Blog
Heading into the holiday season and the new year, the team at Roon Labs has been busy preparing a great bunch of features for our 1.4 release.
We’re grateful for the support of our users and the partners that have helped us get the Roon name out there over the past year. Happy holidays!
With the holidays around the corner and gift-giving on people’s minds, we have another exciting mix of partner announcements to treat your friends, your family, or yourself. Whether you’re looking for an all-in-one streamer, a table radio, active speakers, or a Raspberry Pi hat, our partners have something for you this month.
One of the great features of the Roon Ready program is the diversity of product functions, features, and prices that are represented in the range of available devices from our partners.
From $50 Raspberry Pi hats to $50,000 DACs, table radios to headphone amplifiers, and soundbars to multi-room amps, you can find almost any kind of audio product you need in the Roon Ready family.
We’re very excited to announce that Roon 1.2 is finally live! This is our biggest release yet, with new platform support, new apps, new features, and lots of refinements based on the feedback we hear from our members every day. There are over 600 new features and improvements in all. Here are some highlights:
If our experiences at Sooloos and Meridian taught the Roon team anything, it was do what you know. In our case, that means music and software. Sure, we’ve built hardware and shipped mass-market apps, but when your heart’s not in something, it shows.
The spark that inspired the founding of Roon Labs a year ago was the idea that there weren’t great experiences available to people who love music, audio, or both. A few streaming services have made some interesting mobile apps, but those experiences don’t translate well to listening in the home; they often don’t offer reasonable audio quality and they’re designed to be, well, mobile. Conversely, much of the software that’s designed to be used with audio systems leaves quite a bit to be desired in terms of user experience.
If we had launched Roon according to our original plan, this post might have been called “The First Ten Days of Roon”. Our intention was to release in September as a feature-complete, mature product with the benefit of complete alpha and beta test cycles, but that isn’t how things played out.
Fifteen years ago, some friends and I started thinking about how listening to music was going to change. That was 1999, before streaming services or even the iTunes Store, so music collections were made up of CDs and files downloaded from early peer-to-peer networks.
It was a time of tremendous promise. Music, which had long been bound by the physical discs on which it was sold (and the broadcast media which promoted it), was going to become massively accessible. It was an intoxicating thought that all the music in the world might actually be something we could see and hear in our lifetimes.