Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Meridian no longer supporting Control:Mac [Discussion]

I run Roon on Pi/Linux, Windows, Meridian, MacOS, iOS, Squeezeboxes, Airplay, Chromecast and Android and have not experienced any issues. From my perspective, it’s affordable and benefits from economies of scale in development and excellent support too.

Saying all that I would be interested to hear how you feel that Roon is at a disadvantage for being platform agnostic as I've not been a Sooloos user, having moved from a Squeezebox streaming solution to a Roon and MS200 setup.

Cheers
Tom

I spent a lot of time with Sooloos as a user, nagging HQ about various bugs and also helping Duncs produce the Sooloos tools that some of you will remember.
I also had the chance to get involved with Roon from the very earliest pre-Roon times. I think I have a fairly good view of both.

I really struggle to think of something I did in Sooloos that I cannot do in Roon. In other words, did I lose anything?
So, if I only ever wanted a Sooloos experience, did I lose that in some way?

Does Roon make me do something I didn’t have to do to get that experience? Yes.

I have to update software versions x1000 more often than Sooloos ever updated. I have to map storage drives whereas Sooloos didn’t. I occasionally have to slap my anti-virus software to not block Roon.exe etc.

But in terms of using Roon to play music through my Meridian devices it is as focussed as it ever was in Sooloos.....if I want it to be.

If I want to do much much more I can. But that is optional.

Not suggesting that other experiences have to be the same. I was just trying to see how Roon might be seen as less focussed in a sense that made it feel worse than Roon Sooloos (thanks Russ).

Thanks Nick, do you think Meridian would have adopted smaller and more regular updates if they continued with Sooloos?

You mean if they had continued back in 2015 rather than split off into Roon, or, continued in 2019 rather than mothballing ?

I assume you mean the former.

What you have now as Roon did absolutely start out as Sooloos v5 (or v3 depending on which reference you take). Some of the features you see now where specified way back in 2014/5. However, it was probably clear fairly early that new Sooloos would not be able to be a simple upgrade on all existing Sooloos cores. So, that would have always meant a new path of some sort. Hardware upgrades, new products etc. Grumpy legacy customers with C15, MC200 etc that couldn't run the new core.

Had the break away not have happened then I think it unlikely that Meridian HQ would have adopted a platform agnostic position to support Squeezebox and the ultimately the wide range of brands that now use Roon.
That said, the folks that went from Meridian to MQA have had to do exactly that. So, maybe HQ could have done a Sooloos that was cross-platform and brand capable. It would have been tricky to say the least. Other brands would have been very resistant.

So, it probably would have stayed Meridian-only infrastructure and as such would never have had the scale of user base to justify the features you now see. And without that scale development would have been limited.

So, I think NO. Sooloos, had it not branched off into Roon, would not have had the updates and functionality expansion that we have seen in Roon.

I suppose that one of the frustrations that some long term users feel is that they thought they had bought into lifetime software support/upgrades with their Meridian hardware purchase and therefore feel let down. It changes the nature of the relationship, and I think it’s a measure of the perceived value of such that some users feel a loss.

I have made the switch to Roon lifetime personally, and enjoy many of the upgrades that it comes with. My main frustration is that it is nowhere near as stable as Sooloos was. I don’t think I can remember Sooloos falling over. Roon, however, freezes (quits playing - music or radio - app still looks like it’s working) periodically. Sometimes after less than a day, sometimes after a week or so. I started running Roon on an older Mac mini with the music on a QNAP 429 and thought the problem might be that the Mac was not up to the task. I’ve replaced it with a dedicated Intel NUC that’s over the top for ROCK spec’s, but still have the same problem. I do have a lot of music (over 346,000 tracks) and do need to clean up some duplication, so maybe that’s the issue. The current solution is to navigate by browser to the ROCK page and restart the software or reboot.

Sooloos is incredibly easy to use, and is indeed very stable. The interface is great, very intuitive, and my wife can operate it easily.

I saw Roon on another person's system, and it kept freezing during the demo, and was slow.

I'm about 300k tracks so similar in library size. I get no issues because of that. That you have changed core device and still have some issues might suggest your issues are elsewhere e.g. network related.

I don't use NAS as live storage for music playback. I use a USB attached RAID drive. It might we worth temporarily using something similar to see if that helps. Just try a subset of library first.

Thanks for the suggestion ncpl. Will order one and give it a go. I wonder though why it would also cause live radio to hang up at the same time.

That would still point to network I would guess.

Thanks for your response Nick. One of the things that has changed in software development since Sooloos was developed is the approach that developers now take which is typically smaller and more frequent updates i.e. Agile software development. I was also wondering if you thought this would have been the case with Meridian and Sooloos.

Cheers
Tom

Good point. Things do develop a bit quicker these days for sure. Obviously Danny, Brian et all are very busy developing (as an alpha tester I see this all the time in between the public releases).

However, I have seen no evidence of an agile or sprint approach at HQ. So, it is still a NO IMHO.

And it really is just opinion. I don't know what methods HQ actually use or where they allocate there time and dev resources.

Many of the same arguments in the Mac v Windows debate could be applied here.

A better understanding of hardware allows leaner and faster software with less need to upgrade hardware as often. Meridian's philosophy dictated not just how music sounded but also how you listened to it resulting in simpler less complicated interfaces. And this is one of my main gripes with Roon.

Viewing By Albums
Using an iPad Pro I can only see 8 albums per page. Swiping from 1 end of the list to another is mind numbing. Selecting an album then results in a vertical scroll. Viewing Leonard Cohens, You Want It Darker, only shows 2 songs on the first page, requiring more scrolling to see just a list of 9 songs!

Viewing By Artist
Despite only have 8 artists per page it's difficult to actually ready the artists names. I have to scan from top left to top right, then return to the bottom left and scan to the right. The artist I want isn't on that page so I swipe right and repeat...

If I recall, Sooloos has a list on the left hand side. No large images to distract you, just the text in alphabetical order. I could probably scan a hundred artists on Sooloos in the same time it takes to scan 16-27 on Roon.

In the early days, before Windows caught up with Mac, numerous independent studies showed that Mac users were more efficient than Windows users. You could still perform the same tasks on both platforms, Mac users could simply do it more efficiently. So while you can do all the same things with Roon that you could with Sooloos, this should be expected given the extra 5 years of development. What you shouldn't expect is that it now takes longer to perform the same tasks.