LMS vs ROON

Howdy, folks.

Following on to my earlier post, it turns out that the ROON Core (server) will run on my Qnap NAS.

So now, I'm on the fence between installing LMS or ROON server, both of which will run on my NAS. Hopefully some of you can help me sort it all out.

I have a modestly high-end audio system, and my primary objective is maximum reproduction quality. However, the UI is important, too. My DAC can run as a ROON client, Squeezebox, UPnP, Airplay or DLNA renderer. So on the hardware side, I'm in good shape.

From all reports, ROON offers a far better UI and (allegedly) has better audio performance. But that whole $500 price is a bit steep if the iteration for Qnap requires a license - that part isn't clear. I presume the ROON Core for Qnap and Synology require a license to continue working beyond a trial perid, correct?

So, I'm debating if I want to spend the money for a ROON license, or if LMS is the way to go.

I'd appreciate some discussion from those of you who have tried both and understanding the Pros/Cons of going either way.
 
I suggest that you take the trial period, when you are prepared to try it. If you donate like it, LMS is free.

I used LMS for 5-6 years and is now on Roon. For me several reasons made the difference - the ability to correct for difficult rooms is one, the ability for my wife to easily synchronise and deal with it much easier than LMS was another.

In the end I realised that the software price for Roon was cheap, compared to what I spend on hardware. I ended buying a lifetime solution.

You are aware of the need for a server for Roon with enough CPU capacity? If not, this will add on the hardware side on top of the expense for Roon.
 
Can someone explain the logic behind Roon + $99/year or $500?

Equipment
Server: QNAP + Minimserver + 100GB music collection on HDD.
Endpoints: Moode, Naim, Marantz AVR (when its WiFi works), Yamaha streamer.
Controllers: BubbleUpnp, Yamaha MusicCast

Apart from some music metadata which I can get from last.fm or discogs and a nicer UI, what exactly does Roon give me which I don't already get, for free?
I add few albums a year.

The endpoints support up to 24/192. but most of my files are 16/44.1.

I don't really like minimServer, but just bcos of the manual rescan and the inability to define upnp menu items... and fugly icon... and the authors reluctance to let people configure it.
 
Can someone explain the logic behind Roon + $99/year or $500?

Apart from some music metadata which I can get from last.fm or discogs and a nicer UI, what exactly does Roon give me which I don't already get, for free?
I add few albums a year.

The endpoints support up to 24/192. but most of my files are 16/44.1.

Roon is a commercial enterprise and a very professional outfit with a product they continue to invest in and develop. I think the price is high (more than I wish to pay for such functionality) but others find it acceptable.

Personally I like LMS very much, have used it for years and it will run on a wide variety of platforms of varying performance so is easy and cheap to implement. I think Roon handles complex metadata - mainly Classical - with greater competence but I like to keep things simple anyway, so it does not offer sufficient added value over free or lower cost options like LMS or JRiver.

It's up to the individual to decide on how the cost/benefit works for them.
 
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I'm seriously considering Roon in the future, but the compute requirements are a bit steep. Once your digital music library gets above several thousand albums I believe its advantages really show, esp for classical music. But for now will continue to slum it with GMPC and a linux server :)
 
First off - $500 I consider a rip-off.

To me it looks like old-school pricing for "Big Pocket Audiophiles" :D

2. "...the ability to correct for difficult rooms is one..."

You can run corrections per client on LMS. And you can also run corrections on each client !?!?

Do I miss anything? :confused:

3. "...the ability for my wife to easily synchronise and deal with it much easier than LMS was another..."

I don't know about your wife's capabilities. My family doesn't have any issues to handle the system using iPeng. And that includes synchronizing clients - which probably happens once a year. ;)

***********

After all, what matters is that an audio stream gets played back at highest quality. That's what both approaches accomplish.

If you run LMS you're in the driving seat. You can tweak it as much as you want.

If you go for Roon - you just jump on a train. You hop on, you hop off... ...as most people do with commercial software. As most people, you'll probably just use 5% of the offered features. You pay for 100%. And the features you miss usually never show up.

Good luck and lots of fun with Roon! Enjoy.

I'll continue to enjoy my LMS/squeezelite setup. ;)
 
A big advantage of Roon over other similar software is that it doesn't rely on UPnP/DLNA.
With Roon certified endpoints (the cheapest ones being RPi's) you are able to play the same program material synchronously in several different rooms / zones. You are not tied to one manufacturer as with Sonos, Bluesound and whatnot to perform this.

This is a great advantage, as there are situations one isn't listening to music exclusively and concentrated, but have to do other things in the house. And having synced playback in different rooms is more than just useful.

So yes, depending what requirements you have, Roon can be a much cheaper solution than other "higher end" multiroom systems, and it works pretty hassle free.

If you listen to your music collection exclusively in one room at once and don't have the need for "rich" metadata, many other SW solutions will do.
 
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First off - $500 I consider a rip-off.

To me it looks like old-school pricing for "Big Pocket Audiophiles" :D
There are choices, choice is good. Roon is clearly not for you, but no reason get angry about it.

3. "...the ability for my wife to easily synchronise and deal with it much easier than LMS was another..."

I don't know about your wife's capabilities. My family doesn't have any issues to handle the system using iPeng.
Some of us don't have ishiny products. so Ipeng cannot even be considered for me.

If you run LMS you're in the driving seat. You can tweak it as much as you want.

If you go for Roon - you just jump on a train. You hop on, you hop off... ...as most people do with commercial software.
You got any references for this lack of tweakability?
As most people, you'll probably just use 5% of the offered features. You pay for 100%.
Roon is not FOR most people. It's for those with significant libraries who want a better way to manage them. It's not for the average person with a couple of hundred albums.

I'll continue to enjoy my LMS/squeezelite setup. ;)
You have what works for you. Excellent.


@sinski: Roon is backed by meridian and I believe that the code is in Escrow to handle the case of the company going under.
 
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A big advantage of Roon over other similar software is that it doesn't rely on UPnP/DLNA.
With Roon certified endpoints (the cheapest ones being RPi's) you are able to play the same program material synchronously in several different rooms / zones. You are not tied to one manufacturer as with Sonos, Bluesound and whatnot to perform this.

This is a great advantage, as there are situations one isn't listening to music exclusively and concentrated, but have to do other things in the house. And having synced playback in different rooms is more than just useful.

So yes, depending what requirements you have, Roon can be a much cheaper solution than other "higher end" multiroom systems, and it works pretty hassle free.

If you listen to your music collection exclusively in one room at once and don't have the need for "rich" metadata, many other SW solutions will do.

Just to be clear, as this thread title is "LMS vs ROON", LMS does not use
UPnP/DLNA, is not tied to one type of hardware, is free, and is multi-room.
 
* LMS is not using UPNP - it runs propitiatory protocols towards its clients. * with LMS "endpoints" you can sync whatever stream you want

Don't let you guys fool you by all that marketing crap. Obviously you need to have good marketing in place to hook up "non-Audiophiles". It's not that easy to get them pay $500 during times where apps shouldn't cost more then $10.

The typical "Big-Pocket-Audiophiles" approach - "If I pay 15k for a speaker - $500 looks like a real bargain" won't need much marketing and much logic either. :rolleyes:

We've seen that when Amarra was charging an insane amount of >$1000 during the early days for the OSX player app. BPAs were willing to pay it - without questioning it. Now Amarra is down below $100. :eek: ...and that I still wouldn't call a bargain!

I do understand that people with limited IT knowledge rather tend to go for a full blown glossy SW - potentially easy-to-use - solution.

However. I'd say take a closer look at each solution, make sure you get your key requirements pictured!

Thousands of satisfied people are using LMS since years. And LMS is still maintained!

Satisfaction

Obviously people who paid $500 for a little piece of SW - will always be satisfied! And even if it is just to justify the expenses. ;)

Enjoy.
 
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Just to be clear, as this thread title is "LMS vs ROON", LMS does not use
UPnP/DLNA, is not tied to one type of hardware, is free, and is multi-room.
OK then...(Btw on the German Wikipedia Page it is stated differently...someone has to correct ist then)

If I don't have Squeezeboxes, what endpoints can I use? Software players on RPi or Windows?
Are they in Sync, or is exact sync only possible with Squeezeboxes?
 
"...It's for those with significant libraries..."

Ok. Another one of these great nonsense and misleading arguments!

Please check LMS capabilities first!

"...don't have ishiny products..."

No you rather spent $500 for ?shiny SW. That's a huge difference. :rolleyes: You could buy her a new iPad at <$400 plus <$10 for iPeng instead. Great - IMO much better - deal! Isn't it. :D

Btw. I use Android. That'll also do. Just to mention it. ;)

Enjoy.
 
[....]
Don't let you guys fool you by all that marketing crap.
Obviously you need to have good marketing in place to hook up "non-Audiophiles".
It's not that easy to get them pay $500 during times where apps shouldn't cost more then $10.

The typical "Big-Pocket-Audiophiles" approach - "If I pay 15k for a speaker -
$500 looks like a real bargain" won't need much marketing and much logic either. :rolleyes:
[...]

Why do you generalize and throw in such killer phrases? Put all Roon customers into a bag with the label "fools"? Couldn't it be they do not want or are able to go through the hassle to install server software, client software, etc?

It doesn't really help the discussion...

[....]
It's not that easy to get them pay $500 during times where apps shouldn't cost more then $10.[...]

Pity this is common sense these days, that software, contrary to hardware, has few if any commercial value. When programming good SW and maintaining it you have to compete with an army of open source programmers who do this more for fun than for a living. If you have to make a living from "Apps" times are tough...indeed.
 
"...what endpoints can I use?..."

squeezelite is the key app.


Many RPI Audio OSes offer squeezelite as audio engine.

* piCorePlayer
* Moode
* DietPi
* Max2Play
* and more

MS

*Squeezelite-X

Android

* squeezeplayer
* SB player


iOS

* iPeng player


Commercial Streamer (even these offer support)

* MicroRendu - squeezelite


and more.



If all of them properly work in sync - I can't answer that.


Another argument that's been used against LMS was DSD and/or DSD native
support.
E.g. The just released piCorePlayer3.5 also supports DSD native support up2 DSD256.
 
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"...It's for those with significant libraries..."

Ok. Another one of these great nonsense and misleading arguments!

Please check LMS capabilities first!
Please show me where LMS matches the capabilites of Roon. Otherwise you are just being angry for the sake of it.

No you rather spent $500 for ?shiny SW. That's a huge difference. :rolleyes:
You could buy her a new iPad at <$400 plus <$10 for iPeng instead.
Great - IMO much better - deal! Isn't it. :D
I don't have roon, but I do have 10,000 albums on my server and have yet to find a low cost solution that is easy to use in a family friendly format. My use case is not unique, but as I said before if you listen to a lot of classical most packages are very limited . I understand the Tidal integration on Roon is very good, but I don't use streaming services.

Horses, courses, pays money, makes choice. MPD works for me for now, but is not the final solution.
 
I am a very 'visual' person, and the whole Roon interface does appeal to me heavily! The problem with current Roon's approach is the need for a centralized Core.

I have been moving away from that from day one:
- I used to have my movies on my computer, and served them via DLNA, but I had to have my computer on at all times.
- I had my music in a single centralized location, but had to had the computer hooked to the HD on at all time.

The fact that I can send movies from my iPhone to my Chromecast, or Spotify Connect to my RPi with an iPad or my computer, or from the browser!, for me that is what I want.

I dont want: A) A big computer on at all times B) To go and turn everything on if I want to play music.

For one, I try to be eco-friendly, but most importantly: our electric system is very unreliable and we have frequent losses of power. So, I am OK having a RPi on at all times. I'm not OK leaving a 750W PSU-powered water-cooled i7 on at all times.

So, as long as Roon Core requires such a machine, I'm not using my money to pay for that.

That's just me, but I will add to the people objecting about the tone used by soundcheck. People are entitled to their own reasoning and even to do things without reasoning. My mother loves her Bose Air-play enabled speaker. She likes what she hears, she loves the hassle free solution, she does not care much about the stereo separation. Is she a fool? No, she does not want the same things I do.

Not everyone wants to tweak everything up till the last parameter, some people are really comfortable using products out of the box with little complication. That doesn't mean they are not capable of doing it, it is just that they prefer to do it differently that you would. Don't put people down because they don't think and act as you would.

Sure, offer advice to what you think are better solutions, that is always welcome. But not by being pedantic and degrading others.

Best regards,
Rafa.
 
I am split on this. I am currently using a Raspberry Pi running Volumio as an airport endpoint to a Schiit Modi. I stream from iTunes on a NUC. This is a temporary situation. I have tried several different orientations such as a NAS and music direct from a computer. I went away from them mainly because I frequently add music to my library and found it inconvenient to do so to the NAS or when the computer was sitting with the audio rack. So I want to use my computer as a server and stream to a Raspberry Pi or other SBC as an endpoint. LMS and Roon can both do this. I haven't tried either yet. For 2 channel audio I would probably go with LMS since it is less expensive.

Some questions I have are:
Can LMS do multichannel audio? Roon can (just not to any SBC that I know of). Is there a definitive guide that describes what LMS can and can not do?

I have been hesitant to go with Roon due to cost. Which is why I have kicked the decision down the road until I complete my new streamer/DAC, amps and speakers later this year.