Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Hardware with Roon Application Is moving from Sooloos to Roon worth it?

In what ways is Roon currently considered better or worse than Sooloos with Meridian Sooloos hardware? This is currently 818v3 and MC200. N.B. control is with an iPad or iPhone.

Interested in all aspects, but of particular interest to me personally -

- handling of classical collections (and particularly whether Roon handles these better without user intervention than Sooloos)
- as above with compilation albums
- Tidal integration
- robustness and stability
- slickness and responsiveness of GUI and control of Meridian hardware though iPad, etc.

Sure there are plenty more I haven't thought of. Downsides welcome and useful too!

Many thanks!

Roon requires 64 bit iPad for control, Sooloos will work with most.

Useful to know! Mines an iPad Air, but I have no idea whether that's 64-bit or not?

64 bit.

On all your measures, Roon is superior or equal to Sooloos. I finally made the move about 4 months ago. Stability and ease of setup - better and easier than Sooloos IMO.

I'd say yes ... I really like the interface and the extended metadata. However, it's not perfect (yet) and not for everyone, it's quite a personal decision.

My advice is to take advantage of a Roon trial ... most modern computers running Windows or OSX can run Roon with a GUI and Linux i3, i5, i7 devices can run the (headless) Roon Server. (Note, having the Roon DB on a SSD makes it snappier to use.)

I would strongly recommend not to just point Roon at the audio files on the MC200 (as those files if ripped by Sooloos are not tagged), you will get better Roon album identification results results by first performing a Sooloos native export (which imbeds the tags and creates the expected .../artist/album/dd_tt_track.format folder/file structure) and then set Roon up to watch that export.

Your iPad Air is fine see ... FAQ: What models of iPhone and iPad can I use Roon with?.

Regards,
Carl

This old curmudgeon is still happy with Sooloos and it is hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Improved Metadata is not my concern, only occasionally a nice to have.

Maybe Roon one day.

Hector

Couple of tips:

iPad:
You need a Roon Core running for the iPad app to do anything - but there's nothing stopping anyone from downloading to see if it works - if the iPad is not compatible, the App Store should stop you from even downloading it.

'Server'
If you are planning on trying a Roon trial - getting everything setup in advance will give you more time to play later.

i.e. setup a machine with enough space to hold your Sooloos connection, install Control:PC and setup a native export.

Once the export is complete, try adding something to Sooloos and making sure the new files pop-up on your Roon test machine.

Then - when you start the trial, you can keep Roon in parallel with Sooloos - with anything added to Sooloos appearing in Roon (I run Sooloos on a QNAP NAS, with Roon installed on an Advantech UTC-520C machine (SSD sysdisk / 4TB storage with an Explorer attached) - mainly use Sooloos though, the Roon machine occasionally gets used away from home).

Matt.

Thanks guys. All useful info and tips.

I will download and have a play I think. Now I'm using Tidal, I think even superior integration of that would be worth the admission price to Roon.

Sooloos is great, but if you have a serious classical collection Roon is far superior.

The work lists (listing all works by each composer in your collection) and composition detail pages (which list all performances you have of each work) are alone worth the price of admission.

I'll do some screen shots when I get home.

That does sound much better. A screenshot or two would be great if you have a moment, thank you!

Be prepared to listen to lots of music while trying to sort out your album tags

Roon still has a lot of room to develop yet. Ive been advised of several different methods to correct Roon's destroying my Bowie/Lennon/Floyd/Zeppelin/Beatles boxsets and compilations albums and none of them have worked.

At least Sooloos didn't turn a 100 track acoustic collection into 100 individual albums. If it can't identify it, it just keeps your own edits.

A great thing with Roon though is Multichannel /DSD / playback.

~M~

Hm, that doesn't sound too great. I think I'll have to use the free trial and just see how much pain or gain Roon is to me and my collection.

Here's a question - is there a music cataloging and playback system/software out there which does get these things better, or right (i.e., not just rock/pop, but classical, compilations, etc.). Ideally which offers Tidal integration too?