The forthcoming Roon Internet Radio implementation has me pondering about the whole Internet Radio experience.
Firstly, the bandwidth and lossy file formats associated with Internet Radio are less than we would like. Especially since quite a lot of us have already paid for the right to stream a lot of the same music in better quality format.
So, what if there was a program that could detect what an Internet Radio station was playing and then substitute the best quality version the listener had rights to ? It would mean being able to search all the libraries the user had access to across streaming services in real time.
Not sure if it’s feasible, but would be very cool.
Similar to what @andybob is suggesting, I would be happy with a way to simply transfer the track listing by hitting a button to a type of playlist or log that can be used to track down the Tidal version later for re-listening. I listen to D.I. a lot and currently have to jot down tracks that have grabbed me, and manually search later.
Scrobble your radio tracks to Last.fm and you’ll get exactly that.
What will be interesting (and super nice if it happens) is if Roon takes the decision to add listened Internet radio tracks to the history.
What they will need to handle gracefully though is what happens if you click on a track that isn’t in your local library and also isn’t in Tidal (assuming you’re a subscriber)
That’s what I would love to happen, but I will still be very pleased to be able to enter the url’s in 1.2, and control it all through Roon. That means another box (Sonos Connect) can be removed from my hi-fi rack.
Edit: If it were possible, the listened radio tracks should be compiled in a separate log or history, with maybe a simple ‘Search in Tidal’ for any track listing. If available, one can then compile a playlist or add as a favourite.
