I think the OP clearly articulated his point by stating, ‘I would prefer for Tidal to be exposed only via explicit choices’. What more needs to be said?
That was also my complaint when I trialed Roon. I would prefer a TIDAL icon/button on the Roon app so I can only search TIDAL when I want to. Perhaps I’m not familiar with Roon after my 14-day trial but I got annoyed when doing an artist search and it would show me TIDAL tracks of the artist when I have hi-rez tracks of the same artist on my NAS.
My prior Aurender and my current Lumin app allows users to specifically select TIDAL as a search choice. Very intuitive and you get the desired results. True, the Aurender & Lumin search methods don’t allow searches across TIDAL and locally stored music files via a single search, but this is easy to overcome by providing a multi-select feature.
I agree with Brian, if I own a hi-res version of an album I want to make sure I’m playing this version and not a Tidal version. I would prefer owned music to be clearly identified at the top of any list of music when searching as the preferred version. But I still love Roon it’s just it would be better to more clearly delineate my own music (especially Hi-Rez) from Tidal. In fact what would be best would be if Roon would always select the highest quality version of a track/album, whether it’s local or on Tidal, as the top choice.
I don’t know if I understand this but Roon is always showing your own content first in artists search or track search or whatever search. There is a clean seperation between your own and Tidal content, allways. In the light setting of the interface Tidal content is in a diffetent colour, the dark setting is less clear.
If you are misunderstanding, then so am i…
When searching, either for album or artist and supposedly all other options, you local content always displays first. Further down, with a dark background coms Tidal content. There is always the option to view Tidal conten from within the search results though:
