I personally don’t understand the appeal of Roon, especially not considering the outrageous price. I went through the Roon trial and just couldn’t justify it for myself. Perhaps if it costed around $50 at most i would’ve went for it…
I currently use a headless $50 Raspberry Pi 4 with an SSD drive, running OpenMediaVault (free) and MiniDLNA (free). It works flawlessly with either the standard Naim apps or external 3rd party apps like BubbleUPNP. It does everything that Roon does that i personally need or use. I’m sure that i’m an outlier here since i know how popular Roon is on these forums, so to each their own ofcourse.
It won’t end when I start to list all that I like but these three things alone are worth it for me:
I can add all my thousands of albums that I have in various formats to the library to have an overview, but then I can mark favorites in addition to that. In contrast to every other app where have the choice between only adding my real favorites or creating an endless list where I can’t find anything, or alternatively misusing Albums for real favorites and Artists for “to remember”, none of which is really workable.
Adding my own tags on the fly, in contrast to having to mark albums that I find interesting but terrible as a favorite
Sometimes I just don’t know what tracks I want to listen too but I might have one in mind. I just select the one track that fits my mood and allow it to select new tracks based on it when it’s finished (from my library and Qobuz). Found so much new and interesting music that I’d either skipped past or never listened to before.
I didn’t keep a tally, but it seems to me your one of the most frequent posters in this thread. You regularly seem to have something new. Also I remember your list of equipment you’ve owned in some other thread being quite long.
Two days after this, and having learned more about what I can do, I love Roon even more. It’s so flexible and seamless across all my devices and the Windows application runs flawlessly on my Ubuntu (Linux) desktop (under Wine). Metadata is automatically great and where it is missing it is easy to edit and very detailed. Surely among the best software I have had the pleasure to use. Getting the lifetime subscription ASAP.
The cirrus7 disappeared from my mind 5 minutes after setup was completed with backups in place, etc. Just doing its thing, there is nothing better one could say about a server. It’s in a quite enclosed space and I can’t place it with the fins vertical as recommended, but it does not even get warm.
Yes, so flexible.
