Download Tidal albums for "offline" play [not allowed by contractual agreements with music labels]

Tidal desktop (and Roon) is at the mercy of the user’s internet connection and other network issues.

You can’t imagine how incredibly frustrating it is to start playing an album only for it to buffer. It reflects badly on Roon even though it might not be Roon’s fault.

If you let the user download the Tidal album for offline play then there would be no stuttering issues.

I realize you probably need to authenticate the user’s right to be able to play the Tidal album but surely this can happen just at the very start, before playing the first track of the album.

Maybe your agreement with Tidal prohibits you from implementing offline play?

This is a very important feature, please do something to make the Tidal experience buffer free.

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This is certainly not possible! There is no streaming platform that allows offline playback on a computer (at least, as far as I know). Allowed only on mobile devices. This is completely out of Roon’s hands. Even the Tidal desktop app will not allow you offline playback.

Of course it’s technically possible, Roon is getting the data from Tidal before Roon does it’s own processing/playing of that data.

Roon could save that data locally and play from local files rather than stream it from Tidal.

Maybe Roon is prohibited by the Tidal licence agreement from saving/playing the data locally.

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Concerned about having the necessary bandwidth? Not only do Qobuz’ smartphone apps (iOS and Android) allow for offline content but unlike rival services, so too do their desktop apps (Windows and MacOS).

https://darko.audio/2018/07/qobuz-cuts-a-slice-of-american-pie/

Spotify allows offline playback on the desktop. They encrypt the files. Tidal doesn’t support that even in their own app, so an api call to do that is out of the question right now. And I can assure you, this feature won’t make it into a public api. If I were TIDAL I wouldn’t give my api the possibility for offline downloading. However, there are ways around it. Some people have succeeded to download TIDAL tracks and albums using the official api. But its illegal. So I’m not gonna say anything else about it.

Roon is already downloading via the API before playing it.
They don’t save the data for “offline” playback because presumably it’s not allowed in the license.
However I imagine it would be technically easy to do that.

Yes, you are probably right, but as far as I know, Roon doesn’t rely a lot on the API. They have a partnership where they have access to the database in another way than through the API.

Tidal does support offline playback, I use it all the time

Only in the mobile app. We are talking about having offline playback on the desktop.

Ah, apologies for confusion

Not only does it prevent us, but TIDAL’s own agreements with the music labels prevents them from offering this in any application not called TIDAL.

Renegotiating these agreements with the labels is VERY expensive and while we hope that maybe they will find a way to inject us into any next iteration of these agreements, I am not hopeful for any timely positive news.

Hi Jim,
Not sure of your point. Tidal allows offline play on the computer through the Tidal apps. Qobuz is identical. Offline play only occurs through Qobuz applications.

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