Roon?

[Itsallicanafford]

To be honest I’m not quite sure the advantage of roon.

My case is that I either stream music direct from tidal hifi or listen to vinyl. When streaming I can play across multi devices via naim multiroom. Without a large collection of stored music on a network I’m not sure what roon will add.

Looking at the roon app, it will analyse your music and give you suggested new music, but tidal can also do this based on your tidal collection and play a radio function based on your current music. And it does this without the need for a dedicated roon server.

What am I missing?

[Red 5]

I think you’re fine as you are then. Roon isn’t designed for your situation.

However.....
If you’d like some Naim separates Hi-Fi in one room, a few sets of ceiling speakers around the house, some portable music players dotted about and some outdoor zones, you can do this with Roon.

You can mix-n-match a range of brands and playback Hi-Res files. That’s what it’s for really

[B17NNS]

Roon integrates perfectly with Tidal. Download the free trial and give it a whirl. There really is no finer way to organise and engage with your music collection.

[Red 5]

I think you’re fine as you are then. Roon isn’t designed for your situation.

However.....
If you’d like some Naim separates Hi-Fi in one room, a few sets of ceiling speakers around the house, some portable music players dotted about and some outdoor zones, you can do this with Roon.

You can mix-n-match a range of brands and playback Hi-Res files. That’s what it’s for really

[Deranged Rover]

B17NNS said:

There really is no finer way to organise and engage with your music collection.

Forgive me, but I’m confused by this statement. Surely your music collection is already ‘organised’ in that you just type in the name of the track, ,album or artist you want and there it is.

Also, by ‘engage with’, do you mean ‘play’? If so, how does Roon make this any easier?

[Itsallicanafford]

Deranged Rover said:

Forgive me, but I’m confused by this statement. Surely your music collection is already ‘organised’ in that you just type in the name of the track, ,album or artist you want and there it is.

Also, by ‘engage with’, do you mean ‘play’? If so, how does Roon make this any easier?

Firstly, thanks for all the replies.

I think i can answer this to some extent from reading the web site and you tube reviews (event though i am yet to download). Say for example you are a fan of Stevie Ray Vaughan (RIP). Your library may contain his albums, Roon will then present you with other music available in Tidal streaming services etc (i.e EP's. live performances etc). I think the clever part is that Roon will then present in detail other collaborations, ie. SRV was hired by Bowie to play lead guitar on the Lets dance LP. I presume Roon would present this level of detail to you.

My point is that something like Tidal will do this to a certain extent, but it cannot dig too deep, i.e on Tidal it will show you albums he appears on but these will mainly be his direct songs on 'classic rock' type albums but it does not have the ability to look deeper into the artist. I have always loved the guitar playing on the lets dance album and always loved SRV, but i only stumbled across that it was him playing by accident and i presume Roon would just present this to me.

Roon users, am i correct?

The problem is that it needs to be run through a music server as well as an ipad type app. The question for me is that, is it worth the expense of setting up the hardware for this extra functionality?

[Itsallicanafford]

Just downloaded Roon - im in! With My Stevie Ray Vaughan example, it didn't just link him to playing with Bowie but with half a dozen other artists...

i think i have a work around as well. I can use a laptop as my core, download the albums i like into Tidal and then play through tidal using Naim multiroom...no need for a dedicated core

[B17NNS]

Deranged Rover said:

Forgive me, but I’m confused by this statement. Surely your music collection is already ‘organised’ in that you just type in the name of the track, album or artist you want and there it is.

Type it in where?

My music collection consists of thousands of flac files (songs) ripped from CD's in hundreds of folders (albums) stored on a NAS. In that sense it's organised yes. I could click my way around and find the artist, album and song but it's not much fun and it's not elegant or intuiative. It doesn't inspire you to explore or discover/re-discover. What you need is some sort of interface to manage and enjoy it all with.

Deranged Rover said:

Also, by ‘engage with’, do you mean ‘play’? If so, how does Roon make this any easier?

What Roon does is takes those raw files and attaches oodles of metadata to them. It then presents that to you in a very pretty and user friendly way. By engage I mean interact. Like we did in the old days. Album on the record player, NME to the left of you, sleeve in your hand as you read the lyrics or enjoy the cover art.

An iPad replaces the last two items but whilst listening to the music there is lots more to enjoy should you want to.

I'll take one artist as an example. So I search for Guns n' Roses. On the main page for the artist I can see:

A bio of the band
Clickable links to bios of each band member (past and present) - clicking on those shows their other associations/bands
Upcoming gigs (plus clickable links to purchase tickets)
Clickable links to the bands social media pages
Clickable links to other artists within the bands genre(s)
My most recent played tracks by the band
The albums, singles and EP's
Who the artist is similar to
Who the artist is followed by
Who the artist is influenced by
Who the artist is associated with





Clicking on an album gives me a review of the album. The option to view the sleeve and booklet. Clicking on a song allows me to read the lyrics.



There are tons of other features along with a fully featured set of DSP controls. Download the free trial and give it a whirl

Itsallicanafford said:

I can use a laptop as my core, download the albums i like into Tidal and then play through tidal using Naim multiroom...no need for a dedicated core

I use an old Mac mini as my core but yes, it will run on pretty much anything. I think they recommend an SSD for Roon itself purely so accessing metadata is fast/slick.

Edited by B17NNS on Thursday 22 November 16:31