I could have waited for ARC in trade of being able to create my own reviews in Roon.
I do have an inverter (generator) in the garage, ready to rip. 
(I ran it so much during the last power outage that I had to shut it down and do a scheduled oil change!)
My issue is that when I purchase software as expensive as Roon (especially with its hardware requirements included), I have expectations that it should work anytime I call on it to be there. When I purchased it, there was no such requirement, or I never would have signed on. I also should not be expected to purchase backup software and maintain my music libraries in both, especially since Iāve tried the others and do not like them (Audirvana, JRiver, a handful of others).
There really are four dependencies at play hereāavailability of my Internet, availability of Internet to/from their cloud servers, the uptime/downtime of the cloud server backend at the host, and the uptime/downtime of Roonās own code on those cloud servers. In technology, nothing is ever 100% guaranteed.
Itās only logical that they should have considered these issues beyond their control. Maybe make the advanced features unavailable until the service is restored? They already do this when Qobuz is unavailable, soā¦ 
.
Honestly, I doubt being offline will ever affect me and yes, I can do without, or spin vinyl if I happen to be in the single room in the house with a turntable. But the idea that anything beyond my own stupidity that takes my own music library offline does not sit well with me. I just donāt think they gave this a lot of thought.
Iām as entitled to complain about it as any other paying Roon customer would beā¦and they could certainly stand to be a little more polite and welcoming to user comments on their own forums. Itās a bad look.
2 Likes
Polite response by Roon leadership is clearly in deficit.
I clearly donāt understand the difficulty in playing local media when the internet is unavailable. It seems like a programming challenge, nothing more. Since they havenāt committed to this functionality, itās simply not a priority for Roon corp.
I have been watching the Roon forum, and the concern isnāt as widespread as I thought it would be. Then again, I donāt know how many Roon users are active on the forum.
1 Like
Yeah, first world problem, man. Get a dog. Theyāre never offline.
2 Likes
I didnāt know you had Focal Utopiasā¦very, very nice.
They are Sopra 2. If they turn into something else, they will become Vivid Kaya 90ās.
2 Likes
Focal makes such beautiful speakers. I love they way they look.
1 Like
I like that he brought a stormtrooper for backup. 
1 Like
Thank you Sir.
1 Like
I left Roon Early Access today. The issues over the past week were a bit much for me. I know I could have waited to take the EA B1159 until after the holiday, but I didnāt. I know I could have restored from a backup, but I didnāt. I know what to expect being involved in EA. But to be honest, I just wanted to use Roon over the holiday hassle free. Iāve personally lost my taste for EA.
There were just to many issues with this last EA. It was more like an Alpha then a Beta. On top of that, a large number of Roon employees were on holiday. I appreciate that people deserve time off. But, I canāt imagine why they would drop this or any update and then go on vacation. I have never seen so many people post issues in the EA section of the Roon Forum as I have this past week. Itās a Master Class in what not to do.
Unfortunately I am not surprised that thereās not been any comments whatsoever from Roon leadership recognizing how poorly this EA release is performing. As the leader of a number of large services at work, I feel responsible for my services and team 24x7x365. Vacation, ill, on a plane, it doesnāt matter.
Rant and EA over.
4 Likes
Bleeding edge isnt always what we were looking for or expecting in a new or āimprovedā product.
1 Like
Expecting software I pay a lot of money for to function as advertised is not a āfirst world problem.ā Or actually, paying more money for, since theyāve announced a price increase.
One comment I read from a Roon staffer was something along the lines of āwe donāt want to code a Foobar replacement just to give offline access.ā No, dude, just fix your software so it doesnāt break when Internet and/or servers/processes are offline.
Unfortunately Iāve seen this in other applications or āsystems.ā Developers get such tunnelvision, and work in such an ideal environment (on a test server located on their own network), that the idea of a failover for less than ideal conditions seems to escape them.
There is a thread to vote on preserving offline access for Roon but, in typical fashion, they already flagged the title ā[not on roadmap]ā. Not good. That snubs everyone whoās voted/voting on it. Sure, Roon would love your feedback, as long as they agree with it. 
I am in a similar situationāthe work I do supports servers and processes that must be up and running. With one of the larger clients, Iām considering moving to a managed host (more āmanagedā than the current host) even though it costs more, only so I know issues are handled when I am not available. Iāve had those panic texts/calls/emails when things go offline. Iāve been using a monitoring process (āmonitā for those in the Linux world) to send me notifications via Pushover to monitor resource usage levels when they exceed the limits Iāve set, or check for the presence of running processes.
Sadly only 302 votes. This is what I meant by the number of Forum participants vs users. I know several shops who have stopped selling Roon because of support issue burden that they had to deal with.
So cute! 
If you want an example of poor customer service, go to the Roon forum and search for āsincerest apologiesā. Then sort by Last Post.
How many times can they fall back on āweāve been dealing with a higher-than-usual volumeā?
If that was my team, I would be very disappointed in myself.
1 Like
Isnāt there an old adage that if someone likes a product or service they tell one person, but if they have a complaint, they will tell ten people? That is one reason that forums and other community support venues can seem overly negativeāmore people will sign up to seek support and/or complain about what theyāve spent their hard-earned money on. Same with product reviews, I would bet. Personally, I try to review everything I purchase, but many will review only when they have a problem.
And I also believe that a small percentage of Roon users probably participate in their forums, as is typical of many consumers. Roon, being software, probably skews that somewhat, and a higher than average number of consumers likely use the forum.
302 votes is still a decent number of users, and they really shouldnāt ignore customer feedback. They will eventually end up as a company with āpretty darned goodā software that is toxic to deal with.
Maybe with the price increase, they can afford to get someone in public relations to be the public voice of the company, as well as some additional help to reply to customer issues. Having a developer step in occasionally to pass along technical information is fine, but weāve seen how defensive their staff gets when users like myself point out a flaw in the product and they stubbornly refuse to see the flaw in their logic. Hot heads and bad attitudes are the worst thing a company can have facing the publicā¦
2 Likes
I learned there are ~60K registered forum users and ~250K licensed users.