new user here, demo’ing Roon and Tidal. At first I was very disappointed in searching for MQA content. E.g. I search Diana Krall, all my DK albums on my server show up as the library I know I already have, and just a few extra titles show up in a separate Tidal panel (see screenshot - I’d challenge any new user of Roon not to conclude that this indicates the sum total of Tidal’s DK catalogue).
Anyway, to cut a long story short, I eventually discover that there are indeed MQA versions of almost all DK albums, buried in my Roon library, as separate versions. That’s way too hard to find out. Is there a setting in Roon I can change so I can simply browse the entirety of the Tidal catalogue from within Roon, or for general browsing of Tidal for MQA content, do I need to ditch Roon and use the Tidal app instead?
For third-party providers it would be ideal to be able to have an option to browse their catalogue without album filtering against the local library. Is this feature already available?
I’m not sure what steps you took, but it is straightforward to find all available albums on TIDAL. Simply, use the artist browser or search to land on the artist page. Then scroll down to TIDAL Main Albums and Click View All Main Albums. All MQA albums have a badge on the album cover.
If you already have a release in your library, go to the album view and click on the Versions tab and you will see all the other releases including an option to change the default album.
I suggest you take a look at the User Guide and shout out if you have any other questions.
hi, this is exactly what I did. But on getting to the artist page, I scroll down below the view of my library albums and get to a section with the Tidal logo, and hardly any albums are shown. These are presumably the only albums in the Tidal catalogue that do not have a local match. I would find it intuitive - dare I say it, obvious - that a section with the Tidal banner would show all available main albums for the artist. As you can see from the screenshot, I don’t get a view on all available Tidal albums for the artist.
You are quite right. That Tidal section only shows albums that you don’t have some version of in your library. If an MQA format has appeared since you added the CD version, then to check you need to go to versions for each album, or go to the Tidal app.
In the UK there are 18 Diana Kroll albums available on TIDAL, but all won’t be listed in the TIDAL section if a version already exists in your library. This is how things work.
If you want to play a higher resolution that the AAC version, go to the album, click on the Versions tab and change the default release to the one you prefer.
This is how things work. I don’t think this is a shortcoming since the priority for Roon is release not the format. You can check for alternative versions when you decide to play or routinely go to the TIDAL What’s New > Masters section, for example the recent Peter Gabriel MQA releases.
Thanks for the comments. As a new user, I found this completely unintuitive. Having signed up to Tidal, and initially impressed by the integration into Roon, I naturally started a search on some of my favourite artitsts via the Roon app, only to find that when I scrolled down to the album view, I would find a section for Tidal with a few titles I don’t already own. As a new user, how was I supposed to realise that matches were being filtered out, if I had no idea what albums are actually held by Tidal in the first place. I only realised that Tidal versions of some of my favourite content are available entirely by accident (I stumbled across a Diana Krall track in a jazz playlist and wondered why I had not seen it in my main album view).
I appreciate that Roon is very clever, and most of what it does to help is useful, but for me I would have wanted Roon to tell me it had filtered out matching titles - and ideally have an option to display everything. A lack of a cue to the user in this regard is not great design in my view.
As with all good software you need to invest time in it to understand how it works. Usually there are very good reasons for the way Roon works, which may not be apparent to you just now.
