Who is Roon?
This is an organization that has developed software that consists of a Interface overlay to keep track of Music from streaming services. And create narratives about tons of albums. It’s amazing in all that it does. I have a lifetime membership.
They have a forum that provides assistance from others including all kinds of technical service which is really challenging to deal with should you have problems. They don’t offer phone service.
my question is is this some operation that operates out of someone’s basement? Do they employ thousands of people? Is it a nonprofit organization? Are they doing well financially? Is there a Mr. Roon?
Who are these people that have coordinated this service. Does anybody know anything about this organization?
@ozzy62 , would that award be applicable for the entire A'gon collection of discussions, or would it only apply to the subsection of cryptic threads that have nothing to do with amps or preamps but are mysteriously posted in that forum anyway? |
@phishhhhh4 "Roon is a glossy sham?" Are you kidding me, LOL? It my be a glossy sham to you, but for me and thousands of others, Roon is pure gold. I got rid of my CD player and my turn table years ago and became a dedicated streamer because of the shear brilliance of products like Roon. And, after 40+ years in high end audio, I've never been happier nor have I ever had as much fun. Happy listening. |
You may want to enter the following in your favourite 2023 search engine or AI: "Roon Labs Acquired by Samsung-owned Harman International". See the Roon blog itself for the following too: "the-next-evolution-in-roon-technology-roon-ready-relay-expands-your-audio-possibilities". Sounds like the first results. |
@immatthewj Thats a good question. I suggest they be two individual awards, both of which @emergingsoul soul would be the front runner. |
Roon offers a wide range of features designed to enhance the music listening experience. Here’s a detailed overview of what Roon does: ### 1. **Music Library Management** ### 2. **Streaming Integration** ### 3. **Personalized Recommendations** ### 4. **User Interface** ### 5. **Multi-Room Audio Support** ### 6. **High-Resolution Audio Support** ### 7. **Advanced Playback Features** ### 8. **Mobile and Desktop Access** ### 9. **Community and Social Features** ### 10. **Integration with Hardware** Roon aims to provide a comprehensive and immersive music experience, making it a popular choice for serious music enthusiasts and audiophiles. |
I find Roon to be quite useful. Worth the money to me. For all the useless things we spend our money on, Roon is easily still worth it. (I mean, anyone have a streaming service that they barely watch any show on? Buy a Starbucks coffee you didn't really need this month?) That's what I'm talking about. |
A sham? When you see a worthless reply like this, you ignore ignore any replies from this poster in future threads because he doesn’t know what he is talking about. Like others in this thread, I got rid of my $3500 Classe cd player in 2006 - 2009 timeframe because ripped music sounded better than cd played on a cd player using either pure music or audirvana at the time. Then when I got an A+ rated dac 6 years ago, I sold my $15k TT setup with my 500 albums because digital with mqa, dsd, hires became equal or better than vinyl. |
Took a whole 10 seconds to find, but let’s start a thread about it like it's a Hardy Boys mystery... |
Lots of alternatives to tic tok if banned so I personally won’t miss it especially if its a tool for Chinese propaganda as claimed.
Roon is owned by Harmon International. As American as apple pie. Please keep it that way!
Harmon is a subsidiary of Samsung, a South Korean Company, whose owner is second richest in South Korea and merely nibblin’ at Musk’s feet at present. Oligarchs rule! Always have and looking like always will. Good idea to keep track. Luckily Musk is OUR oligarch having immigrated from South Africa. Lucky us! |
Roon is excellent! It’s not just a layer on top of Tidal or Qobuz. It’s a beautiful way to organize your music, yes, but it’s also technically very capable. Allows you to separate the computer away from the HiFi rack, and RAAT is a fantastic protocol for controlling audio grade streamers, with transparency over what’s happening in the chain. There is a Roon Ready device for every budget, including my Esoteric N01XDSE. Speaking of which, the native Lumin derived Esoteric app is nothing compared to Roon, when it even works. Maybe one day there will be a better Audiophile library/ control interface, but in my 25 years of audiofoolery I’ve found Roon the clear winner. |
I was an early adopter but I wish it had more features. Their support reminds me of chat rooms when I was in college in the early 90's. Roon radio always seems to end up playing the same songs over and over. I don't know of anything better so I still use it but I could never say I love it. I will admit that maybe it's user error. For example, lets say I want to look for Christmas playlists. In other format I would get thousand of playlist based on rating etc. Roon doesn't give you much. Not a serious knock, but get outta moms basement it's 2025. |
@tony1954 you got a point there! I guess we're not so lucky after all. |
Actually it helps lesser knowns get discovered by linking to them from better knowns so that is at least something positive for most musicians. Also Roon provides no music itself. It just integrates external streaming sources into a richer experience for the consumer. Qobuz and Tidal pay teh artists is a different yet related story. Also if you find something you like in Qobuz via discovery in Roon, you can buy teh files from Qobuz. Of course there is no pretty record or CD to look at when you buy it, you just own teh music now in case you fear losing access to something precious to you via streaming somewhere down the road.
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@mapman After years of admiration for James Bond I recently came to the realization that Bond was the one who cheated Goldfinger in their golf game. First offense... Goldfinger would never find his ball because Bond was standing on it. This forced Oddjob to drop a ball down his pants. Then Bond, cheating again, switched balls in the cup and declared that Goldfinger must forfiet the game. A blatant cheat! Golf is a game of integrity and I'm disappointed that Bond had to cheat to beat him. Goldfinger was, in fact, the better player and made a hell of a putt on the last hole and deserved the win.
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Roon is not open source / free, therefore it is superior. In high-end audio, the more expensive products are the better they sound, which is comforting - you get what you pay for - and Roon was happy to oblige. It became such a cash cow in the process that Harman, shrewd enough itself to sell out to a multinational giant, acquired it.
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Sarcasm sometimes goes undetected but let the record show that I am a big fan of open source software, and that I use and support it whenever possible. I don’t use Roon either, and I won’t until the day I see an escadron of pigs perform daring aerial maneuvers outside my window. |
The ability to access a folder from a Microsoft desktop with roon and dealing with the folders within the nucleus that serves as the host for roon software is challenging and if you have problems god help you. You can launch a question into the forum and the answers are all over the place and extremely technical. My questions were fairly basic yet it was so convoluted and awful experience. The organizational aspects of roon when accessing folders leaves a lot to be desired. Organization of albums is not very good as it just presents them all and you have to scroll through hundreds of albums to find what you’re looking for. Would be nice if they developed a system that could easily be used to organize things. Fortunately the underlying software for roon is old and I think it’s challenging to Bring it to the modern ages. If anyone needs to use this who is handicapped and uses voice control the app is not set up properly to accommodate Apple features for voice control. apps that are available on iPad generally conform to the standards of Apple but for some reason roon could care less. And yes they do not offer customer service phone number and this further frustrates the experience if you have problems. The forum Interface they offer is archaic and challenging to deal with as well the people they have involved with it are responsive but you have no idea who’s responding if they are from roon or from who knows where. |
I've found good info on Roon forums, albeit about subjects that were not directly Roon-related (since I have no use for Roon). Folks there tend to be helpful and often quite competent.
From what I was able to discern during my limited exposure, you are better off talking to folks who are not from Roon.
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@devinplombier it did cross my mind that you might have been sarcastic. Unfortunately it’s tough sometimes to make that clear. Sorry about that! |
@ozzy62 re:
....and 347 to go, so both you and our OP gets to sweat it out over your potential prize claims.... *L* .....and all this time I thought Roon was an ’it’...pardon, to all the .... "Roonies"? |
Roon was wonderful and informative… until I had a fatal issue with my lifelong subscription account and could no longer access it. I found their version of customer service (open forum of users) less than welcoming and ultimately unhelpful with my problem. So after attempting to resolve the issue several times over several years, I moved on to greener pastures (Innuos) and look back with some regret at the time I wasted trying to fix my Roon account. What a brilliant design for customer service - make the customer do it for free. I will never again buy gear from a company that doesn’t stand behind their product with more integrity than that. |
This thread has been a very interesting read. I had been strongly considering an investment in the Roon "lifetime" subscription because I've become so very frustrated with JRiver. My online research of Roon seemed to indicate most people really like it for streaming and say it handles their stored libraries well. I've held off because I hate subscription-based software business models, wasn't thrilled with $900 for a "purchase" (way more than MS Office, which actually does work) and do not stream anything except terrestrial radio station websites through my browser. As a work-around experiment, I recently gave JRiver one last installment to "upgrade" to version 33 over the holidays. Same damn problems: Will not rip CDs into my internal SSHD library and will not retrieve metadata on my mid-2012 MacBook Pro running a fresh install of OS X 10.13. It won't even recognize a folder (album) ripped on a different Mac computer and then copied into the library. Shows and plays in Finder and in Windows Files but neither JR27, 28 nor 33 saw/see it. And their forum "help" flatly isn't. I'm going to try installing JR33 on both my 2016 Mac Air and 2024 Mac Air to see if the newer system architectures can resolve the ripping problem using an external DVD drive through the laptop to an external SSHD. I'm not hopeful but have to try. Another work-around was importing the library to Apple Music, and it simply does not recognize the artist-album-song file organization in the near-terabyte size data set. Everything is 44.1 KHz, 16 bit (WAV extension), with a few higher resolution PCM items. Excepting only a few that were downloaded, Music categorizes as individual song listing only and I've yet to find a way around that. Never had that problem with iTunes. The only reason I tried JR was to get higher PCM resolution for some stuff I got through an AgoN sampler, a Linn holiday collection and later on, some vinyl digitized through a TASCAM DA-3000. iTunes required a MIDI interface reset and computer reboot to change output resolution. Now that I learn that this Harmon International / Samsung product does not offer factory support, I don't care how well it's reviewed. I will not plunk down that kind of coin for something without a factory warranty period, period. For the same reason, I have zero interest in their "free" trial (TANSTAAFL). My thanks to all of you for the warning/guarantee. Roon clearly appears incapable of providing me with the functional and happy digital listening I'm seeking. |
