Crazy that this has not been addressed in 7 years… While it seems such a trivial thing to solve.
Forget Profiles. Add 4 or 5 Roon Accounts on top of the first/primary Roon Account. Invite your family members to download and login with their credentials, and of they go. They can then link to their own streaming subscription inside Roon.
Basically the same way as Family Plans work on streaming services. Couldn’t be that hard, right?
And makes sense commercially. Add a Roon Pricing Plan for Families! Once the kids are on their own feet, big chance they’ll become Roon subscribers too…
Right now, nobody, in my household of four, knows I have a lifetime subscription. Just silly…
Without wanting to suggest that the feature is not desirable, it most definitely is and I have voted for this feature myself, I can see that it is most definitely not trivial to do and it’s quite possible that it is not possible to do at all.
Three issues that immediately come to mind are:
Roon appears to have been designed from the outset to have a single integrated library. Managing multiple Tidal/Qobuz/KKBox accounts, even if not impossible, would require a significant change to the the way library management was done (including the database) - effectively managing multiple libraries (with the possibility of a local element common to all of them). At the very least, I can imagine that this would be a lot of work to migrate the Roon Server application from the current library model to the new model.
Roon uses APIs to access Tidal, Qobuz and KKBox that are not under their (Roon’s) control. It is perfectly possible that these APIs do not support one application being logged in to Tidal/Qobuz/KKBox with multiple accounts. If this is the case, it is not within Roon’s power to provide a solution. There may be workarounds (running multiple instances of account helper applications (possibly in containers) but all of them would result in much higher complexity with the consequent impact upon the user experience (more instances of issues) and a much higher demand upon support. It is equally possible that such workarounds are either technically impossible (I’ve worked with other APIs, in an unrelated field, which was strictly one machine, one instance) or would violate license agreements with the API owners.
It is not possible to just switch streaming service accounts on demand because Roon is a multi-user system so multiple users may be browsing the Roon library or streaming to different endpoints at the same time. Thus this feature effectively means that Roon must support multiple streaming accounts from the same service at the same time.
There is a lot of detail around the feature suggestion that has not been discussed. For example, in my household, we have a Tidal family account - so each member of the family gets their own account but, in addition, I have a Qobuz account. In this situation what do you expect to happen if my wife uses her profile within Roon. Obviously, you would want her profile to be associated with her Tidal account - but what about Qobuz? Would you expect my wife to have access to my Qobuz account or not? The answer to this would be potentially different for different people/households. This extends to members of the family that do not have their own streaming service account. Do you expect them to be limited to the local library or would you expect them to have access to my streaming accounts? Again the answer to this point for you may not be the same as it is for me. Thus these possibilities may quickly lead to a need for a permissions and rights management control system on streaming accounts such that, for example, I could allow my wife to use my Qobuz account including favouriting new Qobuz albums on that account whilst at the same time I might deny my children the ability to favorite albums on my Qobuz account. It very quickly starts to become somewhat messy.
It should be noted that the second point above is pure speculation. I have no idea what the Tidal and Qobuz API’s look like and I am certainly not party to any legal agreement surrounding their use. However, the points that I am making are just to illustrate that granting this wish may not be within Roon’s power.
Finally, not even the Tidal and Qobuz apps allow a single device to be logged into the streaming service with multiple accounts at the same time. They are strictly one device, one login. The Roon equivalent of this would be to have each member of the household have their own distinct Roon Server which is already possible (albeit at the cost of multiple licenses if they want to use Roon simultaneously or without worrying about other users in the household already using Roon).
@Wade_Oram I figured as much. Although not quite that much. Thanks for taking the time to point out additional variables and challenges. Always learning something new from your post.
I’m quite surprised to see that not having mutable streaming accounts integrated is a deal breaker for many, but I guess this is down to timing. I just recently started using Roon, and Qobuz a few days earlier. To see that I can use a single Qobuz account and all 3 profiles on my Roon server can make use of it simultaneously via the Roon arc app means a lot of cost savings that can be used to pay for Roon… Unless I am missing something? Why would this be bad, unless you already have tons of playlists in Qobuz on an account you can’t integrate?
The use case which is problematic is for those households which use family streaming packages.
I have one tidal family package - my wife and kids all have their own tidal accounts as a part of this (it’s quite economical). The issue is that only one tidal account can be linked in Roon, which means that only that account’s library is integrated into Roon. Furthermore, if anybody else adds anything to the library in Roon it appears in my Tidal/Roon library regardless of which Roon profile is active. Whilst I love Roon, this effectively means that I am the only one who uses it in my household as nobody else has library integration.
We did try a single household tidal profile (as we had a spare account), but this was extremely messy.
Actually, it’s not anything to do with family subscriptions. It’s about the use of multiple Tidal accounts. Any two Roon users that have their own Tidal account, irrespective of whether or not those accounts are part of a family subscription, would likely want to be able to set up a profile in Roon that would link to their specific Tidal accounts.
The same applies to Qobuz who also offer multi-account subscriptions.
But, as @Holger_Schueler points out above, it is not always cut and dried. Whilst there are obviously many users on this thread that want separate accounts to be tied to each profile, there may well be some uses who want to use multiple profiles all linked to the same Qobuz/Tidal account the way it currently works.
As I explained above, I am in both camps. In my household, the ideal would be individual Tidal accounts (we have a family subscription with individual accounts for each household member) and a shared Qobuz account (we don’t have multiple Qobuz accounts).
Adding my voice to this. my use case is 3 people living in the same house. We share a family qobuz account, have amassed a formidable local library on a NAS here in the house. We all make heavy, heavy use of Roon and Roon Arc.
My wife has years of playlists, favorites and the likes that she’s imported from Spotify to Qobuz. We’re faced with either having to imprort all of those into my roon account manually, or starting over.
On top of that, music tastes vary wildly here, and it seems that even though we have different roon profiles, everyone on the same qubuz account has degraded the recommendations a tad. I’m very much a metalhead, and Lady Gaga and Ella Fitzgerald are showing in my ‘recommended albums’ alongside Whitechapel and Warbringer. (I can assure you I have never played anything close to either artist on my profile)
I don’t know the answer on how to solve this, but it definitely takes away from the roon experience. After using roon for months, this is quite literally the only complaint any of my family has. That, and not being able to get a display functioning on a roku… which is roku’s fault, and not roon.
On tidal you can log on at the same time, even with the same account on a Android device setup as work profile, where Tidal is installed in the personal and work profile. No problem.
@Nick_Doubleday, @Bo_Hjortstrand1 - If this feature suggestion is important to you, if you haven’t already done so, please vote for it by using the Vote button at the top of the thread. Thank you.
I am pretty sure it is not easy to do as it needs a redesign. But it should be worthwhile for the future allowing real multiuser support. e.g. I would like to not allow anyone else to play music in my office or change roon settings at all. Tidal/Qobuz would surely allow multiple logins as it would give them more money. I really hope this will happen in the future. Until then my wife and kids will not use Roon sadly
