February 3rd, 2017

Roon Labs has relesed version 1.3 of their software.  Even though going from 1.2 to 1.3 would seem like a seemingly small change this is a massive update.  Read about the details from the Roon community

What’s New

Tags

Roon’s “Tags” feature has been considerably re-worked and expanded.

It’s now possible to tag Albums, Tracks, Artists, Composers, and Compositions, Playlists, and even other tags. Like Playlists, Tags can be assigned to different user profiles within the app, so each member of your household can have their own stuff. There is now a top-level browser for tags, so you can see them all together and use them as a jumping-off point.

“Focusing” on a tag is much smarter in 1.3. For example, if you add a bunch of albums to a tag, you can select “View All Composers” and see the composers that appeared on those albums, or “View All Compositions” to see a list of the songs. 

Playlists

Roon 1.3 introduces a re-designed playlist browser, and a brand-new spreadsheet-style playlist screen, with selectable columns, sorting, and filtering support, as well as a tool for locating duplicate tracks within a playlist.

We have also added some settings to storage configurations that let you turn on/off automatic import of m3u playlists, which helps keep things nice and clean in Roon for people who have them accidentally.

Track Browser

Roon’s Tracks and Playlist view has been rebuilt from scratch, with new ways to sort and filter all the tracks in your library.

The new Tracks view has resizable customizable columns, horizontal and vertical scrolling, individual filtering by column, and the ability to view tracks by Path. 

This means you can filter for only the tracks in your “HD Tracks Downloads” folder, and even save a bookmark of this content. You can also filter for a certain path or folder, and use our editing functionality to group tracks into an album. 

DSP Engine

Since before Roon launched, people have been asking us about DSP features. After over a year of development work, Roon is taking our first step into this exciting world.

Roon 1.3 supports configurable sample-rate conversion including upsampling and DSD output support. A beautiful (but more importantly, accurate) parametric equalizer, a crossfeed implementation for headphone listening, support for convolution filters, tools for managing clipping and compensating for speaker positioning, and more.

Plus, nearly 100% of Roon’s signal processing code in Roon’s Core has been re-built from scratch, using 64-bit floating point processing throughout, including the implementations used by pre-existing features like Crossfade and Volume Leveling.

The new DSP engine is just the beginning. Now that the infrastructure is in place, we are in a position to continue expanding this offering with new features, or fine-tuning the sound quality to perfection over time.

Multichannel

Roon now supports multichannel playback, including support for reading multi-channel data from all supported file formats, multichannel streaming via RAAT or HQPlayer, channel mapping, and a facility for downmixing so that multichannel content can still work on stereo hardware.

Support for Sonos Devices

Streaming to Sonos hardware is fully supported in Roon 1.3. You can set up your Sonos devices from the Audio tab in Settings, and jump right in. Roon will stream losslessly up to the 48kHz/16bit, and will automatically downsample higher resolution content. 

Social Sharing

We’ve been continually amazed by our users’ enthusiasm for sharing music with each other. In Roon 1.3, we decided to make it even easier to share, both in music and audio communities across the internet, and with your social networks.

You will be able to share artists, albums, tracks, and more from your library, direct to Facebook, Twitter, or a Sharable Link. What you share is fully customizable -- for example, when sharing an album you could choose to also share the genres, some of the credits, or the review, plus a personal message about what it means to you.

Composers and Compositions

Late last year, we deployed major changes to our cloud metadata services. Just as Roon has always identified “interesting” composers in your library, our cloud services now identify compositions across every album and track we know about, whether they’re from our metadata providers or streaming content like TIDAL.

This not only means Roon will do a better job identifying, say, a few covers of “Like A Rolling Stone” in your library. It means you’ll be able to browse all 51 cover versions of the song on TIDAL. Until you start playing with these links, it’s hard to understand what an incredibly powerful tool this is for discovery and navigation.

We have also renamed Works to Compositions in order to make it clear that this feature has huge implications not just for browsing Classical music, but for jazz and popular music, too. Screens in the app related to composers and compositions have been redesigned. If this is a part of Roon that you’ve ignored in the past, now’s the time to give it another try.

Automatic Backup

Roon 1.3 supports fully automated, scheduled backups of your Roon database to local storage, network storage, or dropbox.

Many of us have invested countless hours building content inside of Roon. There’s no better time than now to set up some backups and make sure that that investment is secure.

Performance Improvements

Roon’s Core has always required a powerful machine to perform properly. While that’s not changing in 1.3, a significant amount of work has been done to improve Roon’s performance.

In 1.3, importing, editing, and other database manipulation is much faster, screens load more quickly--especially on remote devices, remote devices will re-connect more rapidly, and Roon’s search engine has been completely re-written, ensuring autocompletion and search no longer make you wait.

Roon’s audio streaming infrastructure has also seen some performance tuning. Roon Ready devices and software-based RAAT endpoints will experience lower CPU utilization when used with Roon 1.3, and CPU usage in the core is improved too.

Finally, our cloud services--the ones that deliver metadata to you when browsing content available via TIDAL, have also been optimized and tuned to reduce load times.

Volume Leveling

Starting in Roon 1.3, we have fully adopted the R128 volume leveling standards. Your music library will be re-analyzed automatically to extract R128 data, and the volume leveling features throughout the app will make use of it.

We’ve added support for volume leveling based on the album loudness or track loudness, an automatic mode that selects between the two automatically based on the content being played, and a setting that allows you to apply a fixed adjustment to content like internet radio streams, which can’t be measured in advance. Finally, Roon 1.3 is also able to make use of REPLAYGAIN tags in case you prefer to manage loudness measurements externally.

Finally, Roon’s Audio Analysis can now be configured to use all of your CPU cores, and several stability issues related to analysis have been addressed.

Dynamic Range

Dynamic range measures the difference in volume between the softest and loudest portions of a track or album. It is most useful when comparing different releases of the same material.

Roon 1.3 measures and displays information about the dynamic range of your tracks and albums. This will provide some much needed insight into what is going on. Roon’s Dynamic Range measurements are based on the R128’s “Loudness Range” value.

Storage And Export Changes

Roon now features a full fledged file browser, that works on all platforms and across the network. This allows for a clean consistent experience on all platforms, whether you’re using an iPad to configure a hard drive on a headless Core, or exporting to a Remote running on your Mac or PC. 

Organized Folders are no longer part of the product, and Watched Folders will simply be called Folders going forward. 

iTunes importing has also been fully overhauled, as Roon will now simply import playlists from any iTunes XML it finds. Users that are already using the old iTunes functionality will be able to continue doing so.

Folders support a few new settings, too: you can choose whether or not to import iTunes content or .m3u playlists, and you can fine-tune the set of paths that are ignored when Roon scans directories. You can also re-point a folder to a new location easily if you happen to move your music library someplace else, instead of having to re-import the content.

Roon provides access a list of files that were skipped during import. This will provide some much needed transparency about files skipped because they were malformed, corrupt, unreadable, or of an unsupported format.

Export functionality has been redesigned from the ground up, getting some much needed attention now that it will be the only way Roon can organize your files on disk. Our new export functionality gives clear feedback on status and progress, handles multiple album editions properly, and exports more metadata fields.

Library Management Improvements

Expanded editing and grooming functionality is, of course, a big part of 1.3. 

Our users have long lamented the fact that Roon didn’t allow editing of “links”--relationships between artists, tracks, compositions, artists, and composers in your library. This limitation has been addressed, which allows for all of those relationships to be edited manually.

Additionally, Roon now includes support for merging duplicate artists and compositions. At the same time, we’ve done serious work on the automatic merging algorithms to make this necessary less often.

Roon includes supports a few new file tags, including WORK, PART, and PERSONNEL, which allow for richer experiences when working with content that doesn’t match our metadata services. 

Roon will detect and expose artwork or PDFs stored alongside your files and make them available to you. Our algorithm for finding and associating cover artwork with your albums has also been improved, and will do a better job of locating artwork when media files and artwork are not right next to each other.

Finally, 1.3 will allow for the configuration of “Import Settings”. This allows you to set global defaults for metadata preferences, import dates, genre handling, album version handling, and delimiters handling in file tags.

Audio Streaming Improvements

When using RAAT to stream audio, Roon now supports fine-tuning of grouped playback with a few new settings that allow you to micro-adjust time synchronization and take control of master clock selection, if desired. The algorithm for managing clock drift during grouped playback has been improved, and should tolerate situations with less well-behaved clock.

Based on your feedback, our Squeezebox support has been upgraded to include support for displays on VFD devices, and to support streaming in FLAC format, to help ease some network-related performance issues.

Roon API (BETA)

The Roon API will allow developers to enable:

Custom volume controls even if the device is not Roon Ready
Custom convenience switching/standby can be used even for devices is not Roon Ready
Display of now-playing data and transport controls
Lightweight hierarchical browsing
Plugin settings from Roon UI

Roon’s API is still in a pretty early state, but 1.3 contains support for these features and is suitable for experimentation. 

We have several exciting integrations planned over the next few months using the API as a jumping off point, and look forward to expanding and improving the Roon API with your feedback. Please try it out and let us know!

Roon Optimized Core Kit (Coming Soon!)

Roon Optimized Core Kit (ROCK) enables you to easily build and configure turn-key Roon Core “appliances”, which will run a custom built, lightweight version of Linux called Roon OS.

Roon OS is fully configured from a web interface, and will be available to both hardware partners who want to build Roon Core products, as well as DIY’ers, who will be able to build high performance “Roon Box” appliances using off-the-shelf hardware.

We initially planned to release ROCK with Roon 1.3, but based on feedback from some of our users when discussing the idea, we became convinced that support for storing music on internal hard drives is a must-have feature. 

This pushed the schedule back a little bit. ROCK is slated to enter alpha testing in the next few days, and will be released as soon as it is stable.

The experience of reconnecting to your Core should be smoother and faster on iOS and Android devices, and will feel less like an error while the connection is established.