WHY DOES summer always seem to fly by and winter to drag on? Why does the line you’re in at the supermarket always seem to be the one moving the slowest? What is Roon? These aren’t the easiest questions to answer.
For our purposes, we’ll address the question of Roon, a subscription-based digital music library and streaming management software that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux-based computers as well as music servers like Roon’s own Nucleus and Nucleus Plus. Created by Roon Labs, Roon is billed as “the music player for music fanatics.” We’ve name-dropped it many times in these pages, typically in the context of audio component reviews, but for some folks the Roon concept might be something of a mystery—one we’ll engage with Scooby Doo-style right now.
Roon Roots
Roon Labs is run by its founders Enno Vandermeer, Danny Dulai, and Brian Luczkiewicz. In 2006, the trio launched the Sooloos music server system, a physically imposing and pricey suite of hardware products that quickly found use in many ultra-high-end stereo systems. After selling Sooloos to Meridian Audio in 2008 and then developing a music software app for Hewlett Packard, they next launched Roon Labs in 2015 to develop Roon.
To briefly sum up, Roon aggregates audio recordings stored as local files on your computers and any attached storage and combines them with ones you’ve added to your Tidal and Qobuz streaming service collections,
