Roon alternative?

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Rob7

Member
Joined 2022
Buyer beware. If you are considering roon, know that it will no longer allow you to access your bought and paid for local music files without an Internet connection. This “improvement” came about with version 2.0. During a recent Internet outage my $50,000 plus audio system became a worthless steaming pile of crap. With the Internet down, I could not even listen to my local files.

Maybe you are OK with allowing an outside company to hold your local files and expensive audio gear hostage. I’m not. Not even for a moment.
just my humble opinion

hoping someone can direct me to a program or method by which I can access my local music files without an Internet connection
 
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titus2002

Member
Joined 2009
Roon has been degrading for a long time. If we compare its old versions and what is now - the comparison is not in favor of new versions, unfortunately. How to find old versions of Roon and how to put them on can be found on the Internet with due diligence. The last good sounding one was Roon1.5
 
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bambadoo

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Joined 2003
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Rob7

Member
Joined 2022
Thanks for all the input. I will investigate further. Meanwhile, is it possible to stream quality Hi-Rez using a Qobus or tidal app on a Smart phone directly into a dac? Aside from the cataloging, search, sorting and metadata, would I lose anything In sound quality?
 
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Sjef

Member
Joined 2003
I also use Roon but have a strong love/hate relationship with it. I mainly use it as an alternative interface for Tidal. For my own local files I have always been a big fan of MP3Toys but that one has some broken functionality since it has not been updated in eight years or so but is is lightning fast compared to Roon and it just always works, something I can not say about Roon. That will work fine one day and painstakingly slow or not at all the other day. J.river is about the worst of the worst imho, it looks like a 90’s windows media player, completely old fashioned in looks and user experience. Volumio, the same, 90’s media player software, not my cup of tea. Unfortunatly there isn’t much out there. Development is terribly slow, especially the streaming services still provide crappy apps. So Roon it is, but not out of love, it’s just that there is no real alternative.
 
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wirewiggler

Member
Joined 2005
Really, there is nothing out there that comes evan close for my lifestyle. I use 6 remote endpoints all over the house. I truly think the endpoints options could be greatly improved but are workable. I question how clean a usb source to dac can be and while their are some eye watering priced streaming devices out there I think they are just using some proprietary computer board inside.I am surprised there is yet a purpose built chipset that can accept Ethernet input and output digital audio avoiding a general purpose compute module and all the emi that surrounds it.
 
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Sjef

Member
Joined 2003
Roon is great WHEN it works, but that's it's main problem. even after 7 years of using Roon it still has memory leaks, relies way too heavy on DNS stability and is very sensitive to everything network related. Some days it works lightning fast and a day later it is slow as hell, and I mean really slow like 30 seconds before a song start to play. Search is the slowest of any music app I know off. Roon is great in potential but it has a lot of stability issues that haven't been fixed in seven years. Even though there is no better solution out there at the moment I can no longer recommend it to anyone anymore.
 
jean-paul

jean-paul

Member
Joined 2002
From a Roon (Essentials, the niche product) fan to happy to be freed from Roon. Eversolo is partly to blame. Roon Essentials was only delivered with Elac Discovery as a Lifetime License and it had/has all the positive stuff one wants running on just 1 device (hurray!) and no monthly fees (2 x hurray!). Then, one day my device could not be used anymore as the servers were down. Roon was sold. It was solved but the thought stayed that Elac apparently had nothing to say about their Roon version. Also the new owner of Roon supposedly has no interest in non paying customers :) Just an assumption based on adventures like with Olive One.

Ecosystems that start fresh and new with acceptable monthly fees (bleh) or even free eventually turn out to be money machines bought over by large companies. All the nice stuff then happens: vendor lock in, higher fees, premium/basic models, internet dependance, one day the app is only suitable for recent smart phones, paid for rented content, phoning home of own content, BS stuff like MQA, nag screens to update membership, countless features no normal soul will ever use etc. That is what most folks want.
 
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wirewiggler

Member
Joined 2005
That really surprises me your issues with Roon, I first used a recycled I5 Intel NUC and had no issues but upgraded to a purpose built fan less case with upgraded NUC absolutely no change in sound or performance . I run a eero mesh network that shows 48 WiFi connections ( 4 of them video cameras) and I have been lazy and never assigned fixed ip address. The only issue I have is it drops some WiFi connected endpoints after sitting idle for a few days, and a reboot fixes it. I guess I have dumb luck.
Bill
 
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Bohuweno

Member
Joined 2015
Rob7 said:
During a recent Internet outage my $50,000 plus audio system became a worthless steaming pile of crap.
Click to expand...

How have you managed to spend that amount of money on presumably high-end hardware (or hardware + music library, come to that) and configure it so that it's entirely dependent on the goodwill of a single software company? Your annoyance with Roon may be justified, but seriously, don't put yourself in a position like that. You gear deserves better.
 
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