The Roon Dilemma

I'm using my old Squeezebox Touch as a 24/192 Roon endpoint in my office system. It works great as a bridge for systems that aren't native Roon endpoints.

Roon Knowledge Base - Squeezebox Setup

 

I'm not seeing what you have that I don't already have with iTunes, my iPhone and our Apple TV. I can bring up AllMusic on a web browser. When you say "complete with album artwork", what exactly do you mean? If I brought up "Rolling Stones No. 2" on Roon, would I see scans of all the original LP artwork, including the back cover and vinyl labels, for example? Or scans of the CD booklet, all pages, for the specific release it was ripped from? For $2K I'm expecting nothing less (in fact, a lot more than that, even). So just how good is Roon?

 

Except that Roon doesn't cost $2K.

 

Last time I checked in order to run Roon on Synology server you'll need some 3rd party support.. Did it change?

 

Roon is collaborating with a third party for running Roon Core on Synology. The information is at the end of this KB article.
Roon Knowledge Base - Roon Server on NAS

 

I see. I clicked on link and it is in German...
And I've seen some application not "officially" approved by QNap/Synology stopped working.
I will wait until they incorporate it all in one package and support. Until then I am fine with my Auralic server...

 

Same for QNAP. They have a person that took it on himself to write a port for QNAP. He is a third party but does seem to have their backing as their site points to it and it works well. It is free, but he does have a donation link.

 

Yeah, they need to fix that link. change the "de" to "en." Once I did that it now goes to the english version.

 

Thank you, will take a look. But still, for $500 soft I would like a little less hustle...

 

I did the free trial to get it installed and running, and spend some time with it. After that I bought the one year subscription for $120. Assuming I'm still using it in a year – and I probably will since the integration with my library, Qobuz and Naim streamer works so well – I plan to spring for the lifetime ($500) when my subscription renews.

I didn't install on a NAS (my QNAP is just too old) so I didn't have to deal with that. Setup on a Mac Mini was easy-peasy, and subsequently assembling a NUC and getting ROCK going took no more than an hour.

 

One pet-peeve with Roon is I find its metadata matching with vinyl and full-length CD rips is lacking. JRiver definitely takes the cake there. It automatically splits the tracks, and finds the appropriate album/artist data. It's quite a task with Roon.

I use both, for different reasons. BluRay playback, especially concerning the Beatles sets, is a must-have for me.

 

I didn't say it did. I'm asking another poster what he gets for his $2K, which includes $500 for Roon.

 

Gotcha. FWIW: if you already have a iTunes library you likely already have what you need to run Roon Core. So for $120 you can be up and running for the next 13 months (or one month for free).

Among other things what that will buy you over iTunes is support for high-resolution 24-bit audio and FLAC file format. And while it's true you can bring up AllMusic in a browser, there is no integration. Maybe that's not important to you, but with Roon it's all integrated and makes it drop dead easy to explore connections from your library to other music if you use TIDAL and/.or Qobuz. That's part of the great appeal.

BTW: AppleTV is a native Roon endpoint and works out of the box with Roon Core.

My full stack for using Roon – from NUC to ethernet switch to streamer – isn't $2K but over $8K, but that's irrelevant. The Roon part is just $10/mon.

 

Anyone tried to use convolution filters in DSP engine? An excellent feature, not that user friendly implemented, but still...

 

I did for a while, really just to control some bass boom. I’ve since added mini dsp SHD. I learnt a lot about dsp playing with Roon. Invest in a UMIK-1 and use REW (free) to create the convolution files.

 

So, for $10/month it shows AllMusic in a browser window integrated into the Roon interface. While with the native Apple stack, you would have to browse AllMusic in a separate window. That and no need to convert FLAC to ALAC to play lossless. Ok.

 

You know I think Roon just isn't for you. We've discussed in this thread what it provides, which is more than what you have gleaned based on your comments I'm quoting here.

FLAC, like ALAC is lossless. Nevertheless, I have a bunch of CDs ripped as ALAC and Roon streams them natively with no problem, so I don't think I understand what your criticism is. My library is mostly FLAC so iTunes is completely useless in that regard: I abandoned what I consider that bloated mess a long time ago. Meanwhile, Roon supports all the audio formats iTunes supports and more (like 24 bit, DSD and formats Apple chose to ignore or compete with).

 

No, I get that for someone like you in a different situation to me, it's better value and makes more sense. But I'm looking for something that better handles metadata than iTunes (which doesn't, basically). For me, integrating with AllMusic, my least-favorite music-related database, is not sufficiently attractive to justify the cost. YMMV, naturally.

 

I agree with you on that. The whole metadata thing is a disaster. I listen almost exclusively to classical and jazz, and nothing is a bigger FUM than classical metadata. I just live with it because I gave up trying to keep up with fixing it locally for my library. AllMusic isn't great either.

And yet, metadata and AllMusic are not why I use Roon, and never were. I use it for the user experience (my wife never used my hifi on her own until Roon), integration with Qobuz (& how it seamlessly integrates my Qobuz library with my file library), and for Roon Radio and how it helps me to discover and explore new things, based on what it's learning I like (i.e. what I call the Tivo feature).

I understand I lot of people are comfortable with what they have, and that Roon doesn't represent the killer app they are looking for. IMHO, Roon has a great start into eventually becoming that killer app. Nothing else I have ever seen comes as close to what I would like.

 

I was referring to the cost of the Bluesound Vault 2i, the Intel NUC, a 2Tb SSD, and the lifetime Roon membership--not just Roon software. The Vault 2i, which is $1295 of the investment, allowed me to rip 2200 CD's to a 2 Tb drive in native flac format.
And trust me, to my ears, what I have is a lot more than an iPhone, iTunes, and Apple TV, all of which I also have.

 

I just downloaded Roon last night, 30 day trial, on my old Mac Pro 5,1. Might try to run it on an even older Mac Pro 1,1 that would only be used for music. I don't stream music so I won't be integrating it to Qobuz, but I might try a trial to see if I or my family uses it. So far I like Roon. Not sure if it's worth it yet though. Runs good on my Mac and I set it up to access it on my new 12.9" iPad as well.
One thing that drives me crazy is it always wants to shuffle songs even if I don't want to shuffle. Seems to play an whole album by accident. Once an album ends, and I get it to actually play the whole album, it just randomly picks songs from other albums. I don't have any volume leveler or whatever is called on so the difference in volume from song to song can be jarring. I want to pick the next thing it plays so I can adjust the volume accordingly. Must be a setting I am missing. See how it goes.

 

You can turn off Shuffle and Roon Radio in the Queue: Roon Knowledge Base - The Queue

You can enable Volume Leveling in the Zone Settings: Roon Knowledge Base - Volume Leveling

 

To stop the tracks randomly playing once your playlist has finished, go to Queue and turn off Roon Radio

 

Ok thanks. Never thought it was because of Roon Radio.

 

Amazon hi rez is here, would you abandon Roon for it?