Choose Primary Source for Audio

Hello Roon Devs,

I am requesting what appears to be a simple enough request. For my example, I am trying to play Flying Lotus’s “You’re Dead!” album. I have a local copy of this album, and I also have access to tidal through the roon app.

The Roon app will auto select the local .MP3 file as the primary source and will have it auto-selected as the version to play if I hit play. Given that the software was smart enough to detect the album as the correct one, and associate both it and the tidal copy under the album versions, it would be nice if it could either pick tidal as the primary source always, or at least compare the quality/types of the files and select 1 over the other automatically. FLAC can always be a preference over MP3, etc.

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I believe roon always prefers the local copy irrespective of audio quality.

You can select the source for the primary album under the version tab.

Ged, this is good to know and Carl, this is understood. From a features perspective, Roon software should let the user choose the preference as a setting for the entire library. It currently doesn’t remember the preference even per album. Having Tidal tied in to Roon software is a great design choice and a reason why I am currently trying the software, but it’s currently a chore to select any music to be streamed through Tidal if I have a local copy.

If I click play, a default settings choice should be used by Roon for playback. My local copies do not rival Tidal’s quality in most every case; thus I would like to easily play back those songs/albums from Tidal. The extra thought/clicks currently necessary to do so is not user friendly.

One should not have to A. enable the “show album format on browser” setting to determine that B. the source is MP3 and should be switched to Tidal by C. making extra clicks. I have a large library of local files, large enough it is hard to remember when I have a local copy of an album already. Needing to look for tiny text to identify if a source is correct, or noticing the quality could be higher through listening or just guessing makes for a tedious user experience.

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My issue is that I subscribe to both Tidal and Qobuz. While I can select versions and choose a primary album, unless I go through each duplicate and delete it from my library, when I shuffle albums, I often see the secondary version being streamed.

I want to choose a primary, and then shuffle albums to only play the primary version. I see no option in Focus to select primary versions only.