[orpheus89]

Hi, do you mind sharing what you did to make the Roon radio algorithm work well for you? Did you favourite or ban alot of tracks?
Did you star rate whole albums etc?
For me it's not working very well so maybe i need to rate more. It's hard to describe but is chooses track that kind of relate to it but not the best ones.
If i play a movie soundtrack i love and than let roon radio do its thing it chooses other soundtrack but definetly not some that people would like.
(with alot of talking in it and i can not imagine audiophiles would like that)
Spotify seems to find really good tracks in the genres i listen too.

I am not doing anything specific to be honest. I just play an album or a single track and let Roon do the rest. For me it always works out very well. But I hardly ever listen to any soundtracks. Maybe that's why it's working so well for me.. idk.

 

[JohnnyOps]

I’ll throw one more in the camp of “Roon is definitely worth it FOR ME” (meaning at a different period in my life when I had less time and less $, it would definitely not have been worth it to me THEN). Absolutely transformational to how I listen - combining local and streaming, getting me out of meta-data hell and into well-curated content, creating smart adjacencies for me to actively or passively explore, and integrating Sonos with my much better office & bedside headphone rigs and my main 2-channel system, as well as integrating local with Tidal (Or Qobuz, pick your poison). It’s a little like having access to 12” LP covers and a smart record-store clerk to talk to while listening to music - obviously not exactly, but it does get me back some of the (non-SQ) things I missed about vinyl, and it makes my complex multi-endpoint life a bit more easy to navigate. Yes, some overhead for building a ROCK, moving music to an SSD and doing NAS backups vs. hitting NAS for music, and making sure my network was up to the task. Non-trivial. But now that it’s working, it’s transformational. If I was me ten years ago, with a Schiit Stack I listened to mostly while working, and a few hundred local albums and no interest in paying for Tidal, I’d think it was an utter rip-off. No longer - worth every penny and minute spent.

 

[cj3209]

I’ll throw one more in the camp of “Roon is definitely worth it FOR ME” (meaning at a different period in my life when I had less time and less $, it would definitely not have been worth it to me THEN). Absolutely transformational to how I listen - combining local and streaming, getting me out of meta-data hell and into well-curated content, creating smart adjacencies for me to actively or passively explore, and integrating Sonos with my much better office & bedside headphone rigs and my main 2-channel system, as well as integrating local with Tidal (Or Qobuz, pick your poison). It’s a little like having access to 12” LP covers and a smart record-store clerk to talk to while listening to music - obviously not exactly, but it does get me back some of the (non-SQ) things I missed about vinyl, and it makes my complex multi-endpoint life a bit more easy to navigate. Yes, some overhead for building a ROCK, moving music to an SSD and doing NAS backups vs. hitting NAS for music, and making sure my network was up to the task. Non-trivial. But now that it’s working, it’s transformational. If I was me ten years ago, with a Schiit Stack I listened to mostly while working, and a few hundred local albums and no interest in paying for Tidal, I’d think it was an utter rip-off. No longer - worth every penny and minute spent.

Nice post! I agree. A while ago I thought it was a luxury but now, with Qobuz and a good Roon core (SSD mac mini), the plethora and wide range of different music is incredible and I consider Roon to be almost mandatory. Just trying to justify the new Roon Nucleus as my mac mini is getting dated (but still works!).

CJ

 

[kelly200269]

Nice post! I agree. A while ago I thought it was a luxury but now, with Qobuz and a good Roon core (SSD mac mini), the plethora and wide range of different music is incredible and I consider Roon to be almost mandatory. Just trying to justify the new Roon Nucleus as my mac mini is getting dated (but still works!).

CJ

I just love Roon, and the way it integrates my local library and Qobuz is sublime.
The Nucleus is a brilliant bit of kit - a bulletproof way to run Roon.

 

[ubs28]

Honestly I don't see Spotify ever doing that. Their focus is on the mainstream consumers and not the audiophile niche. (They did have a high res beta in the past, after that we never heard anything about high res audio from them anymore.) Although it would be great if they ever decided to offer high res audio, I would definitely switch over in that case.

Tidal is fine for me for now, while it's collection is much smaller than Spotify's, it is sufficiently large that I can find almost all of the tracks and artists that I would normally listen to.

I just switch to the one who has the best promo deals. So sometimes I will be on Qobuz, sometimes on Tidal and so on ....

If nobody has any promo deals, I usually just rely on my own local library.

 

[JohnnyOps]

The Nucleus is a brilliant piece of kit, but building a NUC into a ROCK is a great project and saves a lot of $.

 

[tomwoo]

The Nucleus is a brilliant piece of kit, but building a NUC into a ROCK is a great project and saves a lot of $.

Does ROCK on NUC really sound better than Roon installed in Windows 10?

 

[masterpfa]

Sorry to buck the trend but I have tried to like Roon but my personal experience though a trial, a years membership and another trial meant I can for my own purposes sstate

"it's not for me"

My problem was the buffering I was getting especially on Qobuz as well as Tidal or even my own library, which I never experienced when accessed from other apps.

Between the year of ownership and the 3rd trial I changed my NAS.

I have no problems with other services that use my WiFi so I cannot understand why the issues with ROON

As good as the interface might have been my primary requirement to enjoy my music wasn't always possible.

 

[JohnnyOps]

Sorry to buck the trend but I have tried to like Roon but my personal experience though a trial, a years membership and another trial meant I can for my own purposes sstate

"it's not for me"

My problem was the buffering I was getting especially on Qobuz as well as Tidal or even my own library, which I never experienced when accessed from other apps.

Between the year of ownership and the 3rd trial I changed my NAS.

I have no problems with other services that use my WiFi so I cannot understand why the issues with ROON

As good as the interface might have been my primary requirement to enjoy my music wasn't always possible.

Yeah, you definitely need to make more investments in many cases than just “run it on my NAS”.

i bought a NUC to run ROCK fast. I spent days tuning my already tuned Unifi network. I bought an SSD to keep music local to my ROCK instead of having streams traversing the network twice. Cost and complexity were totally worth it... to me. But many if not most people I know would have given up, and Tiao understand that.

 

[JohnnyOps]

Does ROCK on NUC really sound better than Roon installed in Windows 10?

Nope. No SQ difference. Just performance difference (speed / latency of starting playback, more DSP, load off of machine I can use elsewhere).

 

[donato]

I'm also very much in the "Roon works for me" camp as well. It was primarily because of the quality of the indexing and metadata of my own files. I was always a hardcore own-my-files/media guy, but I've been using Tidal for quite awhile now and that was a game changer because of the availability of lossless content. I frequently use the EQ (esp. for my LCD-4) and upsampling (at least until I put together a decent HQPlayer system). I have also tinkered with convolution after doing room measurements with REW. I still don't find the ability to search for a specific recording of a classical work particularly easy. But overall it is a fully featured product for my uses.

I was originally running Roon core on a NUC, but it doesn't really require a ton of CPU or memory, so I've been running it in a VM and it's been fine. All my media files are stored on my Synology NAS, which I recently upgraded so that the NAS and my Hyper-V server are on a 10gbit switch, but that's not really necessary, but was just because I could. I'm also using all Ubiquiti gear otherwise for networking. I primarily run Roon from my Mac which is USB connected to my DAC. I've also used it with a Sonore UltraRendu as well as a couple RoonPi, one with an AlloDigiOne board. I don't regret paying for the lifetime Roon license at all. I may try spinning up a separate Plex instance though to use PlexAmp on mobile.

 

[Kiats]

was comparing between TIDAL, Apple Music and QQMusic last night and decided to see if Roon helped

strangely, playback via Roon was the worst

much to my disappointment, really couldn’t tell a diff between Tidal masters and the others with my setup

Hiya! I noticed you can stream QQ Music via Roon? Does Roon work with music streaming apps beyond Tidal and Qobuz? Thanks in advance for your guidance.

 

[senorx12562]

Hiya! I noticed you can stream QQ Music via Roon? Does Roon work with music streaming apps beyond Tidal and Qobuz? Thanks in advance for your guidance.

I know for sure that it does not work with Amazon.

 

[sfig]

I know for sure that it does not work with Amazon.

I believe it's Tidal and Qobuz only at least right now.

 

[goldwerger]

I believe it's Tidal and Qobuz only at least right now.

Currently only Tidal and Qobuz.

Some hint that Deezer may be on the horizon -- https://www.hear.audio/2021/05/12/deezer-hints-at-future-roon-integration/

Big players aren't likely to ever intergrate - Apple and Amazon work to bring users into their ecosystem ; and Spotify's focus is mass market rather than hifi