We have some exciting details to share about several changes we’ve made to improve your experience while using Roon at home and ARC on the go.
But first, we’d like to thank you again for your candid responses to our user survey. Your input has given us valuable insight regarding new features and needed fixes you’d like to see. We appreciate your help pointing out areas that need attention, and we’re committed to addressing each of them to ensure you have the best experience possible with Roon.
One of the messages that came through loud and clear in your responses was that performance and stability are top priorities for your overall enjoyment of Roon. Since shipping our suite of playlist feature improvements last month, we’ve turned the microscope on how Roon behaves and responds on a granular level during daily use. We’ve combed your feedback closely and investigated the most significant issues you’ve reported.
Our new software update compiles a nice batch of changes that deliver real improvements, but we’d like to emphasize that this is just our first pass. Work of this nature will be ongoing. We’ll continue reviewing your survey comments and gathering fresh feedback on the success of these efforts.
Our latest release covers improvements to the following areas:
- Speed improvements
- Efficiency enhancements
- Accommodating collection quirks
- Exterminating longstanding bugs
- ARC upgrades
We’re excited to share the benefits of these improvements with you. Please read on for a closer look at all the changes we’ve made.
Making Roon faster
Roon makes a range of music tasks easier, intuitive, and more enjoyable. But it’s an incredibly complex piece of software that combines a feature-rich personal streaming service with the characteristics of digital audio workstations—all running on a small device in your home. It’s a cool mashup, but it presents some real challenges. There are countless ways a system like this can gradually become slower as Roon’s features and your music libraries & listening histories grow.
While reviewing your survey and community feedback closely, we found that people’s main complaint is general software sluggishness when responding to actions or page loading that eventually requires a restart – especially when Roon has been running for a while.
We attacked our common enemy, the dreaded jellyfish, on several fronts and have made significant progress. The battle isn’t over, but we’ve gained ground. We’d like to hear from you to understand how we’re doing and what remains to be done to make Roon more responsive and enjoyable.
Efficiency enhancements
We also examined critical areas of Roon’s library management, search, and networking systems and made improvements that speed up these processes. In testing these upgrades, Roon loads libraries 2-3x faster at startup and imports new content almost twice as fast as previous builds.
We optimized our search engine to better utilize multiple CPU cores. This reduces the time it takes to search local files and frees up resources for other tasks when updating the search index.
Finally, we’ve overhauled the code used to discover and track audio devices on your network. The previous approach contributed to a level of background system usage that caused app delays in some cases. We’ve tightened that up, and things should run optimally from here on out.
Accommodating organization idiosyncrasies
It’s no surprise that music hoarders are eccentric, and some of us do weird things. It’s cool; there’s no judgment here.
But software kind of freaks out when it encounters 4000 unidentified Grateful Dead bootlegs or people with tens of thousands of tracks “organized” in a single folder named heady-versions or Phishfood. Jazz and Classical fans, don’t laugh. We’ve seen you put an obscene number of tracks into tags like Great American Songbook: Jazz, The Complete ‘Round Midnight Dossier, and Beethoven Bedlam.
We all have our organizational quirks that make complete sense to us but seem insane to others. Those scenes in High-Fidelity didn’t make themselves up. While the scenarios above are not mainstream, they are entirely normal music-obsessive behaviors.
So, it’s vital that Roon performs well in these cases. We’ve made some focused optimizations to ensure that our more extreme music collectors experience better results – from 10 to 200x better in our testing.
So, weird on, we got your back!
Addressing longstanding bugs
Longstanding bugs are usually longstanding because they are uniquely challenging in some way. They’re difficult to reproduce reliably, require a specific or complex setup, or have other nuanced characteristics. We made serious headway here, squashing 25+ bugs overall (see them all here). We also doubled down to resolve a few longstanding problems.
We tackled a few biggies that caused white screen hangs on Windows, unexpected volume changes on iOS Roon remotes, display issues on the Track Browser and Playlist screens, and occasional “Metadata Improver Paused” errors. Some of these annoyances have been reported for years. And like you, we’re glad to finally put them behind us.
Improving Roon ARC
Alongside changes to Roon, we’ve improved the performance and reliability of ARC’s CarPlay and Android Auto features, plus fixed issues with image loading and missing content.
Some of you have expressed an interest in using ARC more often, but connectivity issues have interfered. Tracing these issues can be incredibly challenging because they intertwine with so many factors, such as user location and environment. We’ve made a few tweaks to this release that are already showing some improvements.
But to better understand these issues, we’ve added new diagnostic and analytics tools to help us determine what’s going wrong when you have trouble using ARC on the go. This work will continue, and we welcome your feedback while we get things dialed in.
Conclusion
We’re thrilled to share the improvements we’ve made to Roon based on your feedback and remain committed to making Roon as enjoyable as possible with targeted fixes and new features.
Your help is greatly appreciated, and we’ll continue to monitor your comments and feedback to ensure Roon meets your needs and expectations. As always, we thank you for being part of the Roon community!
Still not using Roon? See what all the excitement is about with a free 14-day trial!