I like Roon. After years of floundering, Roon gives me more or less the music playing experience I've always wanted, on my existing Sonos nodes, my mac, and Oppo BDP-205 players. I now have high resolution recordings, album covers, album notes, and everything right there. It plays high resolution recordings on everything as best it can be played on them.
When Roon Radio plays music from my own library, it does pretty good too, much better than Sonos "random play." (Nothing, however, in my experience, created a more pleasant automatic personalized radio than Pandora Premium.)
A problem is that Roon Radio does NOT default to playing on my own library. It defaults to being open to all my services. Right now, that's just Tidal. Tidal has a great selection of the world's recorded music but they are always pushing their own artists and titles.
The result is that by default Roon Radio ALWAYS plays something totally out of line with what I like. I may be listening to soft ambient music when it's finished Roon Radio switches me to some loud aggressive Hip Hop, since Hip Hop is a Tidal specialty. I would guess this is because Tidal rates all of their own music as "10" in category and parameter, so that's what you always going to get. I absolutely positively HATED TIDAL before I got Roon. I was planning on cancelling Tidal for years because I could never use it effectively, and did therefore almost never use it, but hoped I would soon figure it out so I could one day enjoy CD quality streaming. No matter what I looked for on Tidal, I only found the most awful stuff. Then Roon made it possible, for the first time, to find the things I actually wanted to listen to on Tidal, and I'm happy with the Roon/Tidal combination, though people now tell me I might like QOBUZ better.
And now I get to the little gripe that inspired this post. Roon Radio has (seemingly deliberately) hidden the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch. "Roon Radio" reserves a large chunk of the Roon window just for blank space. (Tufte would be outraged.) At the bottom of this blank chunk of screen (where, you might have user controls over the Roon Radio of some kind) there is just one control shown. The Start Roon Radio After Music Ends switch.
The essential Limit Roon Radio to Library is hidden behind 3 dots at the top of the playlist where a bunch of obscure playlist features are.
Now I can see why they would make this switch hard to find. Obviously Tidal wants everyone to play their stuff (and annoyingly so) so I wonder if there is some money involved. If Roon is playing Tidal promoted music, do they get a kickback??? Probably not explicitly, but even if there is no explicit kickback, there is often some kind of hidden pressure. Roon may get better service from Tidal if they make Tidal happy.
Avoidance of such kind of hidden pressure is why Roon is such a great concept in the first place. Nearly everything online serves the House Interest and has no particular need to Serve the Customer. Roon breaks the mold by being a User Agent. At least it ought to be a User Agent considering that we do pay for it, and pretty well. We are paying for the services, not the music itself. We pay separately for the music (to some companies that reduce that cost by doing their own self-promotion in the process).
It was maintaining that status of being a User Agent is precisely the reason I chose and continue to choose to pay for my Roon account annually. I have a great fear that as soon as I plunk down the money for Lifetime Service the company is going to start aggressively seeking other sources of revenue, such as kickbacks from streaming companies... Meanwhile, Roon was threatening from Day One to give extra services to Lifetime Subscribers only. I'm hoping that doesn't amount to much. If Roon stays viable, I will eventually pay far more for Annual Service than Lifetime Service. And if it doesn't, it would be a shame without something better.
I feel that paying every year for service should (hopefully) give me some kind of leverage, to keep the company serving the customer interest. If not, I might be able to go elsewhere too, with no loss of sunk capital as such.
I learned this horrible lesson many years ago. For many years I subscribed to Audio Magazine, one of my favorites, annually. A number of times I forgot to renew and ended up missing issues. Finally I decided I'd get a 3 year subscription. The very next year Audio Magazine went straight downhill. The magazine shrunk to a fraction of it's size. Finally, it went out of business altogether and my subscription was converted to 2 years of Stereo Review, a magazine I had always (though perhaps wrongly) hated.
WHENEVER anything is given away free (as in free beer) by a commercial enterprise you can assume there is some kind of con going on. If we really want good service, we have to pay for it.
Now today I was in a panic. I was intending to turn Roon Radio off but instead turned off the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch. Once you select that option, it does indeed appear at the bottom of the otherwise wasted side screen of Roon Radio. But if, perchance, you mistakenly switch it off, the very switch itself disappears.
I panic'd thinking that Roon had summarily decided to remove this switch to keep their Tidal arrangements flowing. THAT was what the last update was actually about, I wrongly guessed.
Actually, I had merely forgotten that when I enabled the switch the first time, I had gone to the 3 magic dots. I had read somewhere online you could do that, and I did. But by the time I mistakenly turned the switch off, a few weeks later, I had forgotten all that.
Another online search and I fixed the problem. But IMO well designed software shouldn't require you to endlessly go online to get the answers, and the answers aren't always easy to find online for various reasons. (One of my worst examples of that is the sound program SOX, which has gone through many major revisions, such that any instructions you find online are most likely for a version you don't have.)
Another curious thing. The Roon Help feature has absolutely nothing to say about Roon Radio. It almost does really seem like they want to leave you at the mercy of the Music Services on this Radio thing.
When Roon Radio plays music from my own library, it does pretty good too, much better than Sonos "random play." (Nothing, however, in my experience, created a more pleasant automatic personalized radio than Pandora Premium.)
A problem is that Roon Radio does NOT default to playing on my own library. It defaults to being open to all my services. Right now, that's just Tidal. Tidal has a great selection of the world's recorded music but they are always pushing their own artists and titles.
The result is that by default Roon Radio ALWAYS plays something totally out of line with what I like. I may be listening to soft ambient music when it's finished Roon Radio switches me to some loud aggressive Hip Hop, since Hip Hop is a Tidal specialty. I would guess this is because Tidal rates all of their own music as "10" in category and parameter, so that's what you always going to get. I absolutely positively HATED TIDAL before I got Roon. I was planning on cancelling Tidal for years because I could never use it effectively, and did therefore almost never use it, but hoped I would soon figure it out so I could one day enjoy CD quality streaming. No matter what I looked for on Tidal, I only found the most awful stuff. Then Roon made it possible, for the first time, to find the things I actually wanted to listen to on Tidal, and I'm happy with the Roon/Tidal combination, though people now tell me I might like QOBUZ better.
And now I get to the little gripe that inspired this post. Roon Radio has (seemingly deliberately) hidden the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch. "Roon Radio" reserves a large chunk of the Roon window just for blank space. (Tufte would be outraged.) At the bottom of this blank chunk of screen (where, you might have user controls over the Roon Radio of some kind) there is just one control shown. The Start Roon Radio After Music Ends switch.
The essential Limit Roon Radio to Library is hidden behind 3 dots at the top of the playlist where a bunch of obscure playlist features are.
Now I can see why they would make this switch hard to find. Obviously Tidal wants everyone to play their stuff (and annoyingly so) so I wonder if there is some money involved. If Roon is playing Tidal promoted music, do they get a kickback??? Probably not explicitly, but even if there is no explicit kickback, there is often some kind of hidden pressure. Roon may get better service from Tidal if they make Tidal happy.
Avoidance of such kind of hidden pressure is why Roon is such a great concept in the first place. Nearly everything online serves the House Interest and has no particular need to Serve the Customer. Roon breaks the mold by being a User Agent. At least it ought to be a User Agent considering that we do pay for it, and pretty well. We are paying for the services, not the music itself. We pay separately for the music (to some companies that reduce that cost by doing their own self-promotion in the process).
It was maintaining that status of being a User Agent is precisely the reason I chose and continue to choose to pay for my Roon account annually. I have a great fear that as soon as I plunk down the money for Lifetime Service the company is going to start aggressively seeking other sources of revenue, such as kickbacks from streaming companies... Meanwhile, Roon was threatening from Day One to give extra services to Lifetime Subscribers only. I'm hoping that doesn't amount to much. If Roon stays viable, I will eventually pay far more for Annual Service than Lifetime Service. And if it doesn't, it would be a shame without something better.
I feel that paying every year for service should (hopefully) give me some kind of leverage, to keep the company serving the customer interest. If not, I might be able to go elsewhere too, with no loss of sunk capital as such.
I learned this horrible lesson many years ago. For many years I subscribed to Audio Magazine, one of my favorites, annually. A number of times I forgot to renew and ended up missing issues. Finally I decided I'd get a 3 year subscription. The very next year Audio Magazine went straight downhill. The magazine shrunk to a fraction of it's size. Finally, it went out of business altogether and my subscription was converted to 2 years of Stereo Review, a magazine I had always (though perhaps wrongly) hated.
WHENEVER anything is given away free (as in free beer) by a commercial enterprise you can assume there is some kind of con going on. If we really want good service, we have to pay for it.
Now today I was in a panic. I was intending to turn Roon Radio off but instead turned off the Limit Roon Radio to Library switch. Once you select that option, it does indeed appear at the bottom of the otherwise wasted side screen of Roon Radio. But if, perchance, you mistakenly switch it off, the very switch itself disappears.
I panic'd thinking that Roon had summarily decided to remove this switch to keep their Tidal arrangements flowing. THAT was what the last update was actually about, I wrongly guessed.
Actually, I had merely forgotten that when I enabled the switch the first time, I had gone to the 3 magic dots. I had read somewhere online you could do that, and I did. But by the time I mistakenly turned the switch off, a few weeks later, I had forgotten all that.
Another online search and I fixed the problem. But IMO well designed software shouldn't require you to endlessly go online to get the answers, and the answers aren't always easy to find online for various reasons. (One of my worst examples of that is the sound program SOX, which has gone through many major revisions, such that any instructions you find online are most likely for a version you don't have.)
Another curious thing. The Roon Help feature has absolutely nothing to say about Roon Radio. It almost does really seem like they want to leave you at the mercy of the Music Services on this Radio thing.
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