And I think that’s the key point here. Some talk about Roon as though it is incredible and god’s gift to music. It’s not. It’s software.
Like all software it comes with bugs and like all software the content, process and UI are very personal things. Some can live with the issues and some cannot. Evangelising helps no-one make an informed decision.
Well done to Roon for spotting the gap in the market but perhaps less well done for not recognising the inevitable shrinking of that gap as manufacturers step into it and for electing to take the traditional route of largely ignoring customer feedback,
Despite protestations to the contrary a user base of 100,000 world wide is very small and shrinking, Assertions to the contrary confuse Roon certification and Ready status with actual users. The numbers of the latter likely do outstrip the number of users and to not very bright people they probably suggest the user base is massive. The reality is no more complex than that of devices which come with Bluetooth. Some manufacturers include it because they think it’s a valuable tool. Others include it because not including it would exclude them from the market space in which they expect to compete. My example would once again include Innuos. Every device they sell works smoothly with Roon. Few Innuos Sense/2.x users will actually be using thar functionality at this point simply because the latter sounds way better. 1,000 sales of a product which Is Roon certified does not equal 1,000 Roon users any more than it indicates 1,000 Bluetooth or Spotify `connect users.
I have no reason to use Roon now. The UI is not especially accessible and the sound quality can’t compete with Sense. However, even if it did I don’t find it’s use of data from AllMusic especially helpful, enlightening or even competent. In the same way Amazon continues to recommend albums to me that I already own, having bought them from… Amazon… the recommendation engine of Roon is basic at best. “Give me less well known and largely mediocre facsimiles of what I already own or have listened to.” For me that’s useless functionality. For others it regains something outstanding. If you enjoy music that you get out of that then brilliant. Each to their own. However, far better to walk into that knowing the reality of it than believing it to be some previously unheralded work of programming genius.
I absolutely stand by my previous assertion re: lifetime membership. There is no software on the planet which will last your lifetime. As several bids to buy Roon have recently been rebuffed and both would have used it to serve only their own product base then it’s a matter of time really. Nevertheless if it represents value to you and you have a lump sum available then go for it.
