Better support for Tidal features & Consistency in Tracks list views between services

I think I migh be wrong about the recently played actually. Recent activity shows all the albums I have added though.

Can you share an example track? Where Tidal does better than Spotify in radio mode?

Hmm, good question. I’ve been running though the tests and im not sure i can remember specific outcomes, i wasn’t recording them. Two examples off the top of my head are the above mentioned Galimatias (artist radio) (electronic/downtempo). Tidal gives a very good mix of related music, if a little trip-hop heavy. Roon does have some good selections but mixes in mostly house EDM and drum &bass which isn’t really related to the artist.

Alternately in the extreme track radio from “Hotel Downtown” by Gray, a track i discovered in my tidal Reccommended tracks for you" last week, on tidal, radio produces a good list of structurally similar music, largely from the softer side of hip hop or trip hop. Not all the music is necessarily music for me, but i excited that and appreciated that most of it fit well with the seed track. Roon radio either fails to start at all citing nothing related, or plays a few very unrelated tracks and then stops.

To be fair to Roon, I’ve found tracks where Roon tries… Though usually badly on tracks where tidal offers no radio option.

Genre radio in Roon needs work. Chinese traditional works great. World fusion gives me mostly modern jazz… :smile:

I may have figured out a slight workaround for our usage. Apparently while tidal and every other streaming service treat their tracks and albums in your library separately, Roon apparently follows the model where the tracks list shows all tracks in the library including everything on albums in the library, but additionally, the albums lost shows every album, including albums where you have only one track in the library. It’s weird, but the album list works more like tidals track list (album art, listed by date added) which is a lot easier than using the tracks list with 15 album tracks between the two songs I’m looking for.

The tracks list on the tidal section is a hot mess without batch options and normal sorting, id call it incomplete really. And because of that the tracks page can’t filter out album tracks either. But until it unless Roon fixes either or both of those weaknesses, (they really ought to) using album library view may at least make it but MANDATORY to use the tidal app for everything other than recommendations.

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Thanks but I was interested in your comment about Spotify vs Tidal, instead of Tidal vs Roon. So I was looking for an example track where I could see (reproduce) this same difference you noted…

Ahh, that’s slightly harder to quantify… What i was mostly disappointed in with Spotify that i still saw was almost a pattern to the playback. It frequently plays the seed artist, similar to Deezer, every few songs. Tidal also suffers from this for some content, but not as intrusively as deezer… Maybe on par with Spotify. But what Spotify tends to do that drives me up a wall, if it has a pattern where it seems to select 4 albums or so, and play several tracks from those albums in close proximity as though you’re listening to a 4 or 8 disc carousel on shuffle rather than an internet radio setup.

If i were to guess, this probably manages to net them some savings on royalty payments somehow.

A can take the Galimatias example from above here. Artist radio on both tidal and Spotify are is similar quality. Each seems to lean more heavily on one set of artists over the other. But where tidals list is a not more dynamic in switching between various artists, with the seed artist repeated every so many tracks, Spotify has a list with a few specific albums repeating tracks regularly as though playing the whole album, and then another set of often repeated albums replaces those etc. The patterning like that seems unique to Spotify, and is the same reason i had sought others back years ago. Same if i take a pop track, say, Maroon 5 or Ariana grande or a kpop artist. It’s almost more apparent there. Once you see the pattern it’ll drive you nuts:smile:

There are places where Spotify can build a quality list for a track where no other service can… But the sense it’s not really a random or dynamic playlist is irritating where other services don’t seem to do that.

It’s at least better than Qobuz’? :wink:

I think I just discovered the very worst of what Spotify’s radio has to offer. I finally discovered some artists where Spotify actually has a good 20% more albums than Apple. Unfortunately starting a radio station from the artist or from a track yields a station where, literally, ever 2-4 tracks are from that artist due to the large discography. Then surrounding those are the same 4 artists. One of which has three tracks in a row, and also makes up a good 15% or more of the rest of the playlist, meaning the station between the seed artist and that one makes up a good 50+ % of the “station.” It actually does throw in a few great new tracks in between, but I have to listen to hours of the same things over and over to get to them. It kills me that I’ve discovered some content they have that others don’t, because their radio is horrendously bad. At least Roon Radio tries, even if it fails. (Ok, modern jazz being most of “world fusion” is pretty awful on Roon’s part. But at least the artists don’t repeat!