AudioNervosa
Systemic Development => Digital Audio Devices => Streaming Players => Topic started by: mdconnelly on November 28, 2015, 06:20:13 AM
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Anyone here give Roon a try yet? I'm extremely curious about it but haven't taken the 14 day free trial yet.
I've been a Squeezebox user since the SlimDevices days, but I'm very interested in Roon because they are working on integration of Squeezeboxen as end points which would effectively replace the need for LMS.
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I hear it's supposed to be the bees knees but I just can't get over having to pay that much for music organization/player software that is now free (for LMS or not too much for JRiver) and does what I need.
Maybe I don't understand all the benefits it offers but it seems like an $$ solution for a need I don't have.
-Mike
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IIRC it's supposed to have the most accurate meta data and best organizational capabilities, but I agree: it's too much money.
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I think I could completely do away w/ cover art and not miss it one whit. Doesn't add to the music at all, and if I ever did need to look it up I could.
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Anyone here give Roon a try yet? I'm extremely curious about it but haven't taken the 14 day free trial yet.
I've been a Squeezebox user since the SlimDevices days, but I'm very interested in Roon because they are working on integration of Squeezeboxen as end points which would effectively replace the need for LMS.
I have looked at Roon before and it's pretty impressive. I'd only pay the lifetime subscription of $500, not the yearly of $119. As I'm still a LMS user and (knock on mdf) it is running flawlessly in spite of two recent hiccups. So the idea of it working on my SB2 is very interesting. I've also been quite interested in the Aries as well.
If I understand it correctly, the music files would need to remain on a
computer and the Roon software installed on the computer as well. Then there would be an app for my iPad and I could control it from there. Is that correct?? As an aside, the iPeng app really works great.
Thanks,
Nick
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Nick, I think you've got the jist of it.
I'm also quite happy with my squeezebox setup and love iPeng as a controller. But all good things must end and that day will undoubtedly arrive for for squeezebox environment. Certainly, the LMS interface is showing it's age despite some ongoing dev work. Still, I'm betting it has a few years left.
OTOH and by all accounts, Roon's strength is in the value of the meta data and it's beautifully designed and highly functional user interface. The fact that it can replace LMS is what has me interested, but that is really tangential to it's goal. From all accounts (and, nope, not tried it yet), it is designed to dramatically improves your ability to mine your own music library via the depth of the meta data and well designed UI - basically, it strives to change how we listen to our music. Hard to say if it achieves that or even the value of it if it does.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the fee - subscription or purchase - everything has a pricetag. If it does all it says, does it well, and let's me continue to use my squeezboxenm then that's big.
I'm thinking I might just have to test the waters. If you've already done so, I'd love to hear your experience.
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Nick, I think you've got the jist of it.
I'm also quite happy with my squeezebox setup and love iPeng as a controller. But all good things must end and that day will undoubtedly arrive for for squeezebox environment. Certainly, the LMS interface is showing it's age despite some ongoing dev work. Still, I'm betting it has a few years left.
OTOH and by all accounts, Roon's strength is in the value of the meta data and it's beautifully designed and highly functional user interface. The fact that it can replace LMS is what has me interested, but that is really tangential to it's goal. From all accounts (and, nope, not tried it yet), it is designed to dramatically improves your ability to mine your own music library via the depth of the meta data and well designed UI - basically, it strives to change how we listen to our music. Hard to say if it achieves that or even the value of it if it does.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the fee - subscription or purchase - everything has a pricetag. If it does all it says, does it well, and let's me continue to use my squeezboxenm then that's big.
I'm thinking I might just have to test the waters. If you've already done so, I'd love to hear your experience.
I haven't tried it yet and didn't think it was ready for LMS users yet based on some forum posts I read a few days ago. I want to keep things simple right now as I'm still breaking in my dac and trying some digital cables a friend lent me. Pls let me know when you try it
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I did download the trial last night. But no, it's not ready to support squeezeboxes yet so there's only so much I'm going to find out about it in the next 13 days of the trial. On the other hand, it can stream to my Devialet via the Devialet AIR app and that seemed to work just fine (which actually also worked with LMS).
I will say that Roon seems to have one of the slickest UIs I've seen. But, like LMS and other apps, there's a level of tech that needs to be learned to take full advantage. For example, once Roon completed it's scan of all my music, the number of albums, tracks & artists did not match what LMS tells me. That's gonna take some digging.
One down side... the Roon iPad app doesn't work on my old iPad 2 so remote control for testing will need to be from my laptop.
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I did download the trial last night. But no, it's not ready to support squeezeboxes yet so there's only so much I'm going to find out about it in the next 13 days of the trial. On the other hand, it can stream to my Devialet via the Devialet AIR app and that seemed to work just fine (which actually also worked with LMS).
I will say that Roon seems to have one of the slickest UIs I've seen. But, like LMS and other apps, there's a level of tech that needs to be learned to take full advantage. For example, once Roon completed it's scan of all my music, the number of albums, tracks & artists did not match what LMS tells me. That's gonna take some digging.
One down side... the Roon iPad app doesn't work on my old iPad 2 so remote control for testing will need to be from my laptop.
Any thoughts regarding Roon yet?
Nick
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Hmmm, I'm beginning to see why people love Roon. Until I started playing with this last week, I would have said that I was quite meticulous about tagging all my music. And based on my use in LMS and various other tools such as MediaMonkey & Foobar, I had no reason to think otherwise.
But having used Roon now for a week has made me quickly aware of a non-trivial percentage of my digital music that is insufficiently, poorly or plain old incorrectly tagged. Roon gives you an easy way to see which of your albums it identified and which ones it couldn't. After initial scan, it couldn't identify about 8% of my 2500+ albums. A bit of that made sense, but a lot didn't. At first I thought it was a Roon scanning problem but I was wrong - just me having been a bit sloppy over the years, particularly in the early years of my ripping & tagging efforts. I've since cleaned up tags on about 50 albums and Roon then quickly identified them.
Of course, the biggest win by far is in Roon's depth of metadata and UI approach to integration. It really does seem to live up to all the hype. If you're wanting to be able to see how all your music is interconnected and want to see far more depth about the album, artist, performers and/or composers, Roon is it. Sure, you can find all that information online from various sources (allmusic.com, discogs.com, etc...), but having it all at your fingertips driven by what you're listening to is way cool and so easy to use.
The down side... the Squeezebox environment has spoiled me. Very inexpensive tools such as iPeng and Squeezepad are great. While there are Roon apps for more recent iPads (and android tablets I believe), there are no remote control apps for my iPhone or older iPad 2. And a big issue for me... Roon does not (yet) stream internet radio which I absolutely must have.
So, LMS won't be going away for me quite yet, but Roon is definitely tugging at my heart strings. Realistically (or perhaps just my way of rationalizing the cost of Roon), I've spent far more $$ over the years on numerous cables, tweaks and things, many of which are sitting in a box in my closet. So my take, albeit after just a week of tinkering... Roon makes a big difference to my musical enjoyment. The UI is easy to use (non-hacker spouses will love you for it) and really does pull you into the music listening experience. It is also an amazing tool to help you find the weaknesses in your tagging efforts.
For me, it isn't yet the only game in town, but it's definitely a great one. I'm still discovering a lot of cool features. And hopefully, they'll soon release support of squeezebox end-nodes. And yes, there's much talk of how they'll support internet radio streaming.
Stay tuned!
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I should have added... I'm using Roon to stream via Devialet Air over ethernet. While I haven't made any effort yet to compare sound quality, I haven't heard anything to make me think it suffers in any way. But from all accounts in the Roon forums, sonics may be marginally better when streaming via USB to your DAC.
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Thanks, Mike. I used Media Monkey for some tagging and my collection is a big mess. I am planning on redoing it as I only have 450 to 500 CDs. So I was wondering about the flexibility and ease of use of manually fixing tags with Roon.
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Nick,
This is handy for editing tags:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
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Nick,
Quick answer: Roon doesn't actually change your music tags as far as I can tell. It stores such info in it's own db. But it does make it very easy to find possible problems in your tags (or at least, where they differ from the Roon metatags). Think of Roon as a music reference rather than as a tagger.
Longer answer: I'm still learning, but it appears that there are two ways Roon can be used - it can either "watch" your music folders looking for additions and changes, or it can manage your music directly in what they call 'Organized Folders'. I haven't tried the latter so I'm not quite sure how that works.
On initial scan with watched folders, it either identifies your albums or it does not. For those not identified, there's a feature called 'Focus' that lets you quickly see those it couldn't identify. It's then usually pretty easy to figure out why. For example, I had messed up the track order on an album. I easily corrected it in MediaMonkey and Roon immediately saw the change and found an exact match on the album. As Rich pointed out, MP3Tag is another great tool for that kind of fix. Roon doesn't replace these. It just makes it easier to see where you need to use them.
One problem I've found in a few of my albums is that track lengths in Roon's metadata don't match mine which can lead to an album not being identified. My guess is that's probably because I didn't handle gaps correctly in my early ripping adventures thus having track lengths a bit off. But, Roon makes it quite easy to see if that's the case and if so, let's you force the album match assuming all the tracks and track order are correct.
There are also quite a few cases where Roon is aware of several different versions of an album (orig, US vs UK release, remastered, bonus tracks, etc...). In these cases, it let's you walk thru the different versions and shows the differences relative to your version so that you can pick the best match. Pretty easy to do.
Of course, you can just as easily leave an album "unidentified", which is not a problem at all. It just means that Roon is not going to provide any metadata about the album and just rely on your tags.
I've still got a lot more to learn, but so far, I like what I see.
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Nick,
This is handy for editing tags:
http://www.mp3tag.de/en/
Thanks, Rich. I also need to do some ripping and will likely switch to dbpoweramp. Any idea if mp3tag does a good job with album art?
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mp3tag doesn't automatically import art like rippers. It is just an editor. But it can edit the art metadata to replace or add art manually.
If you get dbpoweramp, it installs a tag editing feature in Explorer that lets you right click on any file in explorer and edit the tag.
mp3tag is good for mass editing. Like when track numbers of an album are messed up, or if you want to use the Song Titles to create filenames automatically, etc.
If I was gonna sit down and correct my library for an hour I'd use mp3tag. But if it was just the wrong title on one track, I'd use the dbpoweramp edit feature installed in explorer.
Actually I just noticed mp3tag also has a right click menu item so you can easily edit a track from within Explorer. That looks even easier than dbpoweramp's But they are both very easy.
dbpoweramp gets art automatically, but you can also add art or change it before ripping.
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If you use EAC for ripping, it will offer to pull in cover art for you. Pretty sure dbpoweramp does as well but it's been awhile since I used it for ripping.
MP3Tag also provides a means for pulling in artwork - from Amazon I think. But it's not automatic (which may be a good thing).
Too many tools, not enough braincells :duh
I've got a buddy who has just starting down this path and is feeling totally overwhelmed by the effort. Pretty sure that's exactly how I felt years ago when I started doing this.
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I think I'll be giving dbpoweramp a try. Reasonable cost and the artwork feature which is a necessity for me. When I switched from a cd transport to streaming in about 2007, I paid an AC guy named Tim to do the ripping. He did a pretty good job considering some of the unusual cd's I have. Nowadays, I'm not nearly as technically challenged and it should be quite a bit easier
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Here's an interesting video that gives a taste for what Roon does best...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrRfhWcLoqA
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Thanks for posting that Mike, that's cool!
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Thanks, Mike. I also enjoyed some of Mr HB's other reviews
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Roon support of squeezebox devices just released... can't wait to give this a try tonight.
https://community.roonlabs.com/t/roon-1-1-build-88-is-live/5676
Another thing I really appreciate with Roon Labs is their proactive support of their forums. They are quite engaged and responsive.
Note also they are now supporting HQPlayer... anyone try that?
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Wow, I am impressed. Roon works with all my Squeezeboxes. The interface is clean and does allow syncing them. Roon essentially emulates LMS. I could tell no difference in SQ between LMS and Roon.
The downsides (for now)...
-- no internet radio
-- LMS must be turned off in order to use Roon to stream to the Squeezeboxes
-- the Squeezebox display & SB remotes are limited in functionality
Still, a pretty slick accomplishment that no one else has done. While LMS is a solid and mature piece of software, it is showing it's age. I'm not ready to stop using it yet but congrats to Roon for stepping up to this challenge.
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Nick,
Quick answer: Roon doesn't actually change your music tags as far as I can tell. It stores such info in it's own db. But it does make it very easy to find possible problems in your tags (or at least, where they differ from the Roon metatags). Think of Roon as a music reference rather than as a tagger.
Longer answer: I'm still learning, but it appears that there are two ways Roon can be used - it can either "watch" your music folders looking for additions and changes, or it can manage your music directly in what they call 'Organized Folders'. I haven't tried the latter so I'm not quite sure how that works.
On initial scan with watched folders, it either identifies your albums or it does not. For those not identified, there's a feature called 'Focus' that lets you quickly see those it couldn't identify. It's then usually pretty easy to figure out why. For example, I had messed up the track order on an album. I easily corrected it in MediaMonkey and Roon immediately saw the change and found an exact match on the album. As Rich pointed out, MP3Tag is another great tool for that kind of fix. Roon doesn't replace these. It just makes it easier to see where you need to use them.
One problem I've found in a few of my albums is that track lengths in Roon's metadata don't match mine which can lead to an album not being identified. My guess is that's probably because I didn't handle gaps correctly in my early ripping adventures thus having track lengths a bit off. But, Roon makes it quite easy to see if that's the case and if so, let's you force the album match assuming all the tracks and track order are correct.
There are also quite a few cases where Roon is aware of several different versions of an album (orig, US vs UK release, remastered, bonus tracks, etc...). In these cases, it let's you walk thru the different versions and shows the differences relative to your version so that you can pick the best match. Pretty easy to do.
Of course, you can just as easily leave an album "unidentified", which is not a problem at all. It just means that Roon is not going to provide any metadata about the album and just rely on your tags.
I've still got a lot more to learn, but so far, I like what I see.
Any additional comments for us now that you've had Roon for a while?
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I have really enjoyed using Roon Labs for 6 months now. But until they released v1.2 about a month ago, it wasn't sufficient to replace using LMS with my multiple squeezeboxes.
That all changed with 1.2. I now have an iPhone control app. I can now listen to internet radio streams. And there have been numerous other improvements that just keep making it better and better.
So with 1.2, I made the decision to stop using LMS and switch fully over to Roon and so far, no regrets at all.
All I can say is that if you haven't tried it and you're into streaming music, it is a must-demo. Yes, some will think it has a high pricetag. I bought the lifetime license during their December sale last year at 30% off and it was well worth it. I've spent far more on stuff that now sits in the closet.
I'm extremely impressed with their approach to integrating other hardware vendors (RoonReady devices), their willingness to support all squeezeboxes and anything that runs Squeezelite such as rPIs, their adoption of Roon control on any tablet or phone, and their extremely open and engaged approach to customer support.
IMO, Roon has become what Logitech should have done with the squeezebox environment.
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Glad it's working out for you. I'm still working out some bugs on my new Aries Mini. Once that's worked out...and Roon and Auralic are compatible... I'll give Roon a try