100% agree! I set it up as audio only and still buy every upgrade regardless.
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Iāve been buying every other upgrade since they donāt seem to make any appreciable changes to the audio side. It works good for me, other than the Qobuz issue ā¦
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I love it. Lots of hostility that I find as misplaced given they allow you to stay with 1.8. Iām seeing echoes of the Sonos kerfuffle when they briefly discontinued support for older gear. They ended up forking their software into S1 and S2 leaving older gear to operate without new features. Change is hard, I suppose.
ARC still has a minor issue with dropped signals; but two, three taps and I get my music back; played Lakes of Canada, wonderful.
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I just like the fact that even though it will resample based upon the connection that Iām getting the music I know in the version that I like. My own streaming service, as it were.
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The problem with staying with 1.8 is that sooner or laterā and most likely soonerāitāll be obsolete. Bug fixes and feature enhancements will go into 2.0 and maybe 1.8 if they have the manpower or the will.
So your time with 1.8 is limited at best.
Boom, you nailed it. I had EAC apparently destroy one of my CD-ROM drives well over 15 years agoāit kept grinding away at a CD it had trouble reading, and the drive ended up not reading many discs well after that. If it seems strange to mourn a CD-ROM drive, this one seemed to have some sort of secret sauce that was able to ārescueā CDs I owned which no CD player or any of my other CD-ROM drives was able to read. Thankfully I had already ripped my problem discs before EAC apparently burned it up.
I, too, use dBpoweramp. 
It has a āsecureā mode also, but isnāt some janky software that apparently never leaves beta and has too many things that could go wrong. dBpoweramp is more fun when a computer build has more than one CD-ROM drive, as you can use it in a batch mode (might be a separate program in the suite?) and rip more than one CD simultaneously. I tried a third drive but was barely able to keep up with the two. But I could get through 40-45 CDs per hour using two drives. Thankfully the bulk of my ripping is in the past.
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Thatās the risk, I agree. Someone like me is hoping that they take the complaints to heart (you know, actually listening to their paying customers who support them) and at least make some sort of change in 2.0 so that our entire household digital music distribution system isnāt knocked offline anytime there is a blip in the Internet service. Moving the programās processing tasks to cloud servers was A Very Poor Decision on their part, and the only āfixā is to stay on software that, reading between the lines, they admit will be obsolete in time.
They did release a bugfix update yesterday for 1.8 Legacy, which fixes an ongoing issue of Roon crashing anytime the window lost focus for a period of time. And I imagine security issues will still be patched. One does have to be careful that they have installed the 1.8 Legacy versions for Roon Server and all Roon Remote instances, otherwise the system will update itself to 2.0.
For offline use of a library, thereās always Sonos!
Iām making a wild guess here with no real information and only trying to decipher some things Danny has said in the past month. The 2.0 version could easily be put in a state where it functions offline. However, I believe they are planning something in future which, probably already has some level of development behind it, where Roon truly does require access to their cloud back-end. They just choose to make 2.0 the ātransitionā as the always on requirement. This wild guess, if there is any weight to it, makes for a very difficult decision at Roon if they do decide to ātake the complaints to heartā. It means retooling this new thing, causing delay, as well as looking at the overall architecture in everything they planned for future, and 2.0, to keep local files functional. It also means deciding what āfunctionalā means and for how long since their content providers require timeouts it canāt work forever.
Now, what is not such a wild guess as the above, if Roon does decide that āofflineā is still a feature they need to support they will do it after whatever great new thing is coming that requires always on. And they will do it, either by supporting two versions, or weāll be waiting another year plus while they rebuild 2.X+ to support a ānewā offline mode.
But thenā¦ if weāre waiting a year plusā¦ they should put resources behind 1.8 Legacy and keep it around for all of 2023 at least.
Guesses and opinion on my part.
EDIT: on a personal note, Iām good with Roon being online only. Iāve got stable Internet plus backup here. I plan on getting something like a Lumin or other streamer that will function locally just fine and access the same files as Roon.
Thatās an interesting idea since I already have a Lumin T2. But Iāll be honest their app and user interface comes nowhere near Roonās. But of course, their primary focus is hardware.
From what I understood while reading through that trainwreck of a thread on Roonās forum, the search function now processes in the cloud, along with other functions (not sure which). And apparently, that was their āanswerā to some users complaining how slow Roon was operating on their systems. Iām not on the latest/greatest hardware hereāI have a rather modest Roon Server setup and it performs wonderfully, especially now that I have the process restart every night. (It would get laggy after a week or two.)
I have very stable Internet compared to others I know, even more stable than other users who have the same provider I do. But, what happens when it isnāt good, or, if I switch providers (Iām giving thought to changing over to fiber Internet)? Or, what happens when we relocate in a year or two? Based on many accounts Iāve read about various providers (at a site like broadbandreports.com), fixes to the incoming Internet pipe can take a day or two, or take months as the company denies their is a problem (translatedāthey canāt find the issue). Even DNS issues can shut down an Internet connectionāa couple of decades ago when I had Comcast for Internet, their DNS servers were out at least once a week; naturally, I moved to third-party DNS servers and never had an issue past that. This is just one of many issues an Internet connection can have.
We are also putting a lot of faith in their cloud-based backend. What happens when their server(s) have issues, or their cloud provider has Internet connectivity problems (or the Internet backbone itself has issues)? Boom, weāre offline, and itās nothing we are doing on our end.
Thatās the thing that bothers me. My Internet connection has been nearly flawless. But what about many others who donāt have that experience, or have future issues with their connections? And, why should we have to purchase more hardware or software we donāt want, just for those times the connection might flake out on us? We shouldnāt. Roon is expensive enough that we shouldnāt need a backup plan for their ill-conceived upgrade.
I do hope they revise it in future versions so we can continue using Roon like we used to. But it has to start with Roonās management accepting that their latest upgrade canāt work for many of their customers, and making changes to accommodate that. Sticking us on a legacy version with little possibility of future support is not the answer we need. But for now, itās working.
I only raise a bit of a fuss since other than this issue, and a couple of other minor things that donāt really matter in the big picture, Roonās basic architecture makes music easy to locate and play on my systems throughout the house. I can hand my cheap tablet to anyone in the house, and they are easily able to figure out how to play music with it. Thatās why I feel itās worth paying for year after year. There really isnāt anything else like it out there that Iāve found.
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Tried to slog through all 900 posts (as of now) of that thread, and iām exhausted.
Iām lucky that my internet connection is pretty stable, so I havenāt joined the chorus of boos.
If my internet is down, I could listen to CDs or records, or I could have my Mac Mini Roon Core connect to my phoneās hotspot temporarily. (Or I could just stream Tidal/Qobuz or Radio Paradise via cellular on the phone directly.)
The other option for those rare occasions that the internet is down (and the user has local files), a person could use Audirvana to connect to their server.
We get outraged by so much these days.
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Thereās so many options that can keep tunes flowing.
- Standby software like Audirvana.
- A turntable.
- A CD/SACD player.
- The Radio.
- Streaming from a phone to an endpoint.
- A reel-to reel.
- Etcā¦
The folks on the Roon forum are mostly axe grinders. I wonder how many of them have alternative power sources for times when the electricity goes out.
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Roon doesnāt work because internet, or Roon servers down.
#1. Nobody dies
#2. Go for a walk
#3. Read a book
#4. Play local files via other means. For example, listen to records.
No Internetā¦no Roonā¦No problem here.
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- Buy a ticket and go to a concert
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- Take the dog for a walk and listen to a podcast about composting with worms
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Yeah, itās a bit of a first world problem. Like breaking your iPad screen by dropping your iPhone on it. People want everything, all of the time, and the culture of complaint is out of control.
- Peel, core and dehydrate 100lbs of apples.
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I have been using Roon ARC from my phone via Bluetooth to a set of KEF W2ās at the āotherā house and it works seamlessly. It is really nice to be able to access my library remotely. And it was very easy to setup. Kudos to Roon for not releasing the software before it was ready.
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