Roon 1.8

If that’s directed at me, I ridiculed no-one and just asked if it had been controlled for, being mindful of the uncontroversial fact that small volume differences have an effect on perceived SQ.

Don’t be so sensitive.

I’m one of the ridiculers myself!

.sjb

I’m not usually, but as my question had already apparently been interpreted as an insult …

I think I know where Roon went wrong. Somebody (themselves?) told them that they needed to be more like a digital ‘magazine.’ Headlines and pictures and sections! The Best 27 Hip Hop Albums of All Time! 39 Grunge Albums You Can’t Live Without! 45 Relaxing Spins For Spa Night… They lost sight that what people really want most is just the best music DAM (Digital Assets Manager) software, first and foremost. Take me to my albums, and then take me to the ‘music store’ (Tidal or Qobuz currently), integrate it all, send it to different systems in different rooms, maybe help me with the sound a bit and send some recs my way. Make Discover a standalone, those abysmal user charts need to go away. The Home page is the biggest mess. Roon has been a fantastic way to discover new music, catalog my old and new, streaming and local. It fills a real niche and they fell down on this one.

I wonder how often that ‘closer look’ article or whatever they’re calling it, on say, Krautrock, is going to get refreshed (one out of the dozen albums a wrong mismatch as it is)? It’s all a bit presumptuous and patronizing imo. I don’'t have a large banner at home over my bookshelf pronouncing “My Books.” Take the friendly and want to be hip out and just give better basic functionality.

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No, Roon goes right.
What make you think that? Your post is not convincing, to say the least.
If you follow the Roon forum, more than 60 % are in favor of 1.8.

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Looking at the roon forum you would have thought they had killed the first born of each user, Jees!

I’ll be honest I like roon because of the fact every room in my house can have it from a lowley chrome cast up to expensive dacs. All from ‘one pane of glass’. I have never really discovered much music from roon, occasionally but the fact is tidals own app does a far better job of that.

Its an app to play your music, 1.8 does that just as well as 1.7. Aside from the round artist circles, its all good my end.

After a few days to settle down, damn its much faster now too.

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I am encouraged by the amount of adopters here who are focussing on the positive aspects of the update.

One could write a book about people’s attitude to change. It does not surprise me that some here are dissatisfied with the radical change to the UI. You only have to start a discussion on dark or light or green to see how personal the UI gets. The changes to the Roon UI are happening in our personal space and are intimately affecting our perception of how we interact with our beloved music.

Then, of course, there’s the biological issue of how we adapt less well to change as we age. My 11 year old didn’t ask why they had changed the software, but just went “wow!”. Granted, there’s no accounting for taste: when asked he liked most about the new look, “purple on white” was near top of the list!

Perhaps in a subconscious effort to avoid apathy and cognitive decline, the precursors of dementia, I embraced the change long before Roon 1.8 arrived, almost recursing to the boy waiting for the next Beano.

Now 1.8 is finally here and it’s just about the only change round here since lockdown so it’s welcome as long as it works! I can scarcely wait for 2.0…

P.S. I really don’t like Windows though, so please let them bring back MS-DOS!

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Yep I have also noticed that… all in all apart from the rather cluttered iPad display with 1.8 … I rather like it…and I suspect the volume levelling is working slightly better from a digital SQ perspective … I was listening to the Beatles Rubber Soul yesterday evening… and if I shut my eyes I was listening to a vinyl version with that wonderful high end recording distortion seemingly perfectly reproduced which betrays the era of the recording… I don’t think before I wasn’t getting it as pristine.

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I think in general you are right on this.

If we’d all been used to 1.8 from the start and then they had released 1.7 as an ‘improvement’ then there would have been the same outcry.

It does look like Roon were rushed into releasing too early and several c0ck-ups have ensued. In hindsight they should have extended the beta version and announced a ‘delay’ as the date given to the press was tentative. This would have given some chance to review beta feedback and fine tune the end product.

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For me it’s just that it’s too buggy and inconsistent. I like the new UI it has some choices I don’t like but overall it’s better. I don’t see making it better to work on a phone as a negative. The phone app before was severely lacking and didn’t work well, this works brilliantly. I don’t use tablets much so this is always my primary remote, its always available, always on my person and as I move about the house I can easily take my music with me and not hunt for the tablet or use the pc I have been using for work all day. I don’t think it’s broken anything on the other devices either.

There is some wasted space as always, but the odls design was as bad or at times too cluttered as they had patched in new features without much thought.

What I am annoyed at the most is the real lack of new search across both library and streaming. This is an area is sorely needs and with the expansion of focus could have been used for this, but sadly not. Finding albums or tracks by searching is still a pain, I want be able to perform a simple search in Qobuz to find all albums on a label or genre or artist and I can’t.

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First update for Roon 1.8 this morning…

  • Fixed unintentional volume increase on Android
  • Fixed Roon API not returning Internet Radio browser data
  • Fixed crash in the File browser when network share becomes unavailable
  • Updated “Find Roon OS” dialog
  • Fixed inability to connect to certain Shairport AirPlay devices
  • Fixed inability to adjust volume on certain AirPlay devices
  • Fixed some QNAP storage issues
  • MacOS: Improved UI handling when moving between displays with different scaling factors
  • Sonos: fix for issue where Roon misreports which track is actually being played
  • Faster loading of History
  • Updated hotkeys list on MacOS to remove non-functional shortcuts
  • Fixed spacing problems with ‘Composer by’ text
  • Performance improvements for Roon running on RoonOS

The update is for Roon Rock (core), Mac (PC I’d imagine), iPhone and iPad apps,

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@anon23154165 : where did you find this information? What build are you referring to?

On the roon forum I only can see this update:

*Hi all,

Thanks everyone for the huge response to Roon 1.8 – we’ve been reading all the feedback and really appreciate everyone’s kind words about all the changes. We’ve also been reading everyone’s requests, and we’re hard at work planning additional changes and functionality for Roon going forward.

For now, we are aware that some users running on operating systems in languages other than English have been experiencing crashes and graphical issues, especially when opening Settings.

We’ve been able to resolve this issue over the last 24 hours, and so we’re getting a fix out immediately. The only changes in this release are related to this crash, and while the reports have largely centered on iOS and Windows, Build 756 is going live for all platforms.

If you have been experiencing instability on iOS or Windows, please let us know if things don’t improve with this release, and thanks again everyone for all the feedback on Roon 1.8!

The Team at Roon Labs

Roon 1.8 (Build 756) Release Notes

Roon Build 756 is now rolling out for macOS, Windows, Windows (64 Bit), and Linux. Updated versions of Roon for Android and iOS have been submitted to their respective App Stores and will be available as soon as they are approved. There is no update for Roon Bridge at this time.

All platforms and apps should update automatically.

Improvements and Bug Fixes for Build 756:

-Fix for crashes and graphical issues when OS is set to certain languages*

If you go into Roon settings in the app, look for “About” and in there you will find details of the core and app version. It also has a link to “Read Change Log”. This link takes you to a page that lists all versions. There are two for 1.8.The latest one is Pinned. Go into that.

I’ve just gone in and they’ve changed it again, not sure if the one above refers to a pre release fix or not. It might be that another versions is coming out?!? Anyway, it now also says the same thing you posted…

Roon Build 756 is now rolling out for macOS, Windows, Windows (64 Bit), and Linux. Updated versions of Roon for Android and iOS have been submitted to their respective App Stores and will be available as soon as they are approved. There is no update for Roon Bridge at this time.

All platforms and apps should update automatically.

Improvements and Bug Fixes for Build 756:

  • Fix for crashes and graphical issues when OS is set to certain languages

Edit.
Build version was the same… 756.

did it fix not showing history and needing restarting? biggest and longest standing and most annoying current bug for me

Hmm not sure this sells your argument. On the Roon forum, people there are enthusiastic users of Roon - not only do they have it, they go onto the forum to post about it. So these are the keenest of the keen. And only just over half think it’s an improvement.

If you follow decent design development approaches, you involve your users to understand why they use it and what they want, and then give it to them in spades. You identify what your USPs are, and develop those. Then they are happy and content.

Here, they seem too have made changes for changes sake, to have had a beta program and not listened to the feedback, and as a consequence, of the people who you’d expect to be most supportive, almost half are dissatisfied. As I said elsewhere, they have shot themselves in the foot.

It’s buggy, not well thought out, poorly integrated, … It could evolve into something better, for sure - but this should still be in internal development, not a release. At least it’s not a 2.0 version and we can look forward to a decent redesign then… (lives in hope)

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Not sure what problems you’ve had with history but it’s working on the Mac and iPhone versions that I have to hand at the moment. It’s showing up-to-date info as soon as a track has finished playing.

I have not been following their design and feedback process, but the fact that they did not do this (sufficiently) in a public beta is not proof that they did not do it at all. And it seems to me that you conclude that they didn’t because you don’t like the result. Maybe they did and you still don’t like it. And maybe this could be improved so that it works better for everyone including you, I just feel that you are making a lot of assumptions.

I can only say that I, personally, find some of the layout and spacing choices weird on medium displays (4K 15"), but they addressed several of the issues I personally had with editing, I like some of the changes although I did not mind how it was before, and I don’t mind the fonts and other things you dislike.

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Ok… I maybe going blind here but how do you remove a tag from an album?!?

I have a Tag setup up for new albums to listen to and once I have, I remove them from this group and either move them to a finished Tag or delete them from library… for the life of me I can’t find a way to remove a Tag :thinking:

Before I got the Nucleus+ I had a home demo for a week and therefore a reasonable amount of time to compare it to my maxed-out Qnap HS-453DX and I felt it more than had the edge - and that was with a USB HDD. This incidentally was for server playback using Asset and Minim, not just Roon itself.

Using a good SSD in the Nucleus+ when I bought it improved things further. Adding a Sean Jacobs LPS yielded further improvement. The recent change to 1.8 lifts things further in my opinion: a touch more detail/clarity, bass extension, drive and coherence - a bit like some of the recent improvements in the Naim firmware.

Had you told me any of this when I bought the ND555 I’d have been in hysterics, of course… after all bits are bits…

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By whom?