Roon redux

Yeah the Squeezebox server plus DLNA plugin is so much the best design of all worlds. Oh well, that horse has bolted for basically everyone.

LMS is still around and being updated, with the newā€™ish material skin the interface is still good.

My understanding of this back to the early days is that the architecture of DLNA was never intended for handling massive music libraries, so while it was well suited for shuffling relatively small numbers video files around a network it was always going to be a stretch for music. I remember in the early days of Linn streamers the shit they had to deal with and how they eventually caved in started using a Squeezebox plugin just to have a stable system.

I know, I use it and itā€™s fantastic!

Innuos still use LMS and squeezelite for the audio streaming etc but have put their own app on the front.

I think it is much much better than the Roon interface but unfortunately it doesnā€™t let you use Sonos endpoints like Roon does :sob: :sob: :sob:

I think that DLNA was created by network geeks and quickly abandoned. It works well at providing access to the media, but does nothing for metadata and making it look nice or help to manage a large library. Even of video tbh - I use a Plex server usually, as the DLNA access to the same files is very clunky.

Was there ever any music organiser software that was designed to sit in front of the files and played via DLNA? That is what I do, using the Squeezebox server and a plug-in, but was there ever anything that started out that way? Foobar will do it as well, but again via a plugin rather than it being the point of the software.

DLNA operates at the network layer so it was never designed to handle things like metadata etc.

Itā€™s just a method of allowing two different vendor devices to talk to each other and exchange media over a network (the talky shite is still done via UPnP)

Stuff like Plex and Kodi etc use DLNA

Iā€™m on a Roon break.

Used it for 3-4 years but thought Iā€™d see what life without it would be like.

Not so bad, really. Donā€™t miss going room to room restarting computers and reconnecting to wifi just to listen to some music.

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Have you tried changing your DNS to google?

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No, not tried that, does it become more stable?

TBH Iā€™m probably just suffering from a bit of tech burnout. Spend my life on screens at the moment, so physical media is a welcome break. Also finding SQ of streaming a compromise in most instances, so probably need an Innuos or similar to rip/play.

It was a joke.

Roon supports answer to any problem on their forum is ā€œchange your DNS to googleā€

They also mark pretty much anything as resolved by DNS when really it was their cloud servers being shite

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Iā€™m constantly amazed by all these tales of woe about Roon. I turn on the streamer and DAC and there is music via Roon. I copy stuff to the Zen and Roon updates (or I can ask it to). I search for stuff and invariably Roon finds it. The only complaint I have is that the suggestions under ā€˜New Releases For Youā€™ on the Home page are usually so irrelevant to my tastes that I suspect Iā€™m being trolled. FWIW, I paid for lifetime membership years ago so taking the annual subs into account Roon is now a free service to me.

Youā€™ve probably hit the nail on the head there. The grumpiness probably comes that feeling ā€˜you donā€™t get a lot for your moneyā€™ each year, when you could probably get three and half of those vinyls for the same money. Roon is great no doubt, sure Iā€™ll be back using it in a few months when I miss the pictures and bio stuff.

I wish I had of bought a lifetime membership in the early days, great value really.

I think itā€™s gone backwards, I used to like the suggestions and Roon Radio used to be great.

The interface is now horrible, the recommendations are shit, roon radio craps out or just repeats itself and the search is flakey.

I pretty much only use Roon to control my Sonos speakers and that is restricted to Qobuz or Radio Paradise.

To be fair, I never use Roon Radio so I canā€™t comment on that. I really dislike the disappearance of the a-z organisation of artists too, but that is a minor quibble as I can scroll down to ā€˜Nā€™ rather than click on it now.

We only use Raspberry Pi, Lumin and Auralic devices. All work without issue. As for the search, it works for me but I can well imagine that hardcore jazzers or classical buffs would not be impressed. As I only listen to two-note bleepy drone these days searching is not much of a challenge.

I can see both sides to the argument. As a device for presenting a USB output I can connect everything that turns up for review to, Iā€™m not going back to anything else. I also like tying a disparate collection of things in the house together in one interface. That interface is still perfectly OK for me as well.

I can also see that stability remainsā€¦ not quite as good as Roon would have you believe (even using a Nucleus) and the costs annually would grate on me. I think the kicker for me is that there isnā€™t an OS Iā€™d switch over to in preference for my- admittedly niche- requirements.

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Roon has a really weird attitude to stability, for some bizarre reason they use tiny buffers for playback and streaming.

As an example my Zen has 4GB reserved for playback from memory and I can see it download a good number of tracks or even the entire album from Qobuz.

Roon downloads a little bit, streams a little, downloads a little, streams a littleā€¦

Roon say that is for multi-zone playback but thereā€™s no reason why it canā€™t download and cache/buffer tracks on the core before streaming to endpoints. This is a proven and well known method of playback using multicast but Roon seem to think they can invent their own protocol and be pioneers.

They arenā€™t.

I refuse to use Roon primarily because of dumb shit like that. I simply wonā€™t pay actual money for software developed by fuckwits.

Also: the fanbois - just the most horrific cunts.

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Now this I agree with. The Roon forum makes the Naim forum seem sensible, well moderated and welcoming.

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Thatā€™s my experience, it has been rock solid for me. I do run it through a nucleus so I guess it should work ok.

One of the reasons I went this route is because I am clueless on computers and just wanted a turn key product.