Audirvana has new player software now, which similarly to Roon needs a subsciption.
You can get a 30 day free trial without giving them any credit card information so I tested it out.
I also had the old Audirvana for it’s 40 days free trial period and it was quite nice and I thought about getting it, because Roon is too expensive for me.
Audirvana Studio on the other hand feels like absolute trash compared. It even looks shitty because for some reason all text is smaller than it should be and has no anti aliasing filter, so it looks pixely.
There are very limited options. Except for some fancy upsampling and ‘kernel streaming’ there aren’t any stand-out features imho.
When you start the program, it starts analysing all your music and the progress bar never finishes.
I don’t need my music to be analysed, why can’t I turn this off?
When I select ‘my music’ in the left section menu, it shows nothing. To see my music I have to scroll down to ‘local’ where I can only select ‘albums’, ‘artists’ and ‘tracks’. No genre, or any other tag.
It also can’t read tags properly. I see many albums appear multiply times and albums which have different artists in it being splitted despite having the same album artist.
This would be easily be fixable in foobar but you don’t have this option in audirvana studio.
At the end, I just returned to foobar which has all options you could want.
I wish I could use Roon but when I tested it, it simply cannot find most of my anime soundtrack and other nieche music and therefore those albums don’t show up in the library.
The only reason I need a player software in the first place is for playing music that I can’t find on spotify or other streaming services.
But that’s enough rant for now.
Have you any experience with Audirvana Studio? Which player Software are you using?
what do you mean it can’t find it? if roon can’t identify the album and match with it’s database it should still import the album directly to the library regardless but will pull the track/album info from the tags instead. as long as your files are tagged correctly it should still show up correctly in the library. As someone who has almost a terabyte of Japanese music roon work pretty damn well with my collection. Yes there are some obscure stuff that it can’t identify but it still appropriately imports the tags and sorts correctly. There however can be a little tag/library matenance you will have to do yourself for certain instances, mostly artist duplicates and some inconsistencies in album sorting but this mostly hinges on the preexisting tags for the stuff the software can’t indentify, if you have done due diligence with tagging your files it makes alot of this a non issue.
It’s unfortunate with the current audirvana situation though, i demoed it before i decided to go with roon and it wasn’t bad per say actually quite a streamlined experience but ultimately i though it was a little too streamlined and “dumbed” down for my usecase. My advice is if you can get roon working correctly it is the defacto “best” software, I will never go back to foobar or any other software as long as their servers are active.
Yeah, I was going to try Audirvana, but then discovered they’d changed their business model and figured that if I was going to pay a subscription fee I might as well get Roon.
Though I still resent this whole paradigm of paying a subscription fee for software which has become standard for so many programs. If you buy something you should own it, not have the right to use it contingent on you continuing to pay for it for all eternity. /rant
All my music is tagged correctly; I just didn’t find the music in my library not even by searching.
I think I’ll give roon another try and subscribe for a month.
But with upcoming Spotify Hifi I don’t see any advantage in using a fancy player software.
When I want to listen to Anime OST for example I just go to the ‘Anime soundtrack’ genre in foobar and easily find the album I want to listen to.
I don’t know if this can be done in roon as well, i’ll have to look further into it.
I remember going through a couple of sub-genres before I found the genre I was looking for in roon, which was a bit annoying.
Most other music is on spotify anyways, which is way more convenient for me to use.
I wish roon would integrate spotify as well.
yeah i get it. but you also have to understand that with roon there are costs on their end to operate the servers that houses their database and enables the way their library metadata sorting works, as well as servers/fees that have to be paid for the streaming (tidal/qubuz). Their buisness model is not sustainable without subscription.
for sure give it another shot, if you havent checked it out in a while, their lastest update 1.8 brought a lot of great ui changes and different ways to sort music.
I personally don’t use streaming services at all so i can’t relate, but i have heard they way roon integrates tidal and qobuz with your local library is pretty magical. I wouldn’t rule out spotify integration, it could happen but might be a ways away.
it depends. if you have those tags setup in the files i think you can enable roon to use the genre tags for the files and it would indeed work this way. the problem is when you get into roon database identified albums that use the roon prefered tags, this might not yield the same results as some anime soundtracks might not be tagged as such since OST isn’t really a genre but more a type of release. but like i said if you already have the tags setup pretty sure you can just override the roon tags with the file tags
I’m sure Roon would love to integrate Spotify and Amazon music for that matter, but integration with Roon requires the service provides to not only allow it, but to provide additional metadata that Roon uses to integrate across services.
Roon is trying to provide a seamless library across providers.
Services like Spotify and Amazon, don’t want their branding stripped.
yeah I get this, but I always thought that Roon is a bit too pricey.
I actually was able to get another 2 weeks of trial again and just installed it again. I might test out the free month of qobuz as well.
yeah for the lifetime for sure, pretty sure it’s priced that high to disuade people from going for it. The yearly sub is okay, could be a little lower but not terible imo for the amount of functionality you get, i havent mentioned the multi room integration with the core and server, that stuff works amazingly well and is worth the yearly sub just by itself imo
I’m using Volumio for streaming because I just need a raspberry pi with my music on an external hard drive. With Roon I’d have to buy a x86 based pc as a server to host roon core which is way more expensive than a raspberry pi.
I really like the many plugins that Volumio has and after the latest update it doesn’t have any noticable bugs anymore and workds just as well as foobar.