Roon 1.8 is nothing less than the biggest update in the history of Roon Labs LLC. The new version of the media management and multi-room audio streaming solution is said to offer a completely new way to experience music.
Already at the end of 2020, Roon Labs LLC. announced that one of the biggest updates in the history of the young software company was imminent, namely Roon 1.8. Now the time has come and the latest version of the software is almost available. Roon 1.8 is scheduled to be rolled out on 9 February 2021.
Roon Labs LLC. promises nothing less than a new fascinating music experience for Roon 1.8. Well, this has always been the software’s guarantee of success, after all, Roon Labs LLC. can boast of having created a solution that resembles a complex but at the same time immensely intuitive media library, where the focus is not on files and directories, but first and foremost on the music itself, in the form of the artists, their albums, and the relationships between individual music titles, albums, artists, genres, producers and labels. In short, Roon has been a solution from the very beginning that makes it possible in a unique way to discover one’s own music in a completely new way.
All this is now to be raised to a completely new level with Roon 1.8, which offers a completely new design, an improved “intelligence” and numerous new functions. All of this has been developed with a community of users in mind, who want to experience music via Roon in the truest sense of the word.
And indeed, the new programme interface is immediately noticeable, which resembles an exclusive magazine even more than before, a perfectly designed website, if you want to put it that way. And indeed, the handling also corresponds to that of a perfectly designed website, an archive, which on the one hand is graphically very tidy and clearly laid out, and via which contents can be linked and sorted according to the most diverse criteria.
Roon now has a fresh, new visual design, the developers say, inspired by the idea of the museum – an airy, neutral environment where beautiful things are displayed. An analogy we like. As described earlier, they also drew inspiration from classic music magazines, using bold typography and innovative layout to figuratively bring music to life. The aim was to make the software a real joy to use.
That which continues to underlie Roon, the aforementioned “intelligence”, was after all already introduced with Roon 1.7 and thus the last major update in November 2019, namely the so-called Roon Välence Technology.
According to Roon Labs LLC, the Roon Vālence Technology was one of the most extensive projects at the time. It took no less than two years of hard work on this technology, which is a cloud-based technology.
Roon Vālence Technology is ultimately nothing more than an immense, cloud-based database that has artificial intelligence and helps to make all the relationships and connections that Roon has already established between various albums, artists, composers, genres and much more, even more extensive, even more versatile and thus ultimately even more complex and thus more informative for the user.
This has now been further refined to deliver even more accurate results, but above all, the way in which the user himself searches and how the results are presented has been optimised.
This concerns, for example, the Focus Feature, which has always been implemented and which has now become even more versatile. Roon’s Focus feature is already the most powerful way to explore one’s own music, but now it goes beyond one’s own library and even offers the user a 360º view of artists, genres, performers and composers. The user can set filters in such a way that practically any music in Roon is searched for artists, producers, composers, labels and a multitude of other parameters and the results are immediately displayed in a visually perfect way.
A really hot potato, which the developers now attacked with Roon 1.8, is the topic of classical music. Due to the complex data structure, this always causes problems when cataloguing music, especially when it comes to achieving clear structures.
The way classical music is explored is simply different from almost any other genre, according to Roon Labs LLC. That’s why they’ve developed a completely new visual style and information layout that makes it especially easy for classical music lovers to find the classical recordings they’re looking for. Here, too, Roon Välance Technology plays a decisive role, of course, because it identifies relationships between composers, conductors and performers and helps to sort out no-name releases wherever it makes sense to do so, but to recognise relationships that are actually relevant and ultimately to be able to find exactly the right performances of each composition. This should be particularly helpful when integrating streaming services such as TIDAL or Qobuz, as one usually knows one’s own albums on one’s NAS (Network Attached Storage) anyway…
Not only for classical music, but for all genres, Roon Välance Technology is now supposed to make suggestions not only on the basis of a direct context, such as the piece currently being listened to or the most listened to artists, but even more finely tuned to personal taste. Directly on the brand-new Roon homepage, you will find a dashboard with which you can explore your own listening behaviour – both the actual course of the last few weeks, but also on the basis of a new statistical view, which is constantly refined over time on the basis of your own listening behaviour.
Getting to the point
While in the last major release Roon 1.7 it was the Roon Vālence Technology that was to improve the intuitive handling of the media management and multirom audio streaming solution Roon as a fundamental new “intelligence”, with Roon 1.8 a new version is available in which the developers focus first and foremost on the presentation of the results of this “intelligence”, the data determined by Roon Vālence Technology and the determined connections between the data.
| Manufacturer: | Roon Labs LLC. |
| Distribution: | Roon Labs LLC. |
