It is rare inspiration that this author would write accolades about any software product.

Roon Labs is such a product. It is exceptional and sufficiently rich in its value proposition that it has changed my life. Pleasantly and profoundly.

Roon is a user-friendly music streaming platform that organises and streams one’s digital music library to any connected device in the network.

But unlike other programs that are commercially available, the engineers have designed Roon to approximate the experience of bonding with the music, providing on-screen liner notes, artist biographies, lyrics, album personnel, critic reviews, and more. The user experience is rich, seamless, reliable and on-call with the stroke of the finger.

For music lovers like myself — with 3,000 CDs that I purchased personally, physically, and generally in-person over thirty years — the volume of such a physical library is daunting. The size, alone, separates one from facile access to the music. For years, I have been less likely to retrieve a CD for listening. Some CDs I may even have long forgotten to exist. The alternative, to digitise the music, is a functional alternative, but raw-music data-files diminish the user experience to “shuffle” the titles or set an automatic playlist without particular engagement. I want to know — and remind myself — of the liner notes or the degrees of separation between the artists, the recording engineers or record producers…. or which recording studios hosted the album. These data enhance the experience. Each musical acquisition has a story behind it, the benefit of research and knowledge about an artist by the purchaser, and this intimate experience is lost with streaming music as automated playlists on software such as Spotify. There is no connection and no history.

Then I discovered Roon. Data storage is now fairly inexpensive, and after some months I digitised my entire catalog to FLAC on a solid-state 1 Terabayte drive that fits easily in the palm of my hand. This was scarcely possible just five years ago.

Now I can search through the 30,000 songs instantaneously, providing the scope and access that I need to know in the catalog. And as one might suspect, every slice through the catalog is available by Genre (and sub-genre), Artist, Album etc. I have listened to content that I have not known to exist in the catalog…. and have had the joy of experiencing some music for the first time… in my own catalog!

Moreover, Roon can stream to any speaker or device that is connected… including Sonos speakers. But most important, all of the little goodies of information about the album are on-screen and available.

If I could provide some feedback, I would proffer that Roon improve the Personnel section for each album. It is not uncommon that the personnel for each song on a single (jazz) album may vary. Thus, it is important to list the personnel in greater detail for each track where appropriate. Lack of detail may obfuscate the fact that, say, Freddie Hubbard was the guest horn player on a particular track of a Nancy Wilson album. Or if one is really wonky, you might want to know the studio or the engineer of the recording. For jazz or classical recordings, these are useful datapoints.

Also, while Roon has some liner notes, they could be better. There is no reason not to include the original liner notes from a vinyl album. They must be available, certainly. Instead of providing just a critic review that was provided post mortem…. it would be really great to see the originals. Presently, most of the jazz critic reviews are the same guy, anyway — Scott Yanow — who impresses me as not a particularly happy person. :-)

Otherwise, Roon is a gift, a perfection. I could not recommend the service more highly. Truly, to have a personal catalog of beautifully personally-curated music at my fingertips, in uncompromising quality, has made me a better man.

And that is great.