Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Hardware with Roon Application How Much Will Roon Cost?

My retort should not be taken as a critique of your opinions, but simply meant as injecting some understated humour.

I've long believed that some of us already have the 'components' of Sooloos - Mac/PC, Squeezebox, NAS, iTunes, BitPerfect, iPad, iPeng, CoverScout - but without paying the premium price dictated by Meridian.

If Meridian's product road map includes a QNAP Core, then perhaps Meridian may also produce a paid-for Mac/PC software Core. Meridian can make money on such software, if, as other software developers do, in charging upgrade fees as and when new versions are released.

As stated above, Roon are an unknown quantity... but the old Investment adage also needs be borne in mind about Meridian i.e. "Past Performance is no guarantee of future results".

So the need to support their clients and succeed in today's competitive world applies equally to both companies... and for all our sakes, I hope that Meridian and Roon both survive and thrive in the future.

As regards your point about Track Level data, I think you [perhaps more than most] are aware of the proprietary manner in which Sooloos data is stored... in comparison to the open Folder / File folder structure used by Roon.

As you've seen, getting 3rd party apps to read Sooloos' Data can result in compromised data... with better results seen from reading the more common Folder / File / ID3 tags used by Roon.

So the "Shed Load of personal work" that you refer to above applies to BOTH options, if [touch wood] either option fails to exist.

I would also add that the creation of Track Level Metadata in Roon does NOT take a shed-load of personal work... as you will see, Roon automatically populates this data in a manner that is much quicker and FAR more hands off than the same process is in Sooloos.

e.g. Importing a 5,000 Album library can be done in about an hour... compare that to how long it would take you to do that on a Sooloos system, which still requires the "one-by-one" import process... at even 3 minutes per CD, that's 250 manhours sitting in front of Control:PC as it imports your Albums one-by-one... whilst Roon takes 1 hour UNSUPERVISED, plus another 2-3 hours of Grooming afterwards.

I found 6000 CD's per hour was a consistent import rate in Roon over three installs.

Russ

I am using a loaner Source One to run core in my FLORIDA system using a QNAP for store(soon core). I was speaking to Marc Koval about the options and costs yesterday. My conclusion, which he did not take issue with, is (at these prices) why wouldn't you want both, just as a matter of convenience. Roon can access existing Sooloos info and improve on my less than well groomed, full of duplicates 120,000 track collection. Just hiding the duplicates will help me immensely.

Ronnie provides a good cost summary with all the appropriate assumptions discussed and involved amounts disclosed. This allows for argument and recasting the data and assumptions ad nauseous 😏

As a retired PWC audit partner, I had forgotten how entertaining an unfolding cost accounting scrum can be. What's hard to argue with is that the additional cost of adding Roon to most HHikers setups are easily smuggled into a household budget.

Part of the problem with this approach is the music directory structure of Sooloos makes it far less easy for Roon to scan properly. For example I have an opera where one of the three disks in Roon is apparently a different release to the other two. If these were nested in a single folder hierarchy it would be a lot easier for Roon to parse the database, with fewer errors.

I'm just firing up an old ReadyNAS to export all my music to so I can get a better feel for how well Roon will identify multidisk albums versus the extremely clunky way Sooloos handles it. I'd be running two databases but ultimately I'll get a better idea of how Roon runs without the issues that using a single database that is structured for Sooloos creates.

Dominic

I have the two libraries one Sooloos and one a native FLAC export from Sooloos running on my QNAP, just in case.

Russ

Russ,

I think that's sensible. I thought just pointing Roon to the Sooloos database would be an option, but for large libraries I now don't think it is. Roon's ability to dynamically manage the files and the database is a big plus point in favour of having two libraries.

In addition it won't take 3 hours of digging around in the Sooloos debug to find the FLAC files to load onto my Pono.

Since I had the spare ReadyNAS and a few old disks lying around it wasn't a hard decision to make. I'm also covered for my music if one of the NAS breaks down, with offsite back up in the IoW.

[Edit] Really wish that Sooloos export just stuck a folder.jpg in the same directory rather than embedding the artwork in the files themselves. I'm hoping that MediaMonkey or the like will be able to process these out. [/Edit]

This will be my scenario too if I'm going to try Roon.

I'm curious, does this mean you have two cores (1 Sooloos and 1 Roon) as well as separate endpoints for Roon and Sooloos playback? I thought I read somewhere that for an Sooloos endpoint to play from a Roon core, the Sooloos core must be turned off. Or do you toggle the cores?

Ditto... I have always had a "normal" exported folder as backup. Regardless of Roon, I never wanted my only backups to be in bespoke/random Sooloos folders. If Sooloos disappeared then you would be pretty stuck without it.

Not when you're on a modest retirement budget.

You can toggle the endpoints. The Cores can run separately and at the same time.

I never said you wouldn't need to smuggle something out to accommodate.