Roon Remote

What Roon delivers on in terms of a listening experience is beyond amazing. I can stream music to all the systems in my house. In my theater room, I stream it to an Oppo UDP-205. I stream to my kitchen and patio on a NAD C 388. In my bedroom on an Onkyo receiver connected to a Chromecast Audio. Because the core is a Synology Diskstation, the Roon Remote acts just like a remote. You don’t have to stay in range of the device like you would with Bluetooth. You can transfer audio from one room to another without a hitch. You can join zones of Roon Ready devices so you have the same audio playing throughout the house which is great for parties. It all plays in the highest possible quality available, including MQA. It integrates files you have on your hard drive seamlessly with streaming services such as TIDAL and qobuz. It has transformed my listening experience in profound ways. Why four stars? There are times the service glitches. Not enough to be too annoying but it happens. And the user interface is not the best UX. With any other product, these hiccups would be enough for me to give it three or two stars, but WOW! What Roon does best is really good quality listening all over my house. In that one area, the one that counts the most, Roon hits a grand slam.

Since the first time Roon was available, I fell in love with it’s interface. I like the way it reports on the DACs, streamers status. Now with the interface updates with a better playback experience, use of more Roon ready devices, addition of iPhones and iPads interfaces plus to crown their updates; Chromecast and MQA compatibility. It’s been a truck load of enjoyable added features. The software has been extensively enhanced and it just gets better with age. Just a warning if your Core is at the latest, make sure you load the latest release to your other devices. The Audio settings will crash your app otherwise. To be honest, with all of the plethora of software programs available out there, specially the ones related to Audio, this one is worth every penny, you won’t be disappointed. I would suggest you build your Core on Intel NUC using fast memory, PCIe M.2 drive for holding Roon Core and attached USB 3 drives for music storage, with simple Windows desktop operating system (Win 10 home or Professional) and you’ll be running trouble free with future proofing your storage. For me it has made Roon rock solid. If you’re like me with a sizable music library, this is one of the best ways to tame it.

Room allows you to control your music in ways iTunes can only dream about. You have one music library for all your devices, with no worries about syncing and copying, duplicates etc. You can make your own playlists and Roon will find album titles and artwork. Yes, it costs some money but you’ll save hours of your life by not f’ing around with your music locations and metadata. If your music library is big, you’ll need to check the hardware prerequisites for the database but it will connect to some models of NAS.

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Already when connected the Remote App is below expectations for a remote of a music player that is this expensive. It feels as if Roon has tried to port every single option from the Core software to this remote and has made the final product counter intuitive and an outright pain to use. The worst part however is connecting. The connecting when everything is ok is about as slow as the Apple Remote App but when either the Core or the Remote App is connected to a wifi extender the connecting process is extremely frustrating, involving multiple manual retries to forced shutdowns of the App to get it to connect. At this price point (of the Core) this should be better.

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In my personal opinion: Non intuitive interface supported by documentation written to contain as few words as possible. Roon loaded Tidal My Collections with thousands of suggestions that aren’t remotely close to what I listen to and then tells me I have to delete them one at a time to avoid deleting my music that i purchased that is located on my hard drive. They even go as far as to prevent you from recovering your own music that you might delete trying to get rid of the junk they loaded into your Tidal, or Roon account. How do they prevent this? Be bypassing your deleted items folder. Genius! How did they come up with that idea? Google it.