I have Roon connected to Tidal however, when browsing artists or albums under the Tidal menu of Roon if I have the album or artist in my iTunes library Roon only gives me the option to play from my iTunes library in the Tidal browser and I can’t figure how to play from Tidal.
Obviously we want to play higher quality tracks from Tidal and not our old MP3s and 4s from our iTunes libraries, right???
I would simply link the best Tidal version to your Roon library so it’s already there and available. If you want to see both versions in your library, choose “show hidden tracks and albums” in settings.
Roon always prefers the local version automatically over the streaming version. That’s not so great if your local copy sucks. You would have to make the streaming copy the primary version for every album and this would be a manual process.
However, before removing the iTunes version (which is easy if you configured the mp3s as an additional local file path in Roon) make sure that you already have the equivalent streaming versions in your library, else the albums simply disappear. Again, a manual process
Yeah but it should have a button to do that, same as it can prefer one streaming service over the other. Not great having to do this for thousands of albums manually
Well, if your local copy is so bad, it may just as well not be there (when Roon is combined with a streaming service). Perhaps a fix is to just remove the iTunes folder from the storage settings?
But if you collected your albums as mp3 in the past, it’s a practical way to populate your Roon library with the music you like, if you could then tell Roon to add the streaming version for each to the library as well, and then prefer it.
I ran into his myself. My local collection has 44/16 FLAC rips. When available, I’d prefer to listen to higher-resolution versions from Qobuz and Tidal. That’s why I subscribed to those services. That’s my default choice and I’d like to be able to express that via a setting just like I can express the fact that I prefer Qobuz to Tidal and that I prefer to “Treat MQA as worse than CD quality but not as bad as lossy codecs”. But if I have something that they don’t, or even if I have an equivalent version, I’m happy to use my local track.
Preferring a local track over a higher resolution streaming alternative is the exception, not the norm. In that specific case, I’d be happy to mark the local version as preferred. There are a handful of cases like that for me - and that’s a lot more manageable than doing the inverse for thousands of albums.
Any solution that requires many hours of work or requires me to disconnect my local library is a lousy solution. I don’t want to do a massive amount of work and I don’t want to lose access to the unique content in my library. The Qobuz/Tidal/MQA preferences are a reasonable example of how this, in my opinion, can and should work for local content.
True and good advice. After this, one can remove the mp3 files from the storage and Roon should then use the streaming versions. (However, keeping the mp3s in the library will always make Roon prefer them unless changed manually for each album)
I do hope this gets entertained as a feature suggestion - I know it’s been discussed in the past.
Can you elaborate on what someone would do in Soundiiz? I’ve used Soundiiz in the past to move playlists between services but I’m not sure what the application is here.
In the past, I used Soundiiz to add TIDAL copies of my physical library to Roon. Later, I moved [almost] everything to Qobuz. So, the OP could use this to replace his MP3 library with TIDAL equivalents.
