Just like the elephant in the room? I think not.
Personally, I think the Elephant in the Roon is Spotify Hi-Fi (not trying to bring up that discussion) in the sense that if Tidal doesn’t survive, a lot of the really compelling features of Roon have far less value.
Addressing the general community since a number of posters seem to actively resist, rather than just not desire, this feature.
That said, I think the active discussion here speaks a lot for the passion that Roon generates, and that is a great thing. An active community with engaged developers is a pretty rare thing, and it’s cool to be a part of.
That’s an interesting point. Is the essential value of Roon only in the integration of streaming services? For a lot of users it seems to be.
As far as I am concerned Roon’s unique selling point is not the Tidal integration but the general approach especially when it comes to classical music. I am very much aware that I am representing the minority here.
But in a way that’s bringing me back to the tag vs non-tag discussion. One thing that I’m concerned about is that with Roons metadata you are only “renting it” like you only rent the music with a streaming service. Of course you can’t map it perfectly to file tags, but I’d really like to benefit from Roons metadata in a more “physical” way.
If I’d stop caring about my tags after starting with Roon, I’ll end up with a big mess in terms of metadata if Roon would ever go out of business.
But now we are on a totally different topic and I don’t want to hijack this thread.
Well, at the risk of getting really OT, for me there is more than enough value in Roon itself without the need for any streaming service, but I understand completely that YMMV.
I don’t want to hijack either. I’ll just say I think it is a large benefit of Roon. There are others as well, for sure, and too many to list.
But the thing that got me to commit to Roon was the very seamless integration with a streaming service that allows me to enjoy a wider world of music while still leveraging my own collection, and indeed using that collection as a way to explore the wider world.
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Couldn’t agree more, whilst we all have our views, this forum generally remains polite and it’s great to see the points of view of others often put across so well. But you can’t have browse by folder structure 
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Disagree, I’ve actually supported the artists I enjoy by buying their music…1000’s of albums, not resorted to streaming which is just another word for screwing the artists. If all streaming services disappeared overnight I would lose no sleep over it, Roon would be just as useful to me as it is at present.
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Same here.
And here, Tidal used as a discovery tool.
I just counted my ECM Library: I stand at: 548.
These are CDs and downloads. You cant stream them anywhere…
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By the way, i had no answer to my question:
example: I have this in my library:
Beethoven - Symphonies 1 & 4 Karajan - Phil de berlin
Beethoven - Symphonies 1 à 9 - Nikolaus Harnoncourt- Chamber Orchestra Of Europe -
Beethoven - Symphonies 1 à 9 ( - 2 et 7) - Karajan - Philarmonia Orchestra
Beethoven - Symphonies 6 & 8 -
Beethoven - Symphonies 9 - Wilhelm Furtwangler - Bayreuth Festival Orchestra & Chorus
if I type “Beethoven” I have hundreds of lines to read
if I type “Beethoven symphonie”
I have:
Beethoven:Symphonies
Beethoven:SymphoniesNos 1-9
Beethoven:Symphonies 1 & 4 ;Egmont overture
Beethoven:Symphonies 1 & 3
Beethoven:Symphonies (Krajan/philharmonia O 1951-5)
where is Beethoven - Symphonies 9 - Wilhelm Furtwangler - Bayreuth Festival Orchestra & Chorus???
I googled this one. I could be wrong, but I think the correct title might be “Symphony” not “Symphonies”. Perhaps do a search on “Beethoven symphon” instead.
Wrt playing a media-file that somebody brings over: Roon supports this today, I just did it.
Drag-and-drop from Explorer into the Roon user interface, just on top of the page.
It asks for approval to copy it to the server.
The album (I dragged over a folder) appears in the top left when I am in the Album view, sorted by Date Added.
I click on it and play it.
Then I can remove it afterwards, by selecting it and hitting Delete from the Edit menu.
No need to index or anything else.
Roon may in fact index the file in the background, if it finds it, and in that case it will show you the musicians and cross-correlate and do the full Roon thing. But if it doesn’t find it, it just sits there, marked Unidentified, just showing whatever data it got from the files.
What happens if you type Furtwangler or Bayreuth?
This is the central point of Roon.
With a folder structure, the music must be categorized by one main point, Beethoven in your case.
With Roon, you can search on any one of a multitude of entries. If you know the name of the soprano, you can search on that. If you know the name of recording engineer.
if you know the color of the lean violinist’s instrument, you can’t search on that. Dang.
It works for “Bayreuth festival”. But the point is that I had to go thru the folder structure to find it!
I tried too LMS and I must say that if I found what I want, it is far less user friendly!!
You say:
Wrt playing a media-file that somebody brings over: Roon supports this today, I just did it.
Drag-and-drop from Explorer into the Roon user interface, just on top of the page.
It asks for approval to copy it to the server.
The album (I dragged over a folder) appears in the top left when I am in the Album view, sorted by Date Added.
I click on it and play it.
Could you explain it a little more because my English is poor.
Searching for "“Beethoven symph” would have got there as well. It’s really not that different from doing a google search. And I have not seen anyone suggest that they need to see folders to do a google search. 
It’s just a case (for some people) of getting used to something a bit different to what they are used to.
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As outlined by Paul above, if you input Beethoven into a Google Search, then it will return the proverbial “phone book” of results
If however, you input just one or two other more specific terms / words…then the Search Results are far more likely to give you what you are looking for
The same principle will hold true with Roon…be specific with your search and you are far more likely to get useful results
It’s funny that you say that!!..how many here remember when Yahoo was the “gold standard” and most popular Search Engine…see the old Yahoo search screen below
As you can see, you needed to drill down by Category into the specific area of interest…before you might find what you were looking for
But then along came Google…with its single entry box…and the rest is history
At the time, Yahoo was the standard…but Google’s simple single entry box was a paradigm shift in how people looked for stuff…and once people adjusted to the new paradigm, then Yahoo was left in the weeds as a search engine
I feel the same principle holds true with the age old Browse by Folder Structure…versus the new paradigm available within Roon
It’s worth noting that Google never developed a “Browse by Category” method of searching as they felt that once users adapted to the new method, they wouldn’t go back…and this was in the face of much user hostility at the time from people who wanted Categorized Search…Google held to their guns and principles, and most people adapted accordingly
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Has anyone looked at the home page of Roon lately?
It clearly states that Roon is the antithesis of the folder based search method, why would they do a 180 degree turn around?
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Because a supplier should listen to their customers.