Roon Discussion

Dude just upgrade! Your whole world isn’t going to come crashing down because of some bugs. You might actually gain some good things. And even if there are bugs, contribute to get em fixed. Don’t ride on our coattails!

 

@crenca doesn't like change. He always wear the same hat.

So far I'm enjoying the different looks in Roon 1.8. Vertical and Hori modes work as intended in Roon. Still too bad no way to pause something in Roon on an Android lock screen. There's extensions to fix that problem at least......but sucks to be an iOS user, no fix 4 u since you paid the Apple tax.

 

Yep still no ability to control from the Lock Screen. Maybe some day.

One new thing I did notice though, the ability to REMOVE albums from Tidal favourites! I used to have to go into Tidal every once and a while to clean out stuff I didn’t end up liking. Now you can do it right from Roon in the Album view (I’m assuming this is new, at least I didn’t notice it fairly recently).

 

That is cool! See, this is what I love about following ya'll young whippersnappers, you figure out the good, bad, and the ugly for old hat wearing farts like me

 

If you are on Android devices (phones/tablets), you can always install it'roXs Roon Extension for the lock screen/Android Menu addition to pause/play/skip tracks. Works pretty damn well, but you have to install it as a node server (which is super easy to do) in order to get this Roon Extension to work. I don't mind, easy to do and it is always on. So I get everything I wanted from Roon and I don't have to pay the apple tax.

 

Here's hoping that I get home and find that nothing upgraded yet (I think I disabled it everywhere I could find it). I'm with @crenca in letting yous guys to figure out the bad stuff to avoid.

same hat? for me it's the same underwear... inside, outside, frontwards, backwards

 

Not happy at all with the upgrade. Besides the fact that settings menu is broken on international Windows systems I don't like the new design at all. The old UI was just great. Except vertical scrolling which is an improvement it's just a huge step in the wrong direction. Too much wasted space and having the search in the upper right corner sucks on my 34" UWQHD display.

Also the serif font is just awful. Highlight color was better before und something is wrong with the font scaling or DPI or whatever. I can see pixels now that weren't there before.

This is really a letdown for me, because I just discovered Roon's UI to be quite a relief after having used that Audirvana UI POS for several months.

I just hope I get accustomed to most of the changes and when they get the settings fixed, maybe I can configure some things to my liking again.

I still have nine days to go before my lifetime license starts, let's see what happens in the next days.

 

Can you just stick to monthly for a bit? I suspect they will have a lot of improvements to do, hopefully the main ones get addressed fairly quickly. If not, well then the hunt continues I guess.

 

Honestly, my first impression of the UI from the marketing emails (and that's all it is) was too web 2.0, too phone app simplistic, too "the internet of things" and all splash/color - not enough substance. Then again, I am old and creancay...

edit: is this Roon's Metro??

 

Roon's ME

 

They say they will not keep the lifetime option forever, so I would kick myself when I'm too late to the party. Also each month feels like "wasted" money.

I am pretty sure I will accustom to most of the changes and even the new UI is so much better than Audirvana's that I don't know what's left on the market. I liked Amarok when I was using Linux 15 years ago. I then used Foobar2000 after switching back to Windows. Then I meandered to Audirvana which has better UPnP implementation than Foobar - until that stopped working with RoPieeeXL.

JRiver? Never again... HQPlayer? Why? I don't think it gets better than Roon...

 

I normally hate the trend in design you guys are talking about. Spotify for example has become an unusable mess with similar redesign principles. That being said, I am loving it with Roon. So far I feel all the functionality is still there, with nothing hiding from me after coming from 1.7, but overall it seems more fluid, more enticing to look at, just a more natural flow. I do not miss horizontal scrolling the slightest. I think at least from a tablet/phone perspective it is a resounding success for me so far.

Maybe you guys hit the nail on the heads though, it is kind of Windows Metro inspired, but I was a Windows Phone until the bitter end-user, so I am finding it refreshing.

EDIT: That being said, I still pine for the original iTunes days. I still remember how pissed I was when they did an iTunes design and it was an unusable, flashy mess. Give me grids of metadata and I am happy. Roon has never been about that approach. More trying to replicate a physical library type approach.

 

There are some albums I like to listen through from start to finish.

Pre 1.8:
Go to albums or track list, use Focus to single out desired albums, create bookmark. Attempt to play it back, and the only option available is Shuffle. Wtf.

1.8 = fixed.

Nice

 

I feel like they turned Focus into just an advanced set of filters....granted its still very powerful and useful for narrowing things down/finding stuff, but I used to really like the graphs and infograms that Focus used to spit out as you played with it - visually seeing the age/release date of all the albums in my library was super cool, or the pie chart with genres and sub genres

I hope they implement a dedicated Focus page which brings back those graphical elements. Not a super important part of Roon as far as music playback, but to me Roon has always been about that one step beyond into actually interacting with your metadata and music collection and this change to Focus feels like a regression back towards run of the mill music playback software

Or could just throw those graphs back in above the set of filters on whatever page you are viewing, lotta blank space up there

 

I just checked my stuff and it seems I successfully blocked all automagic upgrades. When I look at my devices in "About", I see that there is a new version for both my Core and my Windows remote, but not for any of my rPi bridges (Ropiee).

Just so's I understands what I need to do when the time comes, a couple questions. Do I need to wait until v1.8 is available for everything? WRT the pi, do I need to reflash a new version of Ropiee, do I need to update via ropiee.local, or do I need to do anything on the pi?

 

So rare to encounter anybody who has used Windows Phone. It is actually what my moniker (Metro) refers to. I was a software engineer at a startup that created music apps for the carriers, and we made Windows Phone versions for AT&T and Sprint. I designed and implemented this UI.

 

You don't need to do anything right now with the RPI endpoints, they will continue to work. Just need to update any remote apps so they can still control the core.

 

Lol, nearly 700 posts in the Roon 1.8 feedback thread on their forum already. I was fortunate to get access to the beta of 1.8 last week & it was immediately obvious it would be a hugely divisive update.

Personally, I'm kinda torn on the update. Been a lifetime sub since 2015 & was nicely comfortable with the interface. With 1.8 they seem to be going for the artsy magazine look, moving further away from the traditional music library software feel of JRiver etc. The blank space on a lot of pages looks ridiculous on my ultrawide monitor, but I appreciate I'm in the minority there. Visuals seem to be optimised for tablets...I guess the roon guys have the stats on which platforms are used most so maybe that's the driver.

Being able to include albums from Tidal/Qobuz in Focus filtering is great, though doesn't seem to work with everything yet. I really wish they'd bring back the star ratings in artist albums view, really missing that.

Overall so far to me it feels more like a really deep music magazine than an easily-navigable interface into a music library, but I suspect that's what they're going for.

 

First some things I like about the update:

1. The most important for me is that the connectivity issues of Android Roon remote was, fingers crossed, finally fixed. There were plenty of one star reviews on Google Play because of the random but very frequent failure to connect. Roon support response was "it is your network" but the question what in the network can cause it was never answered. Other improvements in the remote include zone selection, presentation of the album being played, overall much cleaner interface.
2. Zone icons, the picture of a toilet is reserved for my Chromecast Audio
3. Remove from library, which in 1.7 was hidden at the very bottom of Edit as Delete, is now available from the main disk menu
4. Access to the zone configuration is improved, more intuitive than in 1.7

Things I do not like, those are numerous and those are very annoying and mostly because of

1. The limited real estate of the computer screen is completely wasted to create an effect that I do not like or need. When I click Albums half of the screen is taken by my "My Albums". I f'ing know those are my albums and in1.7 I could see twice as many of them on the first screen. Same applies to almost any screen
2. I may be doing something wrong with the Search but when I go to Qobuz and search for label I only get releases that are already in my library
3. To be continued..

 

Zone selection is buggy Af rn, I managed to bug it out to the point I had to restart the app, and there's one zone I can only play to if I group it, otherwise it never appears.

Other than that overall it seems like an improvement, except for the stupid framing of the interface on my ultrawide PC, it's rather good in functionality.