Anyone here use Roon ?

kifi

Hi everyone

I have subscription to Tidal with a couple of RPis as steamers. I wonder if many here use Roon ? I have signed up to their trial which is almost expired, and am still undecided as I think there might be better (and free) alternative solutions such as Logitech Media Server?

Note that I don't have a local song library. Everything is Tidal along with some internet radio

hudo

Late to the party:) But I use Roon, Tidal and RPi with HAT as streamer.
Roon is best music catalog, thinks there's nothing even close, but if you want just player, then maybe Volumio intsalled on Rpi.

_CreeD_

I'm on my second year with it now, running a NUC/Rock.
It's very much a hands-off manager in that in it's intent to make you just focus on the music and not the inner workings it doesn't give you much granularity in manually editing your content when required, something that other players like JRiver excel at.
It's Playlist functionality is pretty weak and has some serious short comings aimed very much at making sure you can't re-use them outside of Roon (you can export but there are caveats about whether content was added to the library (as in was promoted to an elevated status manually) before or after it was added to a list). Inspector+bookmarks is okay for more detailed sorting but is not a patch on smartlists in other players. So from a usability standpoint if you like what they give you out of the box you'll be fine, you don't have many options to customise behaviour beyond it.
No remote (off your own LAN) play without manually configuring your own VPN for streaming access.
Also in the near two years I've used it I've seen very little in the way of true QoL improvements. They've been focusing on hardware integration and an AI based music suggestion system (which is not bad but we already have that built into the main streaming services - which incidentally they still currently don't tie into (e.g. your dynamic suggested playlists from Tidal are not directly accessable and require you create a static list first). The playlist issues I've mentioned have been brought up for years even before I got it and nothing has changed. I really do think they take a protectionist attitude to feature requests, anything that might ease migration to another system is thrown by the wayside.

On the plus side it's a concise and effective UI and it's super simple integration with just about every audio streaming system out there makes it pretty much unmatched as a household audio management system. If there's a network audio protocol pretty much it speaks it, aswell as it's own RAAT of course. This is a huge plus for me in that it makes it so easy for others in my family to use it to control multi-room playback without having to learn anything complicated. It has true bit-perfect playback and high quality 64bit DSP (for PCM ops anyway) so audio quality is as good as you can get. Additionally it has great inline options for format conversion (e.g. PCM to DSD). The Server is easy to manage and extremely stable (I used a windows based server before Rock and never had issues with either).


I think if you have a better editing/curating app like JRiver aswell then you can get past many of it's shortcomings. I will keep subscribing for now but tbh the lack of movement on some basic and typically common features really leaves me disappointed.

Gonzovision

I use Soundiiz to get around the dynamic playlist issue. I add a playlist to Soundiiz that I want synced, say from Spotify to Tidal and this playlist is added to Roon, it then does a sync on a schedule, so I have my discover weekly/release radar and a bunch of other dynamic playlists that I like. I think there's a limit of maybe 20 in the version of Soundiiz I use, but plenty for me.

legrand

Can't justify using it myself but the smooth talking Johnny Darko did this vid a while back that may be of interest.
https://youtu.be/-ZVcNx-DlIc

_CreeD_

Aye Soundiiz is great for Tidal/Spotify -> Roon . I hadn't setup the sync feature though, was just using manual imports, will give it a go thanks

Gonzovision

legrand wrote: »

Can't justify using it myself but the smooth talking Johnny Darko did this vid a while back that may be of interest.
https://youtu.be/-ZVcNx-DlIc

That's where I came across it. He could sell ice to the eskimos.

Biker79

Roon Essentials on the Elac DS101, with ripped CDs on a USB and a tidal sub.

Really like it.