Or why even continue to offer it? If you don't want people to take a lifetime offer, don't make that offer.
They only kept the lifetime since so many kept on requesting it. They had a recent thread on the reasons for the lifetime version in their forum, and why they'd prefer to get rid of it entirely. From a business sense, I do see their point--if they expect to keep on maintaining and evolving Roon, they need a constant flow of income to keep the developers employed. The old lifetime subscriptions were about four years' worth of income and after that, nothing. Yet they still had update development costs, plus the licensing costs for the data they are pulling in, for customers getting a free ride past the four year point. But what about new subscribers on the lifetime plan? That wouldn't be enough to keep Roon in business. They are not Adobe or Microsoft--they are an extremely niche product in comparison, with only one egg in their basket. And the yearly subscription model makes sense. Otherwise, if they used the old traditional model of paying for major version upgrades, they would be hitting up customers for a few hundred dollars each time an upgrade came along, both to cover their costs in developing it, and to make up for those customers who might never upgrade yet go along for the "free ride" on the third party data they use (unless they cut off the third party data for users of older versions, which would create an uproar).
No, I'm not making excuses for them, nor do I care for the price tag on the yearly subscription, but to get such a niche product out there and deliver it at an acceptable quality is going to cost some money.
I was at that point myself with Adobe--I use a few of their products, and now pay for a subscription bundle that offer what I need for $10/month. It is less of a hit financially than trying to scrape up hundreds when a new version came along, or getting by on an older version that sometimes didn't have newer features I needed. Granted I can write it off through my work, but the point is that a small nibble every month, to ensure I'm always using the latest version, is better than the alternative for what could be expensive standalone software packages.
Funny how I have to switch to the Qobuz app to stream to 24/96. Roon just doesn't seem have much of a buffer and gives up too quickly on tracks.. I have looked under every 3 dot rock in that program, and if there is a setting for increasing the buffer I can't find it.
It can depend on a lot of things, not just the network speeds. Despite having 600mbps coming into the house, gig-ethernet/Cat6 in my entire network, and Ethernet to my most important media devices, I occasionally get an issue with it dropping tracks, maybe once every few weeks. That's when I find out that something else is running on my Roon Core computer (maybe a software update, malware scan, another media server doing some indexing), or there's a process running on my NAS that is creating a bottleneck. In other words, it's not my network capacity, but the NAS can't keep up with demand, or the CPU in the Roon Core computer is taxed. (I did just recently bump memory up to 16GB in that computer, and it's less stressed now--no issues yet.) Roon simply (and sometimes wrongfully) flags it as some sort of bandwidth issue. Roon Core really runs best on its own dedicated computer with a somewhat powerful CPU.
