Roon Labs Software

Hi Guys - This is pretty big news. 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.

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.

Demo videos:


https://youtu.be/5dlawHfO8sM

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Got the Beta running today. I am really enjoying it!

Everything from the library overview, to recommendations, and the rich metadata from AMG makes this the Merdian Sooloos I always wanted!

BTW The radio shuffle is excellent, I like how it offers tracks to play and you can vote thumbs up or down. I easily filled up a queue of songs and made a great playlist. Then when the playlist was over, the music kept on coming in with solid gems!

I have barely used the Tidal integration because Roon is finding tracks in my library that I completely overlooked!

Get ready folks, you can not get this level of performance anywhere else. Combined with Tidal, MQA, and a favorite Mac or PC we will all be in music heaven very soon!

 

Walk through

 

Very neat stuff, a buddy of mine has been telling me about this coming out and I am not only excited to try it, but it'll likely have me into a Tidal subscription quickly thereafter I often think "so... what to listen to next?" My collection isn't very big, is entirely digital, and I'm very much in a "musical discovery" mode right now. So yea, good timing for something like Roon. Have they discussed pricing or anything yet?

 

"Roon will be available online beginning May 11, 2015 with pricing for the service set at $119 annually, $499 for a lifetime subscription, and $999 for an upcoming Pro lifetime subscription for Home Automation. There is a 14 day free trial. Visit http://roonlabs.com for more information. "

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/content/640-roon-roon-labs-video-run-through/

 

Thanks! I went to roonlabs.com and signed up with my email to get updates, but I didn't see any pricing. I appreciate it.

 

Does this do movies and have DSP and conversion functions as well?

 

This is really neat. Looks to be what I've been after in music library management and playing. I'm really looking forward to finding out more about what this all will be.

ToneAudio just published a Spotlight feature on Roon: ROON is here! World’s first in depth review…

And a secret Roon community forum.

 

I tried to sign up, but it's buggy as hell. Couldn't sign up and no idea where to download anything or if there's even anything to download.

 

Playing with the trial right now. For as much data as this thing compiles, it is awfully fast. Very, very cool stuff so far!

 

$119 a year? For what exactly? A music player that suggests music?

I admit there are features I like and I can absorb a $10 a month charge easily, but I don't quite get why a product of this nature is so expensive. It feels like the typical "squeeze the audiophiles" logic.

 

Does anyone know what database engine is being used to run this? I remember the reviews on Sooloos were that the system was lighting fast. No slow down no matter how fast you scrolled through a massive library.

 

Allmusic, from what I understand.

 

I've read they are using Allmusic / Rovi for the bio and write ups on artists. My question about the database engine refers to the actual programming side and what database engine is being used to access all data within the software so quickly and efficiently.

 

Probably something like MySQL. Is there anything else left these days?

 

Ohhh, I see. I'll tap out then, as I have no idea except to say I've seen something similar in my job where systems can easily contain tables with a million rows of data that needs parsed very quickly and at least one company used their expertise from writing search engines to optimize the capture and display of said data in ways that are far faster than what we use which is a web front end and a MS SQL backend. It's akin to Google pulling back 1.6 million results in .3 seconds, I'm wondering if they don't have some of those types of tricks up their sleeve, of which I know virtually nothing.

 

Well, Google uses things like BigQuery, which is in a whole different class when it comes to performance. That and the bazillion dollars spent on the back end infrastructure.

 

I in the trial period and think that it is pretty good, so far. I might just bite.

 

The meta tag stuff and amount of info it retrieves for your music is pretty neat. Too bad it doesn't do the same for other media, such as movies, pictures, etc. I use JRiver to do my music as wells as movies and photos ... IMO it sounds and looks great while doing it and the interface is clean and simple. While it can retrieve most of the meta tag features that I want, IMO the extra stuff that Roon pulls up for you is indeniably cool.

That said, I like my media libraries all in one spot and JRiver pulls this off without much issue and don't want to be running multiple software programs for all my media libraries. So the added expense of paying for yet another piece of software that is more expensive than what I use now and being that it can only do music ~ I'm probably going to sit this one out.

 

Just did some digging and found this link:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/can-roons-database-be-loaded-from-a-ramdisk/260/5

which mentions:

"We don't use a traditional DBMS--all of our indexing, queries, etc is custom. We use levelDB as a low-level key-value store and build up from there."

 

I wonder how network (i.e. Internet) intensive this will be? I would assume a fast connection is required for all that information to be "snappy". My "high speed" at home is only 2.5MB.

 

Using Roon with Tidal! Bit perfect playback! So far, Roon + Tidal = audiophile bliss.

 

I'd love to hear more about the experience.

(I'm not entirely sure what I'm even asking here mind you, I'm just curious)

 

Roon's marketing pitch is more about the user experience and metadata. If you point it at an audio file collection on a hard drive or server, it will ingest the material and use Roon's extensive metadata library to provide a "rich media" experience with liner notes and even lyrics for some tracks. That metadata no doubt costs money, hence the Roon yearly subscription fee. Roon does the same thing with Tidal, improving the experience significantly.

But what I'm really digging is the high quality playback of Tidal's lossless files. Bit perfect playback of Tidal's FLAC files is equal to local lossless files. Very nice.

 

I'm curious, but would have a hard time justifying a monthly fee for mostly playing my local library. It would also help if they had an iPhone remote app, which is the one thing I'm having the hardest time finding a good solution for outside of JRiver.

 

I tried it out last night. After reading on the forums and a few different places how fast they evolving I'm on board for a lifetime subscription.

1) I hope they don't add movies and pictures. Nothing worst than software that spreads itself too thin.
2) Apparently the android app functions quite similar to the windows and OSX app, so we can assume the iPad version will as well. If so it will be a greate jRemote and iPeng replacement.
3) Local download and playback will be added to the clients at a future date. A big hell yah on this.
4) Absolutely love the Tidal integration into your existing library. Best I've seen so far.