.  Yes, it's wise to use a uniform practice as one goes.

True. BUT you need to know what the metadata is, plus no matter how rich your embedded metadata you still cannot replicate Roon's ability to link it all. I can click on the bass performer in an album and see every work (s)he's done - whether in my local or TIDAL. Killer feature.