What is Roon, is it a streaming service or something else. Roon at it's heart is a control software that lets you easily manage your library of digital music, it brings all your music together so you don’t have to worry about where it’s stored, what format it’s in, or where you stream it from. Roon supports music files stored on internal or external hard drives and NAS drives (your CD's and Hi-Res downloads), your iTunes library, live radio stations (Internet Radio) and streamed content from TIDAL and Qobuz. You will be able to seamlessly search the combined libraries of the streaming service and the music you own. But Roon is so much more than that, it is a great music discovery and education platform. Physical formats like vinyl and CD had liner notes that contained a wealth of information, but downloads and streams have stripped those away. Roon's goal was to start by restoring all that data, and then go further by leveraging new technologies to accomplish more than was ever possible with physical media. With Roon you will be able to read all about your favorite artists and albums with the in depth information that is available. When reading about an album or artist you will see highlighted names of people who played on it, or possibly produced or mastered it. By clicking on those names it will show you every album that person has worked or appeared on. You will also see recommended albums and artists similar to the one you select.

 

How does Roon do all of this, it uses an artificial intelligence learning system called Valence. It begins by aggregating various data sources, including commercial metadata, crowdsourced contributions, and listening history from expert listeners. Next it identifies every data object the system encounters, whether that’s a file on a hard drive, a stream from a music service, or a mention of a producer in an article about an album. Using these building blocks, Valence forms a database not just of artists, albums, and tracks, but also of composers, works, performances, conductors, ensembles, soloists, labels, and collaborators. This database allows us to build an understanding of the relationships between musical entities, their popularity, similarity, and categories into which they naturally fall. The result is a recommendation methodology that consistently takes into account authoritative metadata, expert opinion, popularity, context awareness, and taste profiles for individual users.

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How do you run and control Roon? The main software (the Roon server software) runs on either the Roon Nucleus, an Intel NUC (a small box shaped computer) or a PC running Windows, MacOS or Linux and is free to download. You control the software with a free app that can run on Android or iOS phones and tablets or with MAC and Windows PC's with the free desktop software. Roon can control and send the music to hundreds of Roon Ready audio devices from numerous companies. For example in the same house you can control and play music on a Bluesound wireless speaker, KEF LS50 II wireless speaker, Hegel integtrated amp and an iFi Stream music streamer connected to your Hi-Fi system. You can control them individually or combine them with Roon for a multi-room music system. Roon also works with other network attached devices. If your stereo, streamer or wireless speaker has Apple AirPlay or Chromecast built in you can send music to it, and it works with Sonos wireless products (Roon also works with all Bluesound products since they are Roon Ready).

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The cost for the Roon service is $12.99 a month or $9.99 a month if you pay annually (save $30 year). You can also purchase a lifetime subscription for $699.99. We use the software in our stories you would like to see it in action or we have arranged a free one month trial of the service if you would like to download and and try it out for yourself. Click the Roon link below and you will be taken to their website where you can sign up for the free month of service. I have also included a link to the Qobuz website, we have worked out a 2 month free trial of their streaming service so you can use it with the Roon software. We use both of these in the store if you have any questions we will be glad to answer them for you.