Hello Forum, I have only had Roon for a week but have been very disappointed. I want to like it and so would be would be grateful for your advice with the following.
My primary reason for downloading Roon was that I had read a lot of reviews saying it was great for discovering new music. I have a relatively small number (10,000 tracks) of music files on a NAS and primarily use Tidal as my library. I use Roon on an iPhone 7 streaming via Auralic Aries.
My main issues are:
The iPhone app rarely allows me to the option to apply the “radio” function to the tracks i have selected and, when i find that I can apply the radio option, it :
A) only selects music from my existing library rather than suggesting new artists or tracks
B) does not work and brings up the error “Played_empty_swim”.
I cannot add tracks to my existing Tidal playlists from within Roon making my Tidal playlists frozen in time.
I can see that the “Discover” option has some merit but its not enough for me to pay for Roon when i can access Tidal via Lightening DS app for free.
Im still dicovering Tidal…so Ill leave that to others to answer…
Radio only continues to play from your library based on what you were last playing. It has a ways to go for random selections but its being worked on. It’s more for rediscovery of your existing tracks in the library of the same likeness to what you had played last.
I don’t think Radio continues to play after a tidal play has finished…at least it didn’t when I tried it just now despite the Radio slider being set to on.
I think you are misunderstanding (and I did not read the reviews) what the reviews meant. Roon is great for active discovery of music. Play something on Tidal, read the review, read the credits, decide “Hey I like that guitar player” click on his link to discover all the other music he has played on or written. And so on and so on until you’ve built a web of music you never know existed.
I think it still has a ways to go for “automatic” or background discovery. Although playlists are supposedly changing for the announced 1.3 update.
When you find an album that you like in Tidal then click on ‘Add to Library’ - that will mean that Radio can use these tracks as well as the original ones in your library.
Another thing you can do is to go to Tidal > Collections - from there you can add collections under various genres - and create a large library which you can then explore.
Hi Chris. Thanks for your input. I was planning to use my iPad but its 2nd Gen and i have found that it does not support the Roon app. That’s progress !
There is a good technical article in the Knowledge Base as to why an IPad 2 cannot run Roon.
It’s well worth dipping in there from time to time for a little study as you listen.
Enjoy, Chris