Roon Discussion

I do not think your distro matters, what matters is what your script will install. If you can install let's say Hifiberry Roon enpoint on your distro, whatever it is, you are good.

On the server box everything that is sound output on the same box, JRiver for example, appears as certified. Local Roon playback does not use RAAT.

 

Distro shouldn't matter as long as your transport is supported. I have three PI's running as transports. Two use Allo DigiOne's and the third uses a Hifiberry Digi+. The Roon Bridge code comes directly from Roon so that is a non issue.

With that said, I do understand the need to do this. Unfortunately messaging and execution was a complete train wreck.

 

It's really easy:

1. RAAT is Roon's proprietary LAN streaming protocol. Apple AirPlay is another example of a proprietary media protocol. (I prefer open protocols, but UPnP/DLNA in my experience is so broken in so many ways that I'm willing to pays for and use Roon's closed protocol.)
2. Roon Ready is a label reserved for 3rd party devices that license Roon's RAAT API and libraries and are certified by Roon. The recent issue is that Roon decided to stop allowing vendors who signed the license but were not yet certified to connect to the Roon service.
3. Roon Bridge is a Roon-supplied binary that implements RAAT for end-users who want to install it on their computers to make them behave as endpoints. By agreement with Roon, some Pi Linux audio distributions (such as Ropieee and DietPi) include Roon Bridge in their distributions.

 

For my bud @rhythmdevils:

Roon doesn't do Folders because the main goal they said is to make it an experience. By using Folders Roon Lab believes that it is too much like a "computer." They believe tagging or searching by the artist/album is the way to go. I perviously canceled a trail of Roon and they reached out to me when they asked why I canceled. At the time I said I need Folder structure, and they said we understand but that is not how Roon is.

I have so much Asian music and Video Game Soundtracks that Roon does a bad job with. Before I did Roon, I been doing the full blown Folder Structure that I do on my own. I never trust software to keep track with what I have.

And this is why I do both Roon and UPnP (Roon for my Album stuff while UPnP for my weird singles/weeaboo/hentai/soundtrack stuff).

 

Yeah, part of the whole thing behind Roon is actually that you don’t have to organize or group or do tons of shit to your music to get it in shape If you don’t want to. Roon does it all for you, and then gives you 100 ways to look for it in different views, or to search for it, etc. Roon tries to be more automated, but there is still tagging and bookmarking etc so you can do some level of customizing/grouping and fast access to things (eg. You can bookmark the “Goth metal” subgenre, and go directly to it at any time, but I didn’t have to create that subgenre, just navigated to it which was already there based on my library of albums/tracks).

 

I almost forgot, that killer metadata and Roon Radio. Would be a good way to find new stuff for @rhythmdevils

 

I still use the old “folder structure” to store my music on the Roon Core, so if something is not recognized by Roon I can still find it quickly. But haven’t got any problem so far. I don’t have many western classical music or OST’s, but indian/japanese classical music and relatively unknown albums from small bands from all over the world are recognized without a problem. So I keep everything in a neat folder structure just in case, but haven’t accessed to it directly in the past 2 years, since I started using Roon.

 

I so far don’t think roon does a good enough job with the auto genre “focus” to be useful. I can’t imagine how they even expect to. I’ve got a lot of metal for example, and it brings in all this stuff that isn’t even close to metal and then the sub genres don’t include anywhere close to everything. Like I have a lot of “sludge metal” which they have a sub genre for which is cool but it only includes like 20% of my sludge metal artists. It just doesn’t work. If I was organizing them into folders I’d have 2: metal and sludge metal because they’re different moods. Metal can be fast, etc

I’m also unclear how well it integrates with Tidal. I tried doing some searching for new music, but couldn’t figure out how to add an artist to my catalog and wound up just doing it manually on my iPod through the Tidal app which makes the whole thing kind of silly. It seems like I can add an individual album to something but I’m not sure if I’m adding it to roon’s data or to my Tidal catalog.

I also heard a lot about roon radio but so far artist radio stations seem the same as other steaming services. Not that useful.

I wound up going to bandcamp while I was in the discovery mood and finding a bunch of stuff that was pretty good.

 

I find it super useful when I seed it with an album or track in a certain specific niche and let it go after the end to (what is thinks) is similar after the end of the seed. I do this while working, and I've found that way several gems I did not know about in Qobuz that I then added to my library. In general, I don't care for genre tags because a lot of what I listen to is somewhere in space between genres, and genres are too blunt (sure, I love jazz, but Kenny G and the like make me puke).

 

I think there is “Live Radio” and “Roon Radio” in Roon. The former is the same as any other radio streaming service. The latter is basically a recommendation engine, based on your listening habits, similarity etc. You can start it from any album’s play button. It can work with your local database but I’ ve found its better with Tidal integration. Most people use ot that way to “discover” new music.

 

So Is there no way to add an artist to your Tidal catalog through roon?

 

OT for a Roon discussion, sorry, but would you mind expanding on this? Is it UPnP's usability/stability or SQ that you find bad?

UPnP with Volumio as renderer has worked fine for me, but I'm willing to try better solutions...

 

I know I'm not him, but on my end I have problems with UPnP on anything higher than 16/44. When I play an album on a higher bit-rate to my Pi Box, UPnP keep skipping tracks. I never have that problem if I play the same album on Roon streaming to my Pi Box.

 

Ha, I just now noticed you can not add an artist directly (and I have had Roon for years), even though "Artists" is a category under "Library". Maybe the reasoning is that Roon manages multiple sources (local content, Tidal and/or Qobuz, internet 'radio', etc.), so how would it hook into the category "artist" from these differing sources? That's just my amateur speculation. If you spend a little time on the Roon community boards you realize just how complicated and esoteric the philosophical debates around how to manage/present music is. If you want to add an artist you have to choose an album/single first and add it, then the artist shows up in artist view

But not being able to add an artist directly? Roon sucks.

 

Wouldn’t the album just get added to Tidal’s list of albums in my catalog if I added the album? I do t use the favorite albums in Tidal. I want genre/mood/category etc > artist > albums > songs (in that album)

interestingly the iPod Classic got this right. But Apple has fucked itself up since and now it’s just a list of artists unless you go into column browser which Apple for whatever reason clearly doesn’t want to support they even tried dropping it with Catalina but added it back when I guess (thankfully) enough people freaked out.

 

Before I got Roon a few years ago, I had been using various UPnP setups. I still use them sometimes, for example when using my Chord 2go away from home. The controller I used then and still is BubbleUPnP for Android. I used a variety of endpoints, including a Naim UnitiQute, Cubox running Volumio, Hegel H360, and I'm sure others I've forgotten. I used different servers, including Synology's built-in, Minim, and probably others. The kinds of problems I include dfailures of gapless play, skipped tracks for unknown reasons, clunky navigation, useless search, failure to recognize albums, ... As for SQ, difficult to know, Roon felt better but maybe that was just because it was (for me) less flaky and so allowed me to focus more on the music.

 

Thanks gents. I'm not currently experiencing those sorts of problems, but I have very little that's not 16/44. I'll try stressing my system (Minimserver-Volumio-HiFi Cast) with more higher res material and see what happens.

 

Well no wonder the “focus” feature was so incomplete. roon shows 151 artists in my library but I have 983 artists in my Tidal library. No idea what’s going on but I posted in the help forums. Maybe my experience will change when my whole library is in roon.

 

I've posted this in th roon help forums, without much response so far. Maybe you experts can explain if I'm missing something or if roon is screwing up. I really don't get this...

Here you can see 151 artist in roon artist view (I con't recognize most of them btw, not sure they're even in my Tidal catalog...)




Here, I've used the streaming transfer service TuneMyMusic (designed to transfer music catalogs from one streaming service to another) to display how many artists are in my Tidal catalog.



Why aren't all the artists in my Tidal catalog showing up in the artist view of roon? isn't that the whole point?

 

I'm not a Roon user, so this is pretty much a wild guess. I noticed in your screenshot that you have 985 favorite artists, but only 90 tracks and 68 albums. If you add 90 to 68 and account for artists with multiple albums/songs in your library, you get something in the ballpark of 151. My hunch is that Roon doesn't pay attention to favorite artists at all, and only looks at favorited content (songs and albums). Here's an experiment you could try: Pick 10 artists who don't show up in Roon but do show up in Tidal. For each artist, add one of their albums to your Tidal favorites. Then you could check to see if they show up in Roon. Good luck with all this. I'm also considering Roon and curious to see how this all turns out~