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[Hilton]

Hi All

I was playing around trying to get a remote interface for Tidal going, so I ended up installing Amarra, Roon and Linn Kazoo server and Kazoo remote software.

JimH - You've got nothing to worry about! The people that compare MC to these products are missing the point.

Wow - they are all so over rated and hyped up.

Roon
It has the best user interface of the other products, but it's hardly better than MC and it's the only one I could seriously consider keeping - But it could never replace MC for me.
Sure it may look a little more modern if you compare it to the default MC skin and theatre view skins but about the only thing of value or improvement I could find was:
1. Curated metadata
2. Navigating to similar artists, albums or tracks was a little slicker than the MC experience.
3. Built-in Tidal library management and playback - with seamless remote control of both Tidal and your own library.

If you use one of the MC modern cards skins and Rapier Fusion Theatre View the UI experience is comparable apart from maybe some of the navigation in MC tree view.
Roon interface is kind of a hybrid of theatre view and tree view so it's not really directly comparable.
Other than those small benefits I just can't see why you would pay $100 a year for it in comparison to the MC purchase model.
MC supports DLNA and far more opportunities for zoning with DLNA out of the box, not to mention the more advanced library management, DSP of MC. 
I love that I have my chromecasts and google mini's setup as zones in MC and as grouped zones too. (via BubbleDLNA server)

Amarra
Wow what a disappointment - the fact that once you've started scanning your library, you cant do anything else until it's finished was enough to put me off in the first 5 mins.
I couldn't stand the interface, though I know it's loosely similar to MC there's something about it I just don't like. So I didn't spend much time with it.
There might be a lesson here though.  The first 5-10mins are so important for first impressions.

Kazoo server/player
Its a minimalist toy in comparison to MC.

So where does that leave MC?
Massively Undervalued
Maybe with some small work on changing MC default tree view for music mode it could come closer to the Roon first impressions. (something Amarra could only dream of)
I think that people complaining about theatre view are confusing the purpose of theatre view - it's a 10 foot interface, it's not designed to be the main interface, especially for music. Theatre View for music is more about the full screen interface for playback once you've got your playlist together or for quick jumps between playlists and albums.

The voice control integration for Alexa should be made a bigger deal of. No one else has that granular level of voice control.
(Roon and Amarra have no voice control that I'm aware of - Im comparing to Spotify, Amazon, Google Apple here, but none of them can control your own collection unless you've cloud synced your library and even then there are limits for those with large collections.)

I've gotten quite used to telling google to do things around the house and cant wait to get Alexa going once House Band is supported in Australia. (though i wont be changing my house over to Alexa - only 2 rooms will have Alexa running specifically for MC.

As far as Tidal goes, I'll support it for a while to see where it goes, but still continue to buy the music I really want and store it in MC.

Here's my music habits today.
Spotify for browsing and curating playlists and buylists.
Spotify for casual listening around the house or in the car.
Tidal for more serious headphone listening or 2 channel listening before I purchase something. (either buy hires online or CD/SACD)
Tidal offline playlists in the car with chromecast and in the office with a DAC.
MC for library management and serious listening in the media room or on a portable DAC with JRemote.
MC for whole house playback using a mix of chromecast audios and Google Mini's. (with Alexa voice control once it's available in OZ)
MC for all purchased movies.

edit: and im using Soundiiz for exporting playlists between systems.

Bottom line -
I'm not replacing MC ever and couldn't live without it, especially for those times I want to sit down and really enjoy music.
I can live without a Tidal remote - (ie NOT using Roon)
MC only needs a few tweaks to Tree View to be compared more favourably with Roon. (which I'm going to play around with tonight)

[Hilton]

Didnt know you could do this.....

DLNA send Tidal bit perfect FLAC to any MC zone.
A bit tidier than using WDM capture!

Using Bubble/UPNP on Android as a proxy DLNA server to login to Tidal and push the stream to the MC zone.
This solves my Tidal remote problem and allows me to stream to anywhere in the house, including to my whole house Chromecast audio/Google mini zone. (6 mini's and 2 CCA's at once in perfect sync)

Tidal DLNA JRiver by Hilton, on Flickr

[mattkhan]

leaving aside the metadata aspect, I thought the point of roon was that it's a more controlled ecosystem, i.e. you buy certified devices/software and the network should "just work". This is a different architecture to jriver as it is more server centric which brings with it some benefits (e.g. you can manage configuration for each client on the server) and some costs (e.g. thinner clients means beefier server).

I have no idea whether that marketing matches reality but I would think that at least some of the appeal lies in that more controlled ecosystem.

At least I think some of those aspects would be good things to incorporate into jriver (e.g. centralised client configuration, separate server services)

What is rapier fusion btw? is it https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=69662.0 ? the blog linked in that thread seems dead so wasn't entirely sure

[Hilton]

Rapier Fusion is a nice looking Theatre View Skin.

[Hendrik]

What is rapier fusion btw? is it https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=69662.0 ? the blog linked in that thread seems dead so wasn't entirely sure

The blog link isn't exactly dead, just slightly wrong, I fixed it:
http://x-plain.blogspot.de/p/rapier-fusion-skin.html

Its really not that world-changing different to the default theme, mostly the main page with the controls moved to the bottom and a more "HTPC-y" selection of background images (not that we don't like Van Gogh, its perhaps not what most people would expect to see), as well as context-sensitive images (which unfortunately is a bit hard because it requires entries to be named a certain way)

[MikeO]

Only just seen this

I have been toying with Roon since Xmas. Suffice it to say JRiver is still live

It’s sexy yes, it has metadata

The good bits
Tidal integrates beautifully. I must check out Hilton’s solution
The remote app is good, rivaling JRemote. It mirrors the desktop app
Metadata lookup is automatic quite a laboursave, as long as it’s available from Ron’s data sources

The bad bits

It doesn’t support DLNA and Mostly the Roon Certified stuff is hi end
So I have to run Airplay on my Cambridge Audio CXN which loses any hi def , I keep JRiver for this if nothing else.
It doesn’t support custom tags
It doesn’t support custom views , what you see is what Roon deems the way to do it
It doesn’t support Tag editing

It’s processor hungry. My main PC melted and is being rebuilt, I am running on an i3 laptop with 4G of ram. JRiver runs, Roon just stops on my 100000 track library. My replacement will be i7 , 7700, 3.6 GHz, 16 g Ram Desktop just to cope

Why am I persevering, Tidal integration. You can have a Tidal album in your library and it just looks like it’s in in your file library. Searching an artist brings up your albums and Tidal ones (by difference)

The bottom line is they are sufficiently different as not to be easy to compare. They do very different things in different ways.

For now I am keeping both but leaning JRiver still.

Simplicity of navigation for me an the wife leans that way, custom views overweigh all

MC & Wikipedia seems ok to me

I have a lot of experience of this now , if any one wants more critique, I could write something more extensive, or simply PM me

Finally JimH need not worry but giving more credence to integrating Tidal would put the icing on the cake. I never thought I would be proposing streaming but I am ...

Mike

[MikeO]

PS

If money is a driver, Roon is $119 annual, $499 life

MC is $ 20