Hi,
I’m thinking about using Roon but have not decided yet.
When reading through older topics here, I have seen some of you praising searchability and metadata of the Roon/Tidal combination for classical music.
I’m curious: what setup are you classical Roon/Tidal users running? From my experience Tidal is a total mess when it comes to tagging Works/Composer/Soloists/Conductor? I even have an Idagio subscription for Classical, because I can’t find what I’m looking for on Tidal (which I use for other genres)
Cheers!
Classical music search/discovery is, imo, by far Roon’s weakest point. It is no better, or worse than Tidal, or Qobuz in this respect. They are all reliant on the data the labels provide, although there is some editorial work from some of Roon’s metadata partners. Some of it is quite good, but some is really not, and genera classifications are hopelessly inconsistent.
Classical is uniquely ill-suited to a pure search paradigm; there are simply too many variables. drill-down search works much better, but alas, that seems to have entirely disappeared from most music apps (Apple Classical makes an attempt). You can hack-together something in Roon that sort of emulates true drill-down, but I don’t find it a quality experience.
in sum, bad data in, middling efforts to normalize, and a UX designed for pop/rock equals a bad classical music experience.
still, as I write this I’m listening to Macbeth streaming from Tidal in Roon, and it sounds pretty good.
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