Roon 1.8

There was a forum thread “Roon 1.8 arrives on February 9” that was opened on Feb 2

I didn’t see it, but it’s clearly there :slight_smile:

The release date was announced on 2/2 and linked into that thread.

Roon 1.8 announcement.

Yeah it’s buried under newer threads now, but I just looked it up

Maybe the way you use Roon is different from mine.

My experience with Roon 1.8 is quite positive, and for me, it just works without a hitch. Of course, there are some rough edges that need to be ironed out in due course.

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Overall I like it, and think it’s likely to be better after a few days getting used to it.

Apart from circular icon thingies, I think the UI is neater - does not look quite as polished in some ways but neater and clearer.

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I nearly didn’t find “add to library”. It’s now in the 3 dots menu of the album, a bit odd.
Some menus, like the track’s 3 dot menu, don’t fit into their boxes anymore, forcing pointless scroll - and there is no scrollbar or other indicator, so not obvious that not all is displayed. Bit of a basic UI mistake.
Tags are now always an additional click, either via Focus or via the album’s 3 dot menu. Not a fan. There is more than enough empty space

Found it! Go to the Compositions main page, find the two compositions, merge them. So in my case I could e.g. merge a German cover version of Lou Reed’s Waves of Fear with the original, despite the German one being called Wellen der Angst. Now the track shows the “cover versions” icon and appears in the list of cover versions of this song. This is great! (Can just be a bit of faff to find and select the two tracks in the very long list of compositions if the titles differ)

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Good tip, I have been trying to do the same.

So, the good: upgrade went fine - upgraded the player on my Mac, then the core, with no issues - database upgrade happened without incident (no idea how long it took as was watching tv but it wasn’t more than an hour, and could have been a few minutes).

Interface is slightly cleaner and clearer, and has a couple of nice bits - what you’ve listened too recently over the past week/month etc.

The not so good: I now see why it’s a 1.8 release rather than a 2.0… had expected a great step forward in discovery and browsing from the press releases and email teasers - and its hardly any different. (And if it is, it’s so far lost on me…).

Discovery, interlinking and diving down the curated rabbit hole should be Roon’s major strengths - but it hasn’t brought these to the fore. If it has altered the algorithm for Roon Radio to improve it, then great - but I’d like a visual Roon Radio to help discover stuff if I were to identify one or two exemplars, for e.g. It appears to be a stylistic makeover with a couple of new widgets, and (from what I see) better support for classical music.

Ah well, maybe I should design interfaces for a living. Oh, hang on a minute… :smile:

Edited to add: they’ve not fixed the history page being blank sometimes when you de-iconify the app either, which seems a major goof.

Edited to add again: and when you quit it and restart it (which you have to do to fix the history) I now get a message saying ‘Unexpected error - limited Roon Radio to library’…

Disappointed, given the heavy trailing. More time testing and less in PR? I have a lifetime subscription, and hope they sort this out. This is still beta…

I thought the same thing after playing more with it

Notice you’ve been in the Beta group - a real pity they didn’t listen to the issues. This really is shooting themselves in the foot, I think - a heavily trailed UI improvement that is stylistically improved in some ways but in others will date horribly (circular icons), mostly worse navigation and not properly thought out across mobile, tablet and laptop form factors. Poor demand management for servers for upgrade itself, and still bugs from earlier releases left unresolved.

Come on, Roon Labs, get your act together. Why do people buy Roon? because it handles metadata well, has good notes and info and links it together. Why is that useful - cos it allows for easy discovery and accompaniment in musical journeys. So support these key USPs - it’s not so hard. If I weren’t a lifetime subscriber, I’d be waiting for a 1.8.1 to come out very soon else would consider other options…

Very poor customer relationship management.

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While backing up my database (running 1.7) prior to upgrading to 1.8 I got the same message about Roon Radio. I wonder if it’s because of some back-end load issues rather than a fault with 1.8?

Could be. But who’d of thought it, hey, a surge on servers? If only there was a good way to load balance and scale a networked based system…

I have just found the “new releases for you” section has reappeared - previously missing so that is welcome.
In the old Roon I think I remember that under the “New releases for you”, you got the tidal new releases & recommendations, Grand Qobuz and Still Trending sections direct from the homepage as it scrolled horizontally. With the new vertical scrolling it looks like this is not possible. A backward step for the way I use Roon.

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Well at 6.30am uk its still hot cabbage my end. I can see albums by an artist then eventually the tidal stuff appears, then some time after that bios of the group then the roon icon loader and nothing else.

Who ever thought page after page of round icons was an idea needs talking too.

It took me a few days to find my way around (I was on the beta) but think I’m there now, generally!

In terms of adding an album to your library, easier than the 3 dots option is simply to click the ‘+’ by the side of the Play now button. Adds it straight in.

Overall I really like 1.8 though there are niggles and some things have definitely gone backwards.
Puts the Naim app niggles into perspective, that seems a dream compared to the noise generated on the Roon forum!

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Agreed. I was all singing its praises as a great leap forward before getting early access, then I was gagged. Its mainly UI with some what come across as focus tweaks.

However the discovery stuff does work better as every page you goto now has a way to find new music as discography shows every release thats available from the services you have, their are more links to artists, albums for recommendations. Focus can help find new things to now it brings up stuff from streaming when used in the right places. Overall search needs a big overall and allow similar filtering at this level. I like many want to search through Qobuz for artists on a specific label , you can’t do this at all which is disappointing.

It needs more user choices in the UI, to allow more thumbnails or a list view like most apps do. Yes this will mean less info but it gives users choice and I think more want that than what RL think is a good layout. Get rid of the welcome nobody needs is, move stats to it own menu, fix focus on phone box is huge and looks messy. Focus on track view on desktop does not format like on others.

When Marketing takes over Product Management, and fixes a date for the release of a Product when it is still in Development and QA.

If you look at how Apple now do it - on the fixed dates for the keynotes etc., they give Demos of the new features (which can be Dev builds, just barely working), and then the release follows at a later date, but not fixed in stone.
They also run large scale Beta programs to get ‘feet on the street’ testing underway, and don’t care too much about news leakage, as not everyone can be a beta tester.
Roon were very controlled about leakage about their release.

Better to get the release right and use the leakages to drive the demand & expectation, IMHO

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LOL I missed that one. Thanks!

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True. And focus is … different. I don’t know yet if better, might be. I guess I was expecting more from “Collaborations” and similar, that they praised so much. But to me it looks the same, just behind a new banner