As of v1.3 build 207, it’s great to have a Masters tab on the Tidal “What’s New” page. I’m wondering if it would also be possible to implement a Masters tab (or something similar) on the Tidal genre pages (e.g., Tidal -> Genres -> Jazz -> Masters)? Failing that (or perhaps in addition to that), it would be great to have a Focus criterion for Format -> MQA and/or Format -> Tidal -> Master.
2 Likes
I’d love a Masters tab on the Genres page. As (hopefully) the Masters count goes up, it will become harder to navigate the current tab.
We don’t have more access to information about masters than what’s already provided by TIDAL’s API (which drives their desktop app, too). If you spot masters tabs on genre pages in the TIDAL app, let us know, and we’ll get the same functionality working in Roon too. I don’t know how we would be able to do it with their API as it exists today.
Fair enough, and even given my vague understanding of this stuff, I’m not surprised this is the case. But what about Focus criteria that will let us home in on MQA content?
Aren’t there any embedded tags in the FLAC files / stream that identify them as MQA ?
That functionality already exists, but focus is only for content in your library. So it doesn’t help with TIDAL.
For “for purchase” files there are supposed to be. In practice this is hit or miss. Many publishers screw it up.
For TIDAL streaming content, every file I’ve ever laid eyes on had no tags whatsoever.
The right mechanism for detecting an MQA stream is to pass the stream to some code provided by MQA that determines what it is. That will happen as part of Roon’s more comprehensive MQA integration.
I wish TIDAL made it easier to find MQA content via their API. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of making MQA “just a special FLAC file” is that it’s very, very easy to treat it that way and not build all of these other features around it, as TIDAL have apparently done.
The “masters” tab (as many have discovered) doesn’t contain all of the MQA content that TIDAL has–it’s delivered via the editorial mechanisms that drive “What’s New”, so clearly a human is populating those manually. As far as we know there is no generic way to find out from TIDAL which content is MQA programmatically other than playing each track one by one, which clearly isn’t practical.
4 Likes
Yikes! I guess there’s a reason why they call it the bleeding edge. Your clear explanation of what’s going on is, as usual, much appreciated.
Yes indeed!
Is possible to have a similar master tab on your own album’s list to check which album you have added to your library that is MQA? I tried with Focus but I can always find TIDAL album but no more than that.
So far I have been adding a tag on the MQA album but I was wondering if there is a more automatic process.
thanks
Marco
There could be an automatic process if enough people convinced them to make some changes by giving Tidal direct feedback…
2 Likes
Hello Brian!
New customer here (well, still in the trial period technically) and I think Roon is awesome! Keep up the great work guys, I love it!
Now, regarding the Tidal API, I noticed that Tidal uses LOSSLESS and HI_RES as values for the audioQuality field in the album items JSON reply, and I’ve posted some details here.
Is that perhaps something of use?It would be pretty strange if either of those values would refer to the 3rd possibility, the lossy compressed stream type.
Also, since it’s been repeatedly suggested we send feedback to Tidal about our MQA/Masters woes, do you have anything in particular to suggest we should mention, or is “Tidal please improve the Masters/MQA integration with Roon via clear tags and complete Masters list k thx bye” good enough? 
1 Like