You must be online so Roon can check you have a valid license to listen to the music you have locally. As you say this seems strange. As you can guess it is all about they checking your license payments. They have also said they are paying an external party for every lyric you view so they are tracking which songs you view lyrics on.
Depending on how you interpret what their CTO has been writing on their forum they are not directly querying your local roon-server (there is a FW in the way) but I read it as when your server make a call to roon-servers Roon are attaching their own queries on the answers you get back from Roon. He may also have written that to tell everyone they know how to do it. I dont know.
There is not necessarily anything wrong with them actually doing all this, it can be anonymized etc. They need to monetize their stuff to keep it up like any other internet service and I dont believe there is much room to raise prices.
They could easily do a completely cloud-based Roon so people wouldnt have to install that server. But today that server is the dongle they need - or rather you need - so they can charge you for the license.
And the alternatives on the market are not that bad. I am right now listening to Apple Music with AppleTV4 and have full lossless audio via HDMI-cable into the preamp and preamp to the TV. Sound is great and I get album-covers, artist, song namesand lyrics on the TV-screen. Funkadelic rocks just fine!
We had an outage here a few weeks back. No internet but I was able to run my network and listen to music with no issues. If you have to have internet to use Roon then thatâs a deal breaker.
My library doesnât just live in Roon itâs available to anything one should always have backup solutions for redundancy, things break, what happens if your uniti core dies, or Nas dies or melco? So if itâs not available I use something else for the time period itâs out, far from ideal and I need to decide how much of an inconvenience it will be. I have lost internet a few times since this change but only for short periods and the music kept on playing but no guarantees it will for greater outages.
Yes itâs because they moved search to the cloud as it gives them more freedom to develop much further than a local engine. This has been confirmed by COO. They use to use two search engines one for streaming one for local then it would parse it all together, but this has run its course and is holding it all back so they say. Time will tell on this. More features are likely to move to cloud as they want a coreless service it just takes a lot of dev time to keep all the stuff it currently does, dsp will be a problematic one to solve.
License checks where once a month so you did have to have internet for that or it would log you out. Pretty standard for any subscription service to have periodic checks. Data obviously needs to be fed back to improve their ai engine and they track MQA as they have to pay royalties back to MQA for the MQA decoding which is per stream I believe.
My NAS is on my network and available to any device on my network. I have multiple backups. And I donât need a Roon sub to have that and I can enjoy my library without internet.
But this is why I am struggling with the fact that the last few updates killed the performance on my hardware. It was able to run Roon problem free till not too long ago. Logic dictates that as processing is offloaded to the cloud, local performance should increase. Not degrade.
Canât say I noticed any change here at all. Same as itâs always been and I donât have a powerhouse to run it. But I donât use a general Pc for it.
Have i5 on windows 10 also Lenovo. 16GB. And dedicated to Roon. All that is sub spec is that the music is on a mechanical drive and not SSD.
Currently I am at about 10 seconds minimum to load album art for a new search. Where a few updates ago it was instantaneous.
Problem could be anywhere and that is what I donât like. I spend my days coding and debugging, I donât want to spend my free time doing it too. Which is what the Naim app frees me of.
The Roon docs is shady about this. States that function cannot be guaranteed without online connection. So this is a wide range of things working to things failing one by one.
Why would you subscribe to Roon for that when you already have it without a Roon sub? Thatâs the point. Not being able to use Roon without an internet connection is a non starter with me. Iâm glad it works for you and you see the value. I donât and thatâs okay.
You have the same setup as me then!
All thatâs on the Lenovo is Roon and Bubble Server. No third party antivirus or firewall just what comes with windows 10. I normally use an old Lenovo tablet which is slightly slow but if I use my newer tablet itâs all instantaneous.
Hmmm this is food for thought. So theoretically it should work.
I do use Bitdefender antivirus as I am a software dev working from home and cannot compromise. But this antivirus is very highly rated and is performant everywhere else. And it was also used in the many months things were instantaneous.
