Yes I also think it’s a great explanation and I see several similarities to my thoughts. I also cherish Roon for the exploration effect and I used it as you parallel to Jriver for some time, enjoying the Discovery features of Roon while playing the music from Jriver. However that’s not really convenient.
In my case unfortunately it’s not only the sound quality that drags me to using JRiver mainly, but also the several categorized custom views I use for navigating to the music I want to listen to and the quick access functions from the play now screens of JRiver. There are also many library management functions I need Jriver for. On the other hand ROON provides the nice wiki-like functions
For me, as long as a server software that sounds great and explores info in a great way doesn’t offer the flexibility in customizing I need, I still don’t want to use it for searching albums and playing back, just for exploring add. info.
I think in your case if your HW would only support ROON and if it would sound great, you’d be happy and leave Jriver…in my case it’s different
I use Spotify in the same capacity…however, as I’ve mentioned before, I can sit in front of the Spotify stream for hours without ever feeling my sound quality experience is diminished in any way by the compressed streaming format of the content. Not just because my Esoteric spins some magic on the decoding, because the DSJ was pretty good at the same thing also.
Thanks and what a thoughtful and heartfelt note of explanation. Love it. Yes, we are not trying to beat Roon, just live up to their standards and build a package of hardware and software that work flawlessly together and produce unequalled sound. It’s really the only way it can be done. IMHO.
As a person who works in the mobile development space, my colleagues and I are continually surprised by how many consumers, and companies, truly believe everyone has an iOS device and that Android is only a sliver of the market which is untrue.
Granted, the Android interface customizations by Samsung and others are very problematic for users but with the incredible market performance of Google’s Pixel phones which run an elegant pure Android OS, consumers now have choices if they want elite phones.
I’m a borderline OS X fan boy (laptops and desktops) but not everyone wants to shell out $1,000 for an iPhone (top-of-theline iphone that is).
I continually find short-sighted and surprising how many think iThingys rule the world. They are less than 15% of the market worldwide, and roughly one-third in the US. Non iThings are huge.
You are very fortunate finding that data compressed streaming sounds good enough. I find the artifacts distracting, sadly disengaging me from the music.
Android is actually about 80% of the market. The lion’s share by anyone’s standards. Apple has 80% of the profits and 20% of the market. Most Android phones are sold at a loss.
" The Cupertino company typically dominates global profit share despite not holding a large amount of marketshare in the smartphone segment. In the first quarter of 2015 alone, Apple accounted for 92 percent of global smartphone profit on 20 percent of actual smartphone sales. Similarly, in the fourth quarter of 2014 Apple captured nearly 90 percent of smartphone profit."
Tablet of any kind or phone. If those are unavailable, something hard to imagine in 2018 (no disrespect intended) there is a quite robust web interface that you are looking at already. But, without a tablet I am not sure how you are going to access a web browser. If by computer like you’re writing your post on, then that’s no problem. Or, if you have a tablet of some sort, then you don’t need a smart phone.
Bearing in mind that outboard storage drives have different levels of audio quality, and the even the quality of a ethernet cable between the a NAS and a renderer can make a dramatic difference, won’t Music files sourced from the internal drives of the Octave have the potential to sound better than files sourced from an out board drive or NAS?
Potential yes, but if we’ve done our job well enough, no. We have gone to extraordinary hardware lengths to galvanically isolate the output Digital Lens of the server from everything else. So, in theory, it should not matter how the data are gotten and processed. But, that’s only theory and nothing’s perfect. I’ll let you know how close we get to perfect.
thanks for making that prototype available.
I really like the nesting of genres, how do you manage that?
Does every track need to have 2 separate fields in the metadata, or is only the more detailed genre recorded on the tracks and a table maps all these genre to the few high level ones?
I spent ages changing all the genre in my collection to just a few very high level genres, so I could pick by genre without having a choice of 200…
Ho does the random on work? does it play the current queue in random order, or can it use the library and build a queue on the fly?
