Roon Discussion Thread

[Mr_Gimlet]

3 minutes ago, sir sanders zingmore said:

As far as I know Dirac's response curves cannot be used in any other system than Dirac.

Thanks for that clarification. I've never used it (I use MRC). 

[Bunno77]

1 hour ago, Nickynick said:

Can anyone speak more about the DSP capabilities of Roon? I have been looking to get room correction software (just bought a microphone for this) and if Roon can do this as well as all the other great features, then I might make the jump. What kind of software can you use for this or are you limited to what comes with Roon? Or am I not understanding this correctly? I currently use an oldish custom NUC which I runs Foobar with monkeymote on my ipad. Output via usb to the dac. I assume that I’ll still be able to use Foobar though not at the same time as Roon. 

Would the NUC need upgrading to run powerful features like DSP and room correction ( if it can do this)? 
Thanks in advance 

I have just started playing with this again.

 

I have a Umik 1 and use REW

 

These videos and a few others are very helpful on Youtube. The second video a fair way in shows you how to export filters as Wav that can then be loaded into Roon like this pic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

59 minutes ago, sir sanders zingmore said:

As far as I know Dirac's response curves cannot be used in any other system than Dirac. They don't make them available to upload into third-party applications such as Roon. You can only use them in Dirac's own DSP engine

 

 

I actually contacted Dirac and they told me there is a work around to use Dirac in Roon. I haven't tried it yet and don't know if you need the Pro version or not but they said it works. I find the Dirac website extremely annoying.

 

 

The convolution doesn't seem to be too hardware taxing but I believe HQ player can be.

 

 

I am not really smart enough or investing enough time to get the most out of REW. I wish it was a bit more automatic with doing timing, phasing and EQ but I think that is what Dirac, Acourate and the others do. I haven't really had any magic moment with it yet. My room has some bad suck outs around 70Hz and again at 100Hz. REW gets it closer to target curves but only so much it can do in my room unfortunately. There is a 2 week trial period with Dirac Pro so hopefully I will get to that one day soon.

 

Adding this function even though I haven't yet had amazing results is what made Roon worth it for me and was when I bought it.

 

[sir sanders zingmore]

21 minutes ago, Bunno77 said:

I have just started playing with this again.

 

I have a Umik 1 and use REW

 

These videos and a few others are very helpful on Youtube. The second video a fair way in shows you how to export filters as Wav that can then be loaded into Roon like this pic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I actually contacted Dirac and they told me there is a work around to use Dirac in Roon. I haven't tried it yet and don't know if you need the Pro version or not but they said it works. I find the Dirac website extremely annoying.

 

 

The convolution doesn't seem to be too hardware taxing but I believe HQ player can be.

 

 

I am not really smart enough or investing enough time to get the most out of REW. I wish it was a bit more automatic with doing timing, phasing and EQ but I think that is what Dirac, Acourate and the others do. I haven't really had any magic moment with it yet. My room has some bad suck outs around 70Hz and again at 100Hz. REW gets it closer to target curves but only so much it can do in my room unfortunately. There is a 2 week trial period with Dirac Pro so hopefully I will get to that one day soon.

 

Adding this function even though I haven't yet had amazing results is what made Roon worth it for me and was when I bought it.

 

I’ve seen that workaround for Dirac but didn’t follow up for a couple of reasons:

- it’s a real kludge of a solution. Also, Dirac are shifting the “blame” onto Roon when the previous versions of Dirac worked just fine with Roon (they just appeared in Roon as another source). 
- audio hi jack is USD 65. That makes a free trial of Dirac not so free anymore. 

[firedog]

I use the DSP  features in Roon extensively: EQ, volume leveling, resampling. and Room Correction.

 

I think they all work great and the combination I've come up with improved the sound of my system by quite a bit. 

 

You can make correction filters and then tell Roon to apply them. REW can make suitable filters, so can Audiolense and some other programs. Once the filters are made, you just point the convolution filter of  Roon to their file  location and it applies them during the processing for playback. 

 

Audiolense is a breeze to setup and use, but it costs money. REW is free, but can be daunting and difficult for some people to get the results they need. The original install and setup of Audiolense  and production of correction took me about 2 hours total. I did  understand the basics of the process before hand, though. You can download a trial version and see how it works for you before buying. 

 

[Peta]

Of course this is my personal view ...

I bought Roon early on when it was giving high quality audio and a smart presentation that worked for playing music.

Then they started bloating the product with features that I do not use and interfere with playing music. I do not use shuffle or most of the other playback options. I like to play the music as the producer of the album meant it to be played.

At the start Roon began to take notice of classical music lovers and improved the way you could classify your collection and then select it. However, they soon went more commercial and focused on pop music "song" based classification and lots of overhead that is ok with a small collection.

I have some 2,300 albums, including more than 200 records that I converted from vinyl. Roon has dreadful trouble with these and I have to manually override. Roon also has trouble with a few HD tracks albums that are in 96 and 192kHz format. It jumbles the album and you cannot seem to fix it.

Their support is atrocious. You have to effectively prove that they have a fault and then they say they will look into it for a future release. I think this is because they know you have bought the product already and they gain nothing by looking after you. By contrast adding bells and whistles to get new buyers is their focus. There was even one instance where they released a faulty update that stopped Roon working completely and they did not even acknowledge it. There were at least five reports and multiple people identifying that they also had the problem. I had to use a different streamer because Roon was installed on my Antipodes DX and  therefore effectively disabled it.

Roon is not so good at managing large collections. It has a crudely built indexing engine that likes to re-index each time you start the Roon server. It then takes a long time to do it, requiring the manufacturers of playback devices to move to much more powerful processor upgrades. I get the impression that their target market is people who play music on a desktop computer to and amp/speaker combination.

There are a few more nitpicks but that is probably enough.

Recently there have been a few small improvements to usability, however the focus on new customers rather than existing ones seems to be still happening. Nonetheless, I still use Roon to play my  music.

[Nickynick]

When you say Roon is bad at managing large collections due to reindexing everytime, does that mean its takes a long time to use (start playing music) from booting up? This could be a deal breaker for me. I have about 5Tb worth of music stored locally on my Nuc. 

[Mr_Gimlet]

3 minutes ago, Nickynick said:

When you say Roon is bad at managing large collections due to reindexing everytime, does that mean its takes a long time to use (start playing music) from booting up? This could be a deal breaker for me. I have about 5Tb worth of music stored locally on my Nuc. 

I haven't noticed any reindexing on startup. It's true it takes a few days to do the initial index when you first install, and that makes it a bit painful to use - but never seen any reindexing going on. It does scan for changes, but it doesn't take any overhead - even on slowish NAS.

Edited May 1, 2020 by Mr_Gimlet

[March Audio]

9 minutes ago, Nickynick said:

When you say Roon is bad at managing large collections due to reindexing everytime, does that mean its takes a long time to use (start playing music) from booting up? This could be a deal breaker for me. I have about 5Tb worth of music stored locally on my Nuc. 

Roon simply doesnt re-index all the time.  I dont understand where thats come from.

 

I have just timed it starting.  Ready to play in under 15 seconds. About 2000 albums, local and Qobuz in the library..

 

 

Edited May 1, 2020 by March Audio

[a.dent]

On 30/04/2020 at 6:52 PM, Peta said:

Of course this is my personal view ...

I bought Roon early on when it was giving high quality audio and a smart presentation that worked for playing music.

Then they started bloating the product with features that I do not use and interfere with playing music. I do not use shuffle or most of the other playback options. I like to play the music as the producer of the album meant it to be played.

At the start Roon began to take notice of classical music lovers and improved the way you could classify your collection and then select it. However, they soon went more commercial and focused on pop music "song" based classification and lots of overhead that is ok with a small collection.

I have some 2,300 albums, including more than 200 records that I converted from vinyl. Roon has dreadful trouble with these and I have to manually override. Roon also has trouble with a few HD tracks albums that are in 96 and 192kHz format. It jumbles the album and you cannot seem to fix it.

Their support is atrocious. You have to effectively prove that they have a fault and then they say they will look into it for a future release. I think this is because they know you have bought the product already and they gain nothing by looking after you. By contrast adding bells and whistles to get new buyers is their focus. There was even one instance where they released a faulty update that stopped Roon working completely and they did not even acknowledge it. There were at least five reports and multiple people identifying that they also had the problem. I had to use a different streamer because Roon was installed on my Antipodes DX and  therefore effectively disabled it.

Roon is not so good at managing large collections. It has a crudely built indexing engine that likes to re-index each time you start the Roon server. It then takes a long time to do it, requiring the manufacturers of playback devices to move to much more powerful processor upgrades. I get the impression that their target market is people who play music on a desktop computer to and amp/speaker combination.

There are a few more nitpicks but that is probably enough.

Recently there have been a few small improvements to usability, however the focus on new customers rather than existing ones seems to be still happening. Nonetheless, I still use Roon to play my  music.

Your experience is unfortunate but I must say I’ve never had any of those problems.

I’ve only sought support twice and both times help was personal and very quick.

 I’ve never had Roon delay startup while re-indexing and I’ve got over 2000 albums. Are you sure you don’t have some setting that is causing that to happen?

Sure, there are features I don’t want or use but I don’t think anything would entice me to move from Roon.

The update you mention that people complained about worked perfectly for me so again it may have been a settings issue for the few users who had problems.

Apart from the inflated cost I’m a strong supporter of Roon.

 

[Peta]

On 02/05/2020 at 12:09 AM, a.dent said:

Your experience is unfortunate but I must say I’ve never had any of those problems.

I’ve only sought support twice and both times help was personal and very quick.

 I’ve never had Roon delay startup while re-indexing and I’ve got over 2000 albums. Are you sure you don’t have some setting that is causing that to happen?

Sure, there are features I don’t want or use but I don’t think anything would entice me to move from Roon.

The update you mention that people complained about worked perfectly for me so again it may have been a settings issue for the few users who had problems.

Apart from the inflated cost I’m a strong supporter of Roon.

 

Antipodes has greatly upgraded their processing power for models after the one I bought - a DX. Originally, Roon was quite light on processing needs but after the version that introduced the DSP and new metadata engine, the problems with initiating became apparent. With only a 1tb internal disk I have another 1.2 tb on a NAS. Roon trawls through that each time I start it and "adds" the files. Most of the time there are no changes but it does all that anyway.

The update that failed referenced a non-existent (to those outside the Roon organisation) DNS name. If you were unlucky enough to do the update at the wrong time, you got that problem. The problem, however, displayed as there being a license problem. Two weeks later it was fixed with no further update installed. Rather than Roon helping to fix the problem, I got good help from Antipodes to analyse the logs on the DX and track the problem down.

When asking what was happening when Roon would only identify two tracks on Talking Heads '77 96-24 bought from HD Tracks, they would only help if I uploaded the full files to a dropbox. The dropbox seems to have a limit on the size or bandwidth for uploading so I was unable to upload after a dozen or more attempts. There was no alternative so they would not look at the metadata, despite me giving it to them. It seems as though I am about the only Roon user who has bought that Hi-res album.

I do use Roon, of course. I wanted to also share the less good part of what Roon do.

[Peta]

On 01/05/2020 at 3:45 PM, Mr_Gimlet said:

I haven't noticed any reindexing on startup. It's true it takes a few days to do the initial index when you first install, and that makes it a bit painful to use - but never seen any reindexing going on. It does scan for changes, but it doesn't take any overhead - even on slowish NAS.

See response jsut before this one

[firedog]

On 06/05/2020 at 7:45 AM, Peta said:

Antipodes has greatly upgraded their processing power for models after the one I bought - a DX. Originally, Roon was quite light on processing needs but after the version that introduced the DSP and new metadata engine, the problems with initiating became apparent. With only a 1tb internal disk I have another 1.2 tb on a NAS. Roon trawls through that each time I start it and "adds" the files. Most of the time there are no changes but it does all that anyway.

AFAIK, it shouldn't do this -Its' never done anything like that for me. It should only be indexing new files that you add to your library, which should be basically instantaneous. 

You should contact @support at Roon forum and ask for help. 

Edited May 8, 2020 by firedog

[Hydrology]

@Peta sounds more like an Antipodes hardware problem than a Roon software issue. I run a Nucleus and as others have said, zero slowdown. Reach out to the Antipodes guys.

[Peta]

Let's just say that what I observe is what I observe. I did contact Roon and got no useful assistance. Antipodes did help and that is a good thing.

Music playing does not slow down nor does much else - it does take a long time. Processing the files does consume resources. Generally that is not a good thing if at all avoidable.

[Hydrology]

43 minutes ago, Peta said:

Let's just say that what I observe is what I observe. I did contact Roon and got no useful assistance. Antipodes did help and that is a good thing.

Music playing does not slow down nor does much else - it does take a long time. Processing the files does consume resources. Generally that is not a good thing if at all avoidable.

We hear what you are saying. What we are all saying is that this is not a standard "issue" with Roon on hifi music servers and for those coming to this thread getting an understanding of whether Roon is worth it or not, not indicative of what the majority of end users are experiencing.

[Peta]

1 hour ago, Hydrology said:

We hear what you are saying. What we are all saying is that this is not a standard "issue" with Roon on hifi music servers and for those coming to this thread getting an understanding of whether Roon is worth it or not, not indicative of what the majority of end users are experiencing.

Nonetheless, also what others may experience.

 

[djmt]

My first experience with roon lasted only 10 of the 30 day free trial. Turns out an older quad core pentium 8g ram and 1t hhd struggled with 1700 albums. 6 months later I went all in with an i7, 16g ram and 512 ssd. Contacted roon support who graciously provided me the remaining 20 days of the trial. That was it. Loading and operation are instantaneous. Upsampling to dsd 256 a breeze. Couldn't be better. Is it expensive? Maybe when looked at as separate entity but as part of a whole system with thousands in hardware and accessories not so much. As a computer layman, for me it's a bargain. You are at the mercy of your hardware and internet service.

[MrC]

On 09/05/2020 at 1:07 PM, Peta said:

Nonetheless, also what others may experience.

 

may experience ??!?!?    I think what Peta has reported is NOT representative of what Roon offers.  I have found support very helpful and Roon is well worth the investment.

[Pim]

35 minutes ago, MrC said:

may experience ??!?!?    I think what Peta has reported is NOT representative of what Roon offers.  I have found support very helpful and Roon is well worth the investment.

I second that. The Roon crew are possibly the most 'involved with their clients' company I know.

[Demondes]

I used to run Roon on a Synology NAS (DS918 8GB ram and dual M2 SSD as a cache in front of the 20TB HDD disk space).  But running a very large  library from a HDD (275000 tracks or 22664 albums) would sometimes work and other times freeze for ages from IPaD UI when trying to find the core.  
 

a restart of the the Synology also meant that Roon could be unavailable for between 15min and an hour.  I don’t know if this for reindexing but definitely DB related activity.

 

to be fair to Roon they do recommend running the DB on an SSD but I wasn’t prepared to pull an HDD out of the volume to put in an SSD for the Roon library DB.

 

i decided to repurpose an old 2011 Mac mini for the core and keep the music on the NAS.  To me RAM seems to be more important than than cpu for Roon.   The Roon core utilizes at least 4GB on the Mac, so 8GB in total ram always struggles.  The Mac mini runs headless in a cupboard with the NAS and is connected to the music system via Ethernet 

 

i added an SSD and 16GB to the Macmini and its an excellent solution now.

 

 

[swarve78]

1 hour ago, Demondes said:

i decided to repurpose an old 2011 Mac mini for the core and keep the music on the NAS.  To me RAM seems to be more important than than cpu for Roon.   The Roon core utilizes at least 4GB on the Mac, so 8GB in total ram always struggles.  The Mac mini runs headless in a cupboard with the NAS and is connected to the music system via Ethernet 

 

i added an SSD and 16GB to the Macmini and its an excellent solution now.

 

 

This is what I do. Works great. 

[Guest gnnett]

4 hours ago, Demondes said:

HDD (275000 tracks or 22664 albums)

This somehow makes me feel inadequate as a music enthusiast.

 

But taking every waking minute, for over 2-1/2 years, just to get through a music library once, seems weird. Would expect it to have cost a lot of money in royalties too. 

 

Cheers 

Grant 

[rand129678]

On 29/04/2020 at 4:31 PM, firedog said:

I use the DSP  features in Roon extensively: EQ, volume leveling, resampling. and Room Correction.

 

I think they all work great and the combination I've come up with improved the sound of my system by quite a bit. 

 

You can make correction filters and then tell Roon to apply them. REW can make suitable filters, so can Audiolense and some other programs. Once the filters are made, you just point the convolution filter of  Roon to their file  location and it applies them during the processing for playback. 

 

Audiolense is a breeze to setup and use, but it costs money. REW is free, but can be daunting and difficult for some people to get the results they need. The original install and setup of Audiolense  and production of correction took me about 2 hours total. I did  understand the basics of the process before hand, though. You can download a trial version and see how it works for you before buying. 

 

 

What's the reason you went with the 33k taps and not 66k taps in Audiolense?

 

CPU loading too high at 66k taps?

 

[firedog]

19 hours ago, rand129678 said:

 

What's the reason you went with the 33k taps and not 66k taps in Audiolense?

 

CPU loading too high at 66k taps?

 

I produced the standard audiolense correction filters at 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 and 192.

Roon chooses the correct filter for the sample rate and the suitable number of taps are applied.  Nunber of taps changes according to what you are playing back. 

[rand129678]

1 hour ago, firedog said:

I produced the standard audiolense correction filters at 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4 and 192.

Roon chooses the correct filter for the sample rate and the suitable number of taps are applied.  Nunber of taps changes according to what you are playing back. 

Ok cool, makes sense.