Moving from Apple Music to Tidal + Roon.. Lots of questions

Hi all,
I’m new to Roon and I just decided to move from long years using itunes then Itunes/Apple Music to TIDAL. Roon is a great option as I do like the interface, but the change is big.
The move to TIDAL is a sound quality choice, as I’m really disappointed with Apple choice to stick to 256 AAC. And by the way, the interface is soooo slow on Windows 10.
I’m still trying to figure out if it’s worth the price for the interface, which I think is far more interesting than itunes (on PC).
But it feels really complex, and I’m afraid of the double use with Tidal… I don’t like for example the way Tidal Playlists are not editable, and a local Roon playlist is necessary…
And all my smart itunes playlists are now just plain playlists.
What about the star rating system as in iTunes? anybody using that? A lot of my playlists are based on that and I can’t figure out a way to reproduce this system in Roon…

Welcome to the Community

are you saying your Roon on Windows is slow? if so maybe you can detail some things about your hardware and setup - roon does a lot of housekeeping and background work especially on a newly imported library that can take days on a larger collection and much longer if your hardware is not so speedy or internet is slow.

SSD is a must, Core system on LAN wired connection and windows can have issues with Intel HD graphics drivers too so giving up some details on your setup will help us guide you in finding the speediness you should expect.

Nope sorry Roon is very fast on my laptop no issue here. I was talking about Apple Music. (french speaking)

Ah ok… I’n not a fan of the Apple Music product…or the apes but the rest of their stuff is good for my needs.

Welcome. Roon only does star ratings for albums not tracks so you can build a playlist based on this. You can however use picks, which is Roons way of picking the best tracks from an album. Using Focus (they key to building anything in Roon) to select what you want. Example below. You can then bookmark this and it will auto update from their on in for anythig you add to your library from your own music or streaming services. You can then save this as a playlist or just use this search as it will auto upate as previously mentioned.

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Thanks ! So in fact Roon gets to choose the best tracks for me? If I decide to favorite a track, is it possible to select these tracks with focus and then make a bookmark?
Edit: Yes I found the way to do that! I just have to click on the favorite icon to select all the favorites and then focus on other criterias, and bookmark it. Cool.

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Another big issue for me is the genres. For example, I use a lot of Deep House and Tech House genres in AM. But in Roon, they don’t exist. Do I have to use a tag for that?

Glad you worked it out. Focus is your friend and the heart of customising things for yourself. It takes a while to work your way around Roons features I suggest a read of the KB. https://kb.roonlabs.com/

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You can use Roon tags yes as Roons genre mapping maybe different to what AM does. You can add Roon specifc tags to the files metadata to. You can then use focus to show anything with a given tag and again bookmark it.

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This is likely very useful for you atm
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_User_Guide#Browsing_and_Playing_Music
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_User_Guide#Adding_Your_Music

By the way, I used soundiiz to move my Apple Music (AM) playlists collection to TIDAL then my tracks were automatically in Roon. I first decided to use the itunes integration but no need to keep 256 AAC versions as TIDAL versions are much better. I now have my AM playlists listed as TIDAL playlists in Roon. Is this the right way to do it?

Yes that’s fine.

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