iTunes in the cloud

Hi
I am interested in getting Roon but wanted to check something with you first.
I had iTunes installed and all my CDs ripped onto a PC where the hard drive failed.
I reinstalled iTunes on my new PC and all my tracks are there just not on the hard drive obviously.

Will Roon still work or do I have to rip every CD again, over 1000 CDs so not keen on that TBH?
I also have Tidal.

Thanks
Tony

How are your tracks there on your new iTunes if they are not on your new PC?

Did you not have a backup ?

I have iTunes Match and iCloud . I think it’s backed up automatically through that . I didn’t back up onto another hard drive unfortunately .

Not an itunes user, so a quick question. When you ripped the CDs originally what format did you rip them in?

Edit, I looked into and The iMatch and cloud storage appear to transcode your local audio files into 256-Kbps AAC for cloud storage. This is not a lossless audio format and, imho, much lesser quality than a CD ripped to ALAC. If you had them originally ripped this way then they are the same quality. If you had them ripped to ALAC, then not.

Personally, I would break out the CDs start the ripping process into FLAC because I can’t stand the sound of lossy formats.

Yes they’re only 256. I ripped them when hard drives were smaller. I never really listen to iTunes , only tidal these days. But to get Roon I assumed I needed Roon to see my collection on iTunes , but as the quality is lower than tidal Roon would play the tidal version. Hope that makes sense.
Thanks
Tony

If Tidal has all that you need then perhaps don’t worry about ripping again.
Maybe check what Tidal doesn’t have and re-rip just those.

And, of course, GET A BACKUP SORTED !!!

Lol. I hadn’t wanted to pile on when someone has that situation, but, yes… backups are everything and USB drives are cheap compared to the time investment.

an absolute must if you start buying HI Def downloads.

Yes I know. Obviously Tidal is great but will Roon recognise my musical tastes in iTunes , or do I just rebuild it in Tidal.
Thanks again
Tony

As I understand it Tony what you’re asking is whether there is some convenient way to import albums/tracks from Tidal into your Roon library to match your existing iTunes library. If so, then as you say, Roon would give preference to the Tidal tracks.

Unfortunately I don’t know of a method for batch importing from Tidal within Roon. It should also work if you could batch favourite in Tidal (which Roon would pick up) but I don’t know a method there either. It may be that others can assist.

If you do find yourself ripping again I would heartily recommend dBpoweramp. It has multi core functionality, saved me a heap of time.

Another option then is to favourite my cd collection in Tidal individually. Am I right in thinking then that I can enjoy all the features of Roon without actually having a library on my hard drive and have tidal as my sole music source ?
Thanks
Tony

Yes. The metadata interface with Tidal is fully functional. Synchronicity can be an issue (work is continuing here) so there can be a delay in new releases etc. SQ is good (local is better but I wouldn’t back myself to pick it in a blind test) and playback is very solid (may depend on download bandwidth).

Edit: I’ve shifted this into Software for more general discussion. Please feel free to post here or open a new thread in Support if any problem should occur after installation. Hope you enjoy Roon.

Thanks to everyone for all the help

If there are albums that aren’t available in Tidal, then you can download the AAC files from iTunes Match and if Roon is set to watch the iTunes Music directory and they will show up in Roon (albeit as lossy AAC files).

I recently ripped / re-ripped my entire CD collection to FLAC using dbPoweramp for use with Roon. I can’t say enough good things about the peace of mind provided by AccuRip in dbPoweramp. I found that even with Error Correction turned on in the iTunes Import Settings, I was still getting flawed output files if the disc had issues (with no notification). I still had a few discs that couldn’t be cleanly ripped by dbPoweramp, but at least I knew that individual song files had issues and I could decide whether to replace the CD or not.

Thanks , I think I’, going to go with dbPoweramp. It can be a winter project.

dbPoweramp for the win. It is what I used to rip my thousands of CDs. Burnt 2 CD readers doing.

Just be sure to enable the HDCD DSP setting in case you have any HDCD encoded CD’s.

Thanks , appreciate that