Roon for the Win

My fit of summertime audiophilia nervosa is officially over. I hope. Despite a fair amount of equipment change – well, OK, it was everything except the speakers – probably the biggest and most lasting changing was in my full adoption of Roon for my whole-house hi-fi system.

For years I had used JRiver Media Center for my massive home library, and while JRMC has a lot to commend it, the program would never win any beauty contests. And it also has some blind spots that I find annoying. But it's infinitely customizable and, as long as I'm assiduous about file tagging and curation, it keeps excellent track of everything.

But I have to say that Roon blows it out of the water. Not as customizable, perhaps, but a modern and attractive way of dealing with audio that blurs the distinction between online streaming and one's own home library. And its ability to stream music around the house, as long as I have Roon endpoints where I want them, is so far beyond JRMC that it's not even funny.

So I've made the move to Roon full-time. I even stopped running JRMC as a server. The only server software running on my M4 Mac Mini is Roon Core, and it handles all of the audio tasks. My own personal computer, which for so long served out all of my home audio, no longer does that. It can certainly act as a Roon endpoint, but that's as far as it goes.

Having utterly reliable in-house music streaming is a tremendous boon. For housekeeping, you just can't beat a long Steve Reich minimalist jobber playing at high volume on four systems throughout the house; Roon can do that without any audio lag. Very cool.

But more to the point, I'm now accustomed to thinking in Roon terms when I'm looking for something, and my tags and curation aren't such a big deal now. Roon doesn't actually touch the actual file tags, but it comes up with its own curation that is frankly better than what I was doing. So I've given in to that and now I let Roon handle it.

So I can listen to anything I want, maybe from my own home library or from Tidal or from Qobuz, listen to all of the latest recordings without having to buy them, and listen anywhere in the house I want, including off my iPads (they make good Roon endpoints as well) or my iPhone (ditto.) I can spend my time listening and not worrying about curating discs.