Reading through the 2023 goals thread, there’s a lot of people considering moves away from Roon.
What are the best options / alternates to Roon?
What are the pros & cons to making the change?
The only one I’ve ever really considered is Audervana. But the limited streaming options always turned me away.
I’m not sure there is a good alternative if you want its features.
I moan about it a lot, but I’ll continue to pay the Roon Tax for now.
I started throwing together something for my own use, but it’s miles away from usable and I only really work on it when I’m bored.
For local only there are a lot of options, though most won’t stream to anything.
LMS/Squeezebox, but I haven’t really looked at what that eco system will do.
Volumio has some streaming integration, but it’s a pretty terrible interface.
Audirvana is the other option.
I only have been using roon for month or so because they had black Friday deal - 3 months for 2 USD and I can see why people like it.
At the same time LMS provides similar functions at least those I used thus far for free.
Sure LMS interface is ugly AF especially streaming integration but it works very well on every device and is hard to beat for free.
I believe with volumio you have to pay premium as well to onboard streaming like tidal.
Has anyone looked into Stylus, made by Euphony Audio:
At first glance it looks like a Roon clone.
Yes, requires a subscription for streaming support, my understanding is they have to use a central server for the integration, though I’m not sure why.
Roon’s win isn’t that it’s a good music player, or even will stream to various end points, it’s the library management, metadata, and seamless streaming service integration, plus the DSP if you use it…
I have as many as 5 or 6 versions of some recordings, just having them collapsed to a single entity, being able to prefer one and get to the others quickly is a huge win for me.
I also like not having to remember if a particular release was by Stevie Ray Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble, or The Vaughan Brothers.
But for a lot of people who heavily use playlists a lot of that is useless.
Agreed. And I would add new music discovery (which is related to your point here). When I’ve moved away from Roon in the past, my new music discovery almost completely vanished. Qobuz is improving in this area, but the Roon metadata makes discovery a very impressive experience.
Reading the Stylus web page (which is not very clear), it’s tempting to try their endpoint with Roon…
I still mostly use Spotify for that. Just have been there for ages and they have best recommendations from services I tried. Plus it plays all the music on my TV/soundbar.
Not ideal either as I need to manage two services playlist and so on but with no hi res Spotify it is what it is for me.
I use Roon simply because it’s the way I can get high res bit perfect Qobuz to play on my Auralic Aries G1 while controlling it from my Mac.
If there’s an alternative to that, I’d happily ditch Roon.
Volumio is a lot cheaper, which helps and I think version 3 has become an all around improvement to the older system. Spotify streaming is in the free version but not Tidal or Qobuz. Spotify worked well enough but Tidal on Volumio has been a definite step up in my experience.
It took me a while to be comfy with the front end as I find it a bit stripped down compared to the web player but if I want to I can always do some music exploration on the pc and pick up things later on to listen to intently and I tend to do a lot of discovery via Youtube anyway.
I’m super happy with Volumio now, the free version was just not quite what I wanted but the little tweaks the subscription gives just tipped it over into ideal for me.
With pi based installation I would say that there is a lot of technical performance to be found if you get into the dac and power supply hat rabbit hole but from experience I can say that you really have to want to do that and be happy spending a fair amount of time on it - it was a hobby in itself for a good year before I built my streamer.
Roon doesn’t have a lot of users. I’m always surprised by that fact, given all of the pervasive feel about it in the industry. I’m also surprised by the fact that so people have stated they’ve got a lot of issues with it. I’m on my second year of membership and in that time they had one release (which was bad) that hosed things up and it took them nearly an entire month to come up with a fix. After that I simply don’t upgrade to a new version until I know it’s stable and don’t introduce issues that would impact my utilization. After I spent time properly setting up my NUC, removing all the superfluous Windows crap from it and installing Roon Server on it, I really don’t have an issue with my library delivery to any of my multiple endpoints.
As much as rank on Apple, iTunes and their ecosystem was way ahead of its time. Yes not software for audiophiles but Roon is the closest thing I’ve used that gave me that seamless iTunes ecosystem. Then on top of that you throw in the Roon metadata functionality and it becomes by far the best audiophile environment IMO.
Yeah it’s an expense, but then again it’s not “affordable” for the demographic given that we don’t quibble about spending $600 for a cable.
There are things I would like Roon to do better but to answer this question, life after Roon for me would be when there’s a better option for me as I’m not married to it in any way.
If I only had one PC that I played all my music through I would use MusicBee and life would be simpler. But I want the best sound I can get with the most functionality I can access that’s easily implemented and today, that’s Roon.
Hello,
I am still a happy Audirvana 3.5 user.
I tried Studio as well as Roon and both were missing something.
Roon has a lot of gimmicks in Blrd which I like, but it fails at simple things.
I can play my Tidal playlist, but if I want to add a track to the playlist it only goes into the Roon playlist, not the Tidal playlist.
Also the “Roon language” I personally find very confusing as a beginner Nuc,Endpiont,Roon ready ect ect…
All these things spoil the start.
Audirvana 3.5, like Studio, is much easier to set up and use.
Typically French is that the operation can be confusing for others and takes time.
Studio in particular has so much crap implemented that you don’t know what it is.
I didn’t find it convincing in terms of sound either.
Hq Player just makes the hours but also not cheap.but still an option like the Audirvana 3.5 at that time.
I would buy something like Audirvana 3.5 again with better operation if it is good.
These subscription models only fulfilled a certain point for me, but not everything.
Roon does a lot right but also wrong, Audirvana Studio as well.
But for a subscription model it is too little for me.
There should be much faster updates, especially when things get stuck, more intuitive for users, easy to set up, and also support that can really help.
And much less holus pokus to sell.
Then these programmes would run much more reliably and stably and a subscription would be justified.
Sure, there is no Jriver and the like, but it takes time and is similarly complicated to set up.
I am new to the Roon ecosystem so I do not have the experience that many here have. I can only relay my short time view of it. I like what it does and how it sounds coming from Amazon music HD as well as Spotify. I find the sound and clarity to be a vast improvement over both of those. The info relayed about the album/artist is also much better in my opinion. I unlike many I feel chose to purchase the Nucleus to separate my pc from the equation. With the purchase of the Nucleus it came with a free year of Roon so I will at least give it that time for me to decide how I proceed. The fact that I had a 2tb drive and a external cd burner already is a little bonus. There are of course other choices that I could have made but I trust the opinion of certain individuals on here and so chose THIS route. A year from now there may be something else better but then again maybe Roon will have done something that sets it even more apart in the chase for what we all seek. Just my 3 cents.
Agreed. It’s a small market to begin with, but they do a good job looking more pervasive than they are.
I thought you ran ROCK? Unless you have a use case for the NUC apart from running Roon, I would recommend giving it a try. I’ve found it to be noticably more responsive and stable. And slap on a fanless case and you’ve basically got a Nucleus.
In the end this is where I keep landing. I’m not married to it, and would replace if I found better. But I am hooked on using my iPad as a remote to control playback and discover new music, while kicked back in my chair listening. It’s hard to fully replicate the lean-back easy use of Roon.
Reminded me to add: Volumio does have a phone app. I always forget as I rarely use it.
I’ve really wanted to try it but I use the NUC as a convenient file server for other things and it’s nice to have that. I may wind up switching to ROCK as I know it will be better still as far as the Roon experience, but once I moved to Roon Server I’d say 80% of the quality of life issues I had with Roon went away and I stopped there.
Anyone that is using or trying out LMS/Squeeze must also use the Material Skin mod, esp if you think it doesn’t look good visually. It def doesn’t look like Roon, but should look closer to other software.
Innuos Sense 2.0 software is good. You add Quoboz and Tidal and it has radio feature too. The SQ though to my ear is what was the best part. It was developed to play well with their equipment.
Otherwise nothing else I have tried even comes close to ROON
Ill be following here, and would love to see what you all are doing with LMS/Squeezebox. I eventually will need something like that. I know there are probably some music server/streamers that fit me best but i really like the clean, clear, well separated sound the lumin gives and i dont see myself moving away from it unless i go real big on that front.
As an Audeze headphone enthusiast, the Audeze EQ presets for Roon – based on convolution files and not parametric EQ – are worth the price alone for me.
I’ve tried oodles of EQ and convolution files from the community for my LCD-X 2021, and the Audeze preset with linear filter is the king.
Maybe the engineers who tuned the presets know what they’re doing because they also tuned the headphone? 
I know some are turned off by Audeze’s acceptance of EQ, especially with its Reveal plug-in. I love it. It provides options – you can still listen to the headphone bone stock, if desired. But the Audeze preset in Roon converts my LCD-X 2021 from a very good headphone into a GREAT headphone.
Add the metadata, music discovery, great interface, stable software and more, and Roon is a pretty easy spend for me.
