I wonder how many current, paying subscribers Tidal actually has in those 3M? I, for one, have had five or six over the years. How handy others like me. How many trial offers that turn into dead ends? Tidal won’t give out any numbers on how many paying subscribers it has. My bet is it’s a fraction of 3M, and much closer to Qobuz’s 200K.
Neil, remember Tidal has been going far longer and is available in far more countries. For instance, Qobuz has only just been launched in Australia two months ago. This also means their costs may be higher.
Qobuz was founded in 2007. Tidal not until 2010.
I find Tidal has a better discovery feature set than Apple Music with My Mixes and links through album credits to explore artist discography. New and noteworthy seems better in Tidal than Apple Music exposing truly new albums of the week instead of Apple Music still showing something that came out months ago (this is in genre-specific landing pages).
Qobuz has digital booklets and the new album by genre works even better than Tidal and miles ahead of Apple Music.
What I like about Apple Music is the great integration with Apple Watch and Airpods. Spatial audio works pretty well for those albums that were mastered right with Dolby Atmos (most of the Atmos Blue Note records are good). Also, Apple Music works great with Carplay vs. broken Tidal and Qobuz apps. Some of the exclusive radio shows are good too (e.g., Matt Wilkinson) though I would like to see more variety there. I also like Apple Music curator pages.
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and yet it took 12 years to get to the US. Still not available in Canada.
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Slow methodical grow trumps expansion that is too rapid.
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I agree, I hope Qobuz survives. Their model has to be more sustainable.
well said. I agree…
Yes. This is the WTF how is this not addressed yet bit for me. A complete and total clusterf*ck.
If I were Apple considering to integrate or purchase Roon I’d be like “Buddy, your sh*tty software has the largest crash dumps in the history of the App Store!”
Yep. Sad and unnecessarily true. I actually doubt there is some QC or decent test strategy in dev at Roon. At least s/th that deserves that name. Not using hardware specific frameworks and technology maybe wasn’t a great decision either.
12 posts were split to a new topic: I really don’t understand some people who post on this and some other threads in the Roon forum
I too would like to play Apple Music media on the big rig. Right now, its AirPlay to an EndPoint running HiFiBerryOs or ROIPEE XL. As nearly as I can tell, Apple Music Lossless is sending the Red Book original on the titles I know well.
Apple Music’s Music API is new and different than the old one. The apparent catch from reviewing the web page about Music API, Apple Developer Documentation, is that it does not support opening a stream connection for playback. You’re supposed to use Apple’s playback object for playback and they do the stream mechanics for you. That would not make RAAT happy. But even automatically spawning an AirPlay would be better than nothing. But I’d rather RAAT.
Back in the old days (CDC SCOPE 2 for the 7600), the disks system was relatively small (300 MB storage module drives) so SCOPE staged files to and from tape. The operator would hang the tape, the OS would spool it to disk, open the spooled image for the program, and resume the program. When the program exited, the OS released the temporary file space occupied by the staged data set. So files were online, in cold storage (partially purged), or gone (purged). Partial purging kept the catalog entry with the tape label in the directory entry. Full purging deleted the directory entry and the file. The catalog had the library call number to aid the operator in fetching the correct reel. There was also a reference counting mechanism to let the OS track tapes still in use.
Can Roon use a similar model with services where it fetches the media from the service to /tmp, plays it from /tmp, and deletes it shortly after playback completes? It is kind of silly to spoon-feed media at playback sample rate from the source these days. Stage it, play it, delete it.
Apple Music App will cache titles in /users/user/music/media… for offline playback. This API (is there one?) would directly support the staging model described above. This service is not mentioned in the linked page. Apple is silent on the amount of media it will let you cache locally for walkabout playback, time to live, DRM, etc.
It would be great to be able to add Apple Lossless through Roon - let’s hope at some point we can get it integrated.
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Yes i use it all the time, with AU plugins
Added a Feature Request for playback of HLS file format. That is for Lossless content purchased through iTunes. Hopefully that is doable.
Hi Rooners and Roon’s moderators,
I’m happy about Roon but I’m looking for further features to simplify access to my iTunes library, now I can use it with aac files …
What’s about MusicKit - Apple Developer ?
Any chance to have an integration with Roon?
I look forward to hearing opinions and hopes 
Sante
From what I see this uses the SDK, it’s been repeatedly said the Roon required far more information than is provided by the SDK. There are numerous threads discussing this,
Roon and Apple appears to be a non starter
Thanks Carl, sorry for overlapping …
Really appreciated.
Sante
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