I’ve been running the Roon trial for a little more than a week. Love the software and am going to subscribe. It works amazingly well and is great for a music lover.Within the span of a week I’ve changed my entire life for music around. I now have a NAS feeding many endpoints including a Roon ready dac and also a Raspberry Pi. Given I have different environments in the house with different audio capabilities, I like that it automatically figures out what bit rate to apply in any given situation. One issue I have is that this ease doesn’t seem to be extended to album management. Apologies if this is something already known or there is a solution and I’m just not clued in as a new user, but here goes –
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has multiple albums at different bit rates. I have CD’s multiple SACD’s at different masterings etc. Roon does a great job of finding labels etc. However, with a specific album, I would just like it to be treated as a single album that Roon manages for me. I know you have the ability to show (“other versions”) and merge. But it doesn’t seem to extend to playlists etc. While I should be allowed to play any song from a specific instance of album if I wish, what I would like Roon to do is pick the best album or track for the device. So I may have started with a regular CD with items in a playlist, then added an SACD rip or DSD download of the same album later. What would seem natural is that now the playlist works with DSD’s when I have a DSD capable DAC for higher quality audio and the PCM for DAC’s that only support PCM ( or DSD converted to PCM if it would prove to be better than the Redbook ). Right now I have to manually select which album and then delete/re-insert items in my playlist if I have a new album at a better quality. If I want to target different bit rates it seems I’ve to create multiple playlists. This would apply to Tidal too of course. Also, if I have Tidal and later add a CD, it should automatically know and pick the CD if the service is slow etc ( this is because in some cases I’ve added album CD’s after adding a Tidal album into a playlist ). Also, when picking a song or album, I should also easily be able to select the file types/bit rates available if I want to instead of trying to switch to another album. In general, Album/playlist management does not seem as intuitive as the rest of Roon, although it is leaps ahead of other software I’ve used.
