First, cool with it the hyperbole. Words and their definitions matter, especially so with words like “slander”. A critical part of the definition of slander requires the statement to be false. The only slandering here is the one you are making when accusing me of slander. I have said nothing false.
Now, for the weirdness of this. There is nothing weird or out of the usual… It is perfectly aligned with what was done in the past and what will be required in the future.
Checking out the past Qobuz threads… I’ve had no change in course. Qobuz failed to make progress on Roon integration multiple times while saying they were interested, and then their CEO actively came out and said something to the effect of “we will copy all of Roon’s features soon”.
I called them out on their delays and lack of public decision one way of the other. Eventually, they came around. Not saying Deezer will, but I’m willing to wait and see, with no hard feelings either way.
I had a very bad experience where Spotify gave us the run around for over a year when we had a complete Spotify integration (this is at Sooloos, pre-Roon). Finally, they came back to us with a definitive answer and pulled the plug. We won’t let another company waste our time like that. I call it as it is: we’re very happy to do the integration, but we need to do things correctly and I’m not willing to pussyfoot around the topic. Our customers appreciate that we tell them what it takes to do the integration, and what our position is. What has Deezer told you about this?
Which as you’ve pointed out is uncommon. How do/would you use Deezer with HQ Player now?
Deezer hasn’t told “me” anything. You yourself pointed to their forum post where they say they’re interested in the integration but want to update their SDK first. Which is about as much as you told us, which is to say nothing substantial other than “would be happy to, but ‘reasons’”.
The other things I said about their existing API and SDK is based on their public documentation on the two.
I get that you feel wary about not playing it ultra safe after your personal experience with Spotify but maybe you can transcend that in lights of the existance of FOSS projects who are able to keep up with Deezer to enable users to, err, have alternative ways of playing Deezer’s content on their computers.
At any rate you’d have at least two avenues of integrating Deezer right now… Using their official API and SDK or taking a page out of one of those FOSS projects books.
And I wouldn’t be able to use Deezer with HQPlayer right now - that’s my point. That’s exactly why I very much appreciate even a basic integration into Roon. I’m sorry if my description of my use case made this hard to infer.
I’ll hapily edit my wording if you’re concerned about it. Can’t help but notice how thin-skinned you seem to be around this aspect. Keep in mind that I’m just an individual and not another company and that English probably isn’t my native language. And while you say you won’t pussyfoot around your integration requirements when officially working with another company, you do keep pussyfooting around in this conversation - focussing on semantics, and your related but not necessarily relevant past experiences to justify your unwillingness to compromise. At the same time you ask me questions I already answered in the very message before and otherwise completely omit any response to my use case description that I gave you solely because you were asking about it.
Sorry, I thought I had made that clear earlier in the thread. I’ll restate it.
To do an integration that we think would be a reasonable offering for Roon + Deezer, we have minimum requirements. Others have met these requirements and are integrated. Deezer has shown interest but at this point, they have not met these requirements. To have anything short of those requirements is not interesting to us as a business. To build a product upon their current API would be a significant effort that would result in a product that we would not be proud of, nor do we think would result in recouping the investment put in.
While I understand your position in regards to using Roon as the middle man between Deezer and HQ Player, this is not a place we are wanting to take the product.
Thanks for re-interating so explicitly. Point taken: You don’t want to risk not getting a return for the additional effort that you’d need to put in without Deezer catering to your specific needs. That sounds ingenuous.
What sounds disingenuous to me is your claim that you couldn’t at all meet your desired quality standards with the current status quo. I know a thing or two about the complexity and possible pitfalls of systems and service integration and I think you could very well produce a result that is on par with your Qobuz or Tidal integration. Would you have to do more heavy lifting without Deezer making things easier for you? Very likely so! But “impossible” doesn’t exist in this realm and for the very most of the feature set you offer, I don’t even think it would be unreasonable either.
At any rate I think this boils down to “nor do we think would result in recouping the investment put in”. And you know what? That’s ok. Just by itself. No need to make up a lovable excuse for it.
Just wanted to add to this.
The fact that for releases marked as Master, Tidal no longer offers the option to stream the actual lossless flac, means Tidal no longer offers lossless streaming for it’s entire catalog.
(Even on hifi quality setting it simply streams the MQA file without flagging/unfolding).
It would be fantastic to see deezer or spotify hifi support to make up for this, as qobuz has a limited library, and Tidal’s removal of lossless content means that now many tracks can only be obtained lossless through something like deezer
And now you’ve crossed the line into fantasy. If you think you can do it, go do it. I’m saying it can’t be done. Not even close. But feel free to attempt it with the thing or two you know, and you will get a Deezer to HQ Player bridge while you are at it!
As for the recoup, it’s a big investment to do it the right way too. Using the API is just impossible. The non-Roon-like Deezer inside Roon is the thing I stated isn’t worth the effort.
Let me give one of many simple limitations: using the Deezer API, how would you determine which albums were available to the user browsing in the region they are located, which happen to have a credit for George Clinton? There are two ways to do this.
With what we ask for from Deezer, all this is done and precomputed along side the rest of our metadata ingestion process that daily crunches through millions of albums.
With Deezer’s API, you’d first use our API of the “world of data” as we know it (but nothing of Deezer), and then make many hundreds of API calls to see if many hundreds of albums are available to the user. You’d miss some, and you’d get some, but it’s take you a minute to load up an artist details page. That is, if you weren’t rate limited or blocked because your be making millions of API calls every hour. Bad experience, bad results.
This one is a straight forward problem. It gets worse when you consider the bigger issues related the fact that there are multiple artists with the same names, or same artists with different spellings.
The people who need to be convinced here is Deezer. I was around during the Qobuz discussions and they did try to emulate some of the Roon look. A lot of the same criticisms as here were directed at Roon. You’ll find those exact same criticisms levelled at Roon with regards to Highresaudio and others people want integrated into Roon. The thing that makes the difference is not Roon though. In Qobuz’s case they decided to go global and did the required work in conjunction with that ambition. If Deezer are serious about Roon and want to do this, it will happen. If you are arguing that Roon should lower its requirements in order to integrate Deezer and other candidates, forget it. The truth is Deezer may see themselves as doing OK without the tight partnerships required with others. Spotify certainly do. If so, good luck to them, but Roon needs to stick to its vision.
Why I would like Deezer or similar to be integrated.
Based on my experiences with SACD, I prefer to work with open standards not needing any specific hardware to have full access to the goodies. Meaning I would rather avoid Tidal’s MQA.
Leaves me with Qobuz. But for my taste the Qobuz library is too limited and for my main use case the Roon-Qobuz integration is fatally flawed.
I like to go to an artist page and from there play ‘his/her/their’ music.
But this doesn’t work with the Roon integration. My favourite example is the bass player ‘Linda Oh’. When I go to her page and push ‘play’ I always get the same album, all tracks are played from this always the same album until nothing is left and then the radio stops.
When I do the same from within Qobuz I get a mixture of albums/songs, although not as broad as wished, since the Qobuz library is lacking several important Linda Oh albums.
When I do the same from Roon-Tidal, I get a mixture of albums/songs, but with too much repetition (a radio issue also reported by several other users).
(I didn’t test this in Tidal itself. The best result I had was with Spotify.)
So by adding Deezer I hope to get a broader library and (for my use case) a working integration with Roon.
I do not care much about high definition, CD quality is good enough for my ears, and Deezer fits this bill also.
In theory I do buy Danny’s argument that the integration needs to be done on Roon’s terms and conditions to get the integration and the added value (Valence?) they want to offer.
In practice however, this added value is not always clear.
This! Music matters. If Qobuz have limitations, and it has, if Tidal also have limitations, and it has, new streaming service integration is crucial. Deezer HiFi or Spotify HiFi or even Amazon HD… something with lossless tier, with much bigger library than Qobuz and also with better quality than Tidal (all MQAish library, only lossy compressed even “HiFi” tracks (!) & special equipment needed / cost for licence). Its hard to understood, why we must ask for that if your - Roon dev - product have now big limitations?
Like I said: music matters, more and better results, more genres (mhm, many more Roon dev) = so much better Roon. And one more thing - SQ - Tidal is now only for searching/new music trials (sub of course but it isn’t lossless per se), Qobuz is ok but limited library, so we have to build our own, local, library. Very annoying situation. Many of yours fantastic features works for us for 50% at best.
You must know, that streaming offer enlarge and you must fight for customers also in that range.
I don’t understand why you’d stick with a streaming service that isn’t aligned with your goals… or maybe they are, in which case you are in the unfortunate position of having to choose.
Just to clarify, some of us are located in parts of the world where Qobuz is not available, and that company aggressively blocks VPN/proxy access so that we can’t use it. With all of the negative press currently circulating around Tidal/MQA those of us who want access to unmodified FLAC 44.1/hi-res have very few choices. Hopefully the Deezer people will come back to you sooner and the integration work can begin, because until then Roon will be pretty much useless to me once I cancel my Tidal sub.
Now you have MQA files on Tidal also on HiFi tier (on non MQA stream, software decoded). Device show 16/44 but its not lossless, its lossy because source is MQA. A lot of music on Tidal now only MQA version and even “HiFi files” is like I said. So, when you turn off MQA processing in Roon you have decoded stream form Tidal (typical on nonMQA devices streaming directly from Tidal). Tidal Connect like Spotify Connect …UI from source, service protocol, directly. Roon? Worthless. No UI, no RAAT, no features in this scenario.
Source files. Yes, you can stream different lossy compressed music (double??? Who knows? Source is MQA, a lot of tidal’s new arrivals is MQA only), when you want better you have also lossy MQA. Messy and lossy
So just want to add my voice as a request for Deezer. Or anything not called Tidal.
I’m in Canada, and Qobuz is not available here. I think Mqa is bad for music like the proposed “football super league” is bad for football. Thank you fans for fighting back. So no Tidal for me.
Our developers confirmed they’re interested in developing this integration, however, we can only consider it after updating our existing SDKs - which is a project undergoing during the course of 2021. Stay tuned for further updates by subscribing to the topic, if you haven’t done so. Thank you for your support!
