Who is Roon?

@jastralfu

No worries! It's harder to dial it in just right in an online forum as opposed to in person 🙂

@ozzy62 re:

I know it’s only January,

....and 347 to go, so both you and our OP gets to sweat it out over your potential prize claims.... *L*

.....and all this time I thought Roon was an ’it’...pardon, to all the .... "Roonies"?

"Rooners"...better....;)

Roon was wonderful and informative… until I had a fatal issue with my lifelong subscription account and could no longer access it. I found their version of customer service (open forum of users) less than welcoming and ultimately unhelpful with my problem. So after attempting to resolve the issue several times over several years, I moved on to greener pastures (Innuos) and look back with some regret at the time I wasted trying to fix my Roon account. What a brilliant design for customer service - make the customer do it for free. I will never again buy gear from a company that doesn’t stand behind their product with more integrity than that.

This thread has been a very interesting read.  I had been strongly considering an investment in the Roon "lifetime" subscription because I've become so very frustrated with JRiver.  My online research of Roon seemed to indicate most people really like it for streaming and say it handles their stored libraries well.  I've held off because I hate subscription-based software business models, wasn't thrilled with $900 for a "purchase" (way more than MS Office, which actually does work) and do not stream anything except terrestrial radio station websites through my browser.  

As a work-around experiment, I recently gave JRiver one last installment to "upgrade" to version 33 over the holidays.  Same damn problems:  Will not rip CDs into my internal SSHD library and will not retrieve metadata on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro running a fresh install of OS X 10.13.  It won't even recognize a folder (album) ripped on a different Mac computer and then copied into the library.  Shows and plays in Finder and in Windows Files but neither JR27, 28 nor 33 saw/see it.  And their forum "help" flatly isn't.

I'm going to try installing JR33 on both my 2016 Mac Air and 2024 Mac Air to see if the newer system architectures can resolve the ripping problem using an external DVD drive through the laptop to an external SSHD.  I'm not hopeful but have to try.

Another work-around was importing the library to Apple Music, and it simply does not recognize the artist-album-song file organization in the near-terabyte size data set.  Everything is 44.1 KHz, 16 bit (WAV extension), with a few higher resolution PCM items.  Excepting only a few that were downloaded, Music categorizes as individual song listing only and I've yet to find a way around that. 

Never had that problem with iTunes.  The only reason I tried JR was to get higher PCM resolution for some stuff I got through an AgoN sampler, a Linn holiday collection and later on, some vinyl digitized through a TASCAM DA-3000.  iTunes required a MIDI interface reset and computer reboot to change output resolution.

Now that I learn that this Harmon International / Samsung product does not offer factory support, I don't care how well it's reviewed.  I will not plunk down that kind of coin for something without a factory warranty period, period.  For the same reason, I have zero interest in their "free" trial (TANSTAAFL).  My thanks to all of you for the warning/guarantee.  Roon clearly appears incapable of providing me with the functional and happy digital listening I'm seeking.