I really do like the convenience of this.
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Again, guys I want to make this perfectly clear. I system, one set of ears, 1 set-up. I was weary of posting because it is absolutely dependent upon my ears and what I am perceiving but it was enough to make a statement about it and my own personal preference.
That stated, I’m away from home for a few weeks and absolutely want to try HP’s on this one system set up and go back and forth between the 2 streaming services to see for myself if there is any difference I can quantify.
I’m not pushing one or the other service for anyone, I’m simply trying to note my own perception of the two and that there is enough value added to tilt me towards a preference.
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I look forward to getting a second set of ears on the system and doing some back and forth swapping of equipment to note the variations in sound character and we can then put up a proper post based on our listening test. 
I get excited and am very happy to post my own experiences but am hesitant to make recommendations because they are based on my tastes and desires. 2 sets of ears on the same sound system will give me the confidence to really speak my mind one way or the other 
LMSers and Squeeze Guys and Squeeze Gals, I ask for your feedback and input as I am looking to move off my Lumin into something more fitting. While i was originally looking at a used Aurender due to its attractive package, app, and VU meters.(@dB_Cooper) I think maybe it could be time to not only redo my source equipment but also it’s structure and I think I am going to buy into LMS/Squeeze…
I guess the questions I have for the current users are…
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Are there any big complaints you have or missing features you are missing from elsewhere.
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Plugins? Must haves? Nice to haves? Interesting to play with?
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Skins? Is there more than Material?
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Can you view by the established folder structure? (IE: i have my library file structure as Artist > Album > Track, but when i sort by artist on my dap it uses the tags, which will split any songs with a featured artist into their own realm)
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If i have the server set up on an antipodes server (my hopeful next piece) , can i then set up squeeze on multiple other machines and use that to pull to those machines.
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Any great advances over the past year or anything youre excited for? Better qobuz integration, continue playing after playlists. Ive read of some decent feature adds in other forums.
Thanks in advance. I wanted to set something up to test this week but i caught a bug and have been flattened in bed until last night.
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My brain hurts after reading this post. I of little experience went from iTunes one year to Roon the following year. 
It sounds to me like you’ve got two questions going on here though, sound quality and UI functionality. If you’re going to put emphasis on an ecosystem though I hear Innuos has an actual nice interface and a variety of hardware flavors from bridges to servers to streamers.
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Hmmm maybe i should simplify what i wrote and be less aimless conversational. That usually helps 
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I guess mostly what I am trying to see from the LMS/Squeeze users; what aspects of that system have you used to optimize your experience, have you hit any notable hitches along the way, is there anything else you would like to share about your experience?
As long as it is available and viable, i would prefer to go to something like an antipodes and lms vs aurender (which is very good software and SQ but a closed ecosystem).
Also i believe innous runs off an lms backbone.
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I’m still not a person than can answer this but my brain didn’t hurt with your explanation so I’ve got it! Look forward to the responses.
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I usual tend to write coherent posts, but yeah i agree that one needed an edit.
It’s been 3 months since I switched from Roon to LMS/Squeeze. There are some features that I definitely miss about Roon, but I’ve been able to make it work this long with Squeeze so I guess that’s something lol.
My (personal) biggest gripe about LMS/Squeeze is the Qobuz integration. It just really isn’t user-friendly like it is on Roon. An example of this is (with the material skin at least), you have to go to Apps > Qobuz > Search if you want to search for a song or album you want to listen to via Qobuz, whereas on Roon you use the search bar on the top and it will pull up music from your Library and Qobuz. That, and how it pulls up results is pretty terribly laid out as well. There’s also the lack of a viable replacement for Roon Radio atm. Roon also has premade EQ presets (like for Audeze), while I’m not big on EQ personally, I’m sure there are those that enjoy that kind of option for from-the-manufacturer eq tuning. Lastly, there’s Roon ARC which can be nice while you’re out and about and you want to listen to the music on your server (it’s also nice if you have music on your server that isn’t available on most streaming services).
However, despite all of those nitpicks I will say I noticed a slight bump in sound quality using LMS/Squeeze vs Roon when I A/B tested the two services back and forth a few months ago. And that is what got me to try switching long-term, which has definitely been a learning process. First of all, here are all the things I’m using with my server…
- Material Skin (yup, tried a couple of others and this is the one that stuck for me)
- Playlist Manager Plugin (get this, making playlists using LMS/Squeeze is an absolute pain without it)
- Qobuz (While it sucks, it’s nice to at least have the option)
- DSDPlayer (If you have DSDs in your library)
- Music and Artist Information (finds artist/album info and song lyrics that are available in the “Show Current Track Info” menu or ⓘ button. Lyrics can be hit or miss though).
Annnd that’s it, there are more that are installed by default, but I won’t bother going through those. Oh, another thing worth mentioning is iPeng (if you’re on iPhone) as the mobile remote. You can browse your library and all that and play music using it, and it has a great interface. It also allows you to play music from your server to your phone, effectively turning your phone into a squeeze player (it only works locally though, unlike Roon ARC). iPeng is also super customizable and is just overall easier to use (for me) than the Material Skin web interface.
After installing all of those plugins and getting iPeng, LMS/Squeeze is at a state where I am satisfied with it, and haven’t felt like I super need to switch back to Roon (so far lol). I am looking forward to what the future holds for the platform since it is open source, who knows maybe all of my nitpicks will be resolved by this time next year lol (that’d be nice).
However, if you don’t want to bother setting everything up (plugins, skins, etc) and just want an easy-to-use UI and don’t mind the slight knock in sound quality (which could get better or worse in the future since RAAT is a closed source protocol) or you use Qobuz, Roon Radio, EQ, or Roon ARC a lot then just keep using Roon. I can totally understand why people stick with Roon because of how dead simple it is to set up and use without the need to tinker or do much maintenance in the process, as Todd Howard said “It just works” lol.
I hope this post helps answer some of your questions/gives some insight for those considering the two services.
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@EstrangedBaron thank you for this, it is great! I will also note that I am not coming from Roon, i just dont want to use (read: pay) for it.
I installed lms on my pc the other day but only had a few minutes to play with it. Material is better but still odd. I did see a qobuz icon in every artists’s subfolder, it was listed under the last album. Which also the albums are just listed like lines in notepad, with nothing dividing them. None of the usual tiles or bars.
I think overall it wasnt horrible like some make it out to be, but first impressions are that it is a little under what i was expecting. Tbh the thing that triggered me was lms scanning and downloading artist generic photos and it all being bad pics or wrong pics or just the generic placeholder. And it took a while to do this to boot. I hope that is something i can customize or have it follow my music tags since I OCDed over that all.
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I wrote code to do exactly this a few weeks ago for my own music organization software.
It’s enormously hard to get good results, most sources are at best poor, the metadata in most recording is incomplete.
I have code that will map to discogs, based on near string matching across albums, code that uses audio finger prints, etc etc.
The obvious sources have poor images, or don’t classify artists consistently.
One example that caused me issues was Discogs has “Walking Into Clarksdale” but it’s not listed by “Plant and Page”, but by the two individual artists.
I ended up with what I’d consider a usable solution, but it’s nothing like as good as roons
Roon’s solution of hosting a database of curated artists and forcing providers like Qobuz to map to their ID’s when they provide the feed is probably the only good way of doing it. And it isn’t practical on the OS world.
Roon’s now actively pushing their user base to help upgrade artist images and the ability to choose metadata source helps a lot.
…anyway, there’s no life after Roon, it’s just a series of compromises with varying degrees of pain. lol I know we say a lot that you can’t unhear things, you can’t un UI things either. One day if there is a better ecosystem for less money, I’m there as I don’t think the value prop of Roon is as good as it could be.
One thing to add though is now, after having set up ROCK, it’s THE way to run Roon.
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I’ve settled on ROCK, Roon on antipodes and ARC on my phone for now. Couldn’t notice too much difference in sound quality and the experience is much nicer to my taste but mostly the discovery of roon radio when a playlist or album finishes playing is something I use a lot now
I’ll probably give LMS another try at some point
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It’s a much much better experience this way!
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For the LMS material skin plugin users.
Ive been having an issue where it seems the material skin loads,… but not the right one.
It used to be after a reset it would show this, before i reloaded or purposely went to /material.
But what it is supposed to look like is this, note that other menus and customizations are also off.
Anyone know how to get it to load the bottom interface reliably? I tried other devices and laptops in case it was a cache thing and did a few player / server restarts. I have not hit clear database or reloaded squeeze as i got setting where i wanted and dont want to redo it all
I believe it might be an Antipodes bug. Did you try searching their support forum?
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Thats the next move, as well as asking there about a few other things.
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Alright, I bend the knee this time again LMS and Squeeze player. I just spent my Sunday transferring files from my Roon Rock Intel NUC Server to the LMS Antipodes S30 Server. I was able to integrate Spotify, Qobuz, and my local library into 1 playlist on the LMS server. That makes me pretty happy that LMS can do that because now I can just organize all the music streamers and my local library under 1 interface. While playing with the settings to fix Squeeezelite-X (Windows App) and IPeng (iPhone App), I came across this Output Format setting:
I haven’t really A/B for the best sound quality, but I wonder if this might be the reason why people like LMS/Squeeze more than Roon 
Welp, if anyone ever having trouble getting the audio fix on IPeng and Squeezelite-X on windows, its probably because they can’t play wav files. I changed it to FLAC (not compressed) to get those app working because sometimes I like playing music from my server on my phone or computer when I am not near my setup. My main setup with the S30 server/streamer, I left it at wav for the output format. So far, I like the LMS Server just like I remember when I used to own the Pi server/streamer. I think the biggest issue was the playlist limitation, but it might be more on the limitation of the Pi hardware rather than the LMS itself. I guess I will find out next weekend if the playlist will act buggy when adding over a bunch of tracks in 1 playlist. I like having a big playlist to divide music by language to make it easier to organize them.
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I’ve heard Squeeze is better sounding than Roon but it seems there’s definitely some compromises there. Probably would be easier to use Tidal or Qobuz connect and then use an internal player (antipodes, innuos, etc.) when playing local files.
Am I missing something?
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With Aurender the sound quality performance is local files >> internal streaming of Tidal > roon endpoint (with ROCK being the server)
Based on that I haven’t used Roon in many weeks
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