If commercialy feasable, it would technically not that difficult I hope. They follow the same logic work - performances that makes Roonlabs now so great for classical music lovers.
In short: they have the catalogues of
Deutsche Grammophon
Decca
Sony Classical
Warner Classics
Erato
Harmonia Mundi
ECM
They offer this for approx. 10 EUR in 1440 kbps (lossless).
Very interesting service. Tightly managed by venture capital who will want results so maybe not a bad thing. Odd revenue share for artists as well, based on per second per track. A very telco way of doing things. Almost as if partnership with the telcos is the next stage of this. Really has the air of a service starting to snowball.
Really like the “mood” service and curated playlists. 40 out of 70 staff are hand-grooming the metadata. Also really like the look of search on their apps. Roon looks far behind to me here but there have been strong hints from roon that search will have a high priority in coming releases in the new year. Will be interesting to see who pulls of search better as they seem to be taking very different approaches.
Struggling also with the hardware integration. I saw a few threads on CA trying to get HQPlayer working but wasn’t clear if that was possible. Only real obstacle for me.
I just called up Idagio’s one-page website. Ugh. It contains a teaser price, four bullet points, and then…
YOU READY, CONSUMER?? SIGN UP!
Sorry, if first impressions count, I agree with @Ludwig : no sale. No offense to-Idagio fans here. I gotta believe the reality is much better than the perception.
But I’m one of those old dinosaurs; easily ignorable.
You can sign up without your credit card and get a low-rez preview mode. They just want an email address. It’s enough to snoop around. Search and metadata have been put front and center so compared to roon that is very strong. Much more basic in terms of hardware integration.
They have had 500k downloads since launch. They are converting these to subscriptions at about 18%. A lot of VC interest. Some very interesting youtubes on the business model out there.
Yes, the mood service and curated playlists, discovery, really work. Some common sense in that in these modes single parts are sequenced, a mood is sustained and there is still variety and surprise. The contrast with roon radio couldn’t be starker. Search works too and they have real experts QA’g the metadata.
Those are my priorities if I am going to sign up to a subscription service of millions of albums. Otherwise it is just an incomprehensible swamp. I really weary of the level of manual intervention needed with roon TBH and I still cannot radio to work.
I don’t know if they plan changes in future releases but at the moment it is a very different approach to roon maybe reflecting economic changes in Europe since the financial crisis. Their youtubes talk in terms of insourced manual processes managed by a generation of university educated young musicologists and yahoo technology for some reason whereas roon often seems to talk in terms of outsourced manual processes to legacy metadata suppliers and internal AI and machine intelligence and google technology. There has been a lot of talk on the search thread about new search and radio functionality from roon in the new year so it will be very interesting to see what general approach works best.
Idagio needs to improve HW integration for sure but high rez and all that stuff is personally of very little interest to me. I used to waste far too much time and money on audiophoolery but age is a great leveler and now I cannot hear anything above 11khz (I mean absolutely nothing).
No local library management either. But TBH I question just how important that is to me but that was the point of the original post.
The Germans have often been slow out of the blocks but they understand value chains very well. Won’t be long before they address the hardware integration issue, probably via their automotive industry I suspect. A lot of industrial synergies the Germans can call on.
I can’t see them giving up on this when there is such a long history of dominance in all parts of the Classical music reproduction chain from composers, performers, instruments, labels, artists, publishers, conductors, orchestras and concert halls.
I’m mostly experimenting with Chromecast at the moment. I don’t have a soundbar but it’s a cheap easy way to get a TV centric system working that may work for you if remote operation is important. Since my JRiver days I always had the habit of using a bluetooth keyboard to the TV in theater mode. Mostly use roon that way as well and Idagio is much the same. Sounds fabulous. Now if I can only get HQPlayer working as well.
But having a wobbly with main roon core at the moment. Cannot get it to boot. Very tired of the whole computer audio thing to be honest.
A couple of things though about Idagio. On the one hand it doesn’t do gapless. That’s bad. On the other, the better metadata means that catalog coverage (which I think is good for classical only and getting better) is a little academic. You can find things on Idagio you cannot with the other streamers because their metadata can make it difficult.
I put my CC, hdmi into the sound bar, Idagio cast to it no problem
Then I Airplayed to my Cambridge Audio CXN, only AirPlay but fine, this connected coax to my Audiolab mdac a d headphones so I get Idagio as flac on my phones
So all is well, I don’t need the CC other than Roon displays which works fine too
I will now see what’s in IDAGIO that isn’t in Tidal, not much so far but early days. I didn’t realize it’s not gapless
Yes, I was surprised about gapless too. They have prioritized the metadata at the expense of a few things it would seem. Looks like you just can’t have everything.