Multiple Streaming / Family Accounts and Roon Profiles (Tidal, Qobuz, ...)

Posting +1 is next to useless. Did you cast a vote at the top of the thread?

I did. I can’t see your vote there :slight_smile:

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I’m about to buy a lifetime subscription for Roon, I’m really into it, but my “wife” listens to a fair amount of Hip Hop which I just don’t want polluting my listening and suggestions etc. Each profile supports a different last.fm account, each profile should also support a different Tidal account cause I’m probably gonna get Tidal Hi Fi Family and ditch Spotify. I don’t understand how this only has 24 votes at the top. If you just posted +1, you should go click Vote at the top!

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We have a family of music explorers all going in different directions. Without profile support they just bypass Roon and use Tidal directly. Having a Tidal account per profile would help all develop and track their own tastes - think of it as seeding future Roon customers…

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Absolutely must have integration-the more I use Roon. Actually using Roon with more than one profile is useless. All the great functions get absurd when one is „polluting“ a rocker with hiphop, a new wave fanatic with jazz….

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+1

I have 2 boys, they don’t want me to pollute their music lists (and vice versa)

Please prioritize this almost 5 years old request

ps other users please vote at the top of this thread. Now less than 50 votes, but hundreds of users are waiting for this request

+1. Multiple tidal accounts shoulbe be great feature

Come on Ilia,
At the top of the thread you can add a vote.

I’m considering going with a roon setup for a client and am new to roon. This topic is interesting to me even though it is not a deal breaker necessarily, but I already see it coming into play, where I might want to pull up a playlist from my subscription.

Question for roon/tidal aficionados, as this might be a less tedious work around from what I’ve read in this thread so far:

If one sets up a dedicated roon specific tidal account as discussed earlier, can he or she just share playlists from personal accounts quite easily?

And for roon support:

If the answer the first question is yes, then might it be possible to create a specific address, text maybe, for each account whereby the playlist (or Artist etc.) could be sent and automatically added to the roon Tidal account or profile etc.?!

I see that we’re able to create folders within Tidal, surely this feature could be leveraged to do all we need, no?

The user of the account would need to share the playlist via the Tidal app.loged in to their account then open it in the Tidal app logged in to the Roon account then save it and added to favourites it would then sync to Roon and be available. There is no mechanism to share playlists internally from one account to another nor anything else.

To share albums or artists you would need to be able to sync from one account to another, you may be able to use 3rd party service soundiiz for this to sync from one Tidal account to another when added to the Roon one they should sync into Roon.

So I think what I was asking was if there was a way roon could facilitate that clunky process with a clean wrapper, maybe even unique hidden text addresses or destinations to send the lists to triggering the process…just spitballing

I just took Roon to the test and was very surprised that this was not implemented. Voted +1

On the roadmap or major difficulties to realize?

Added August 2015 as a recognized feature request by @mike however I scanned thru the rest and don’t know if there’s been a follow-up.

The issue as I understand it is that Roon considers streaming services as single libraries, which they no longer are with family plans.

They’re just multiple instances of a single library. Roon already knows what to do here. For example, I can play the same song from my NAS thru my laptop’s speakers and headphone output and at different points in the song. I can independently stop/start for each endpoint.

It’s an odd and jarring thing to experience from a single piece of hardware until you realize the laptop’s speakers and headphone port are two different endpoints.

The only thing that matters is, why has Sonos figured family plans out years ago?

I’m on the trial and looking for reasons to keep Roon. It’s becoming a hard sell, because I do not live alone.

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This is a no brainer, but since this post/suggestion is 5 years old and there are no signs on the wall about Roon even thinking about integrating this feature, it seems as Roonlabs doesn’t read or care about posted suggestions? maybe im wrong?

To clarify, my Sonos comment was me parroting what I’d read above. I have no experience with Sonos, nor can I be bothered to research it.

So … speculating … if Sonos does recognize family plans for profiles then it comes down to philosophy or resources.

Philosophy suggests Roon does or does not want to make this happen. An answer would be valuable for the community.

Resources suggests either hiring a developer, or paying the streaming services “more” so that they allow it. This is the sort of arrangement Roon would shy away from publicly discussing.

I would argue that an absence of acknowledgement does not negate its strong likelihood without evidence to the contrary.

Roon are not alone. Bluesound also does not recognize family plans on their profiles or whatever. I’d expect their pockets to be deeper however.

It’s all a curious “not invented here” scenario, and so as users or potential users we will naturally act accordingly.

With Sonos it’s just accessing the APIs for respective services, it does not have an internal database like Roon which is for streaming services and local music therefore it’s pretty easy to implement as the app is controlling which account is used at any one time to stream to either one or multiple.devices.

Roon has a local database that when you add music from it to your Roon library it becomes part of this. So Roon would need to have multiple databases running concurrently to manage different users accounts. Given how taxing one library is on the hardware at times managing multiple databases could be a nightmare. All stuff that manages to have multiple accounts does not do what Roon does with the streaming services its a very different challenge to achieve. I can guarantee you can’t have multiple accounts active on one device at any one time so what happens for Roon it would not be able to manage your account at all if someone else is using it in one room and your in another. Sonos doesn’t have a central server it’d point point so again easy to implement. It would be great to have family or multiple accounts but i imagine it’s not easy and likely API restrictions don’t allow how they would want it to work.

I don’t think — or didn’t intend to imply — that I was comparing Roon to Sonos in any way other than in this one area. I also hope that I haven’t set myself up as a Sonos expert or whatever.

Users are saying here that Tidal use (for example) while away from their home negates Tidal use at home via Roon and vice versa. As in, the service literally stops playing. That’s … um, astoundingly not good and I’m being extremely charitable in my words here.

And that’s before we even discuss anything so quaint as individual user playlists. The upshot of this seems to be that if you have a streaming family plan you should not login to your account with Roon, and really only listen to the stream via something besides Roon.

So Roon would need to have multiple databases running concurrently to manage different users accounts.

Nah, you just treat them as new instances, as I already articulated in my laptop example above.

API restrictions

Again, that’s an outstanding question.

One account can only stream to one device at a time so of your account is being used on one device say your Roon core then you cannot use it on another device. Roon itself can stream tidal to multiple zones not just in sync but different streams as Roon core is the device and is using the account. Try you phone and Tidal app whislt streaming to Roon, Roon will stop as your phone is now using the license. Stop phone Roon can now stream again. They all work this way.

When your tie a Tidal account to Roon it syncs your favourites to Roona database so it’s treated the same as your local library it no longer interacts with Tidals database its Roons from their on in, only uses the API for playing. As soon as you log ou of said service t they disappear from Roon but are still in your database unless you do library mainentance and clean them out You could log in with another account that will likely then sync to but, you could do this for each account on you family plan. But what Roon would make of it in the one database is anyones guess. I can’t see it being pretty mysel f and edits you make etc would likely just disappear or get very confused especially if another user has the same albums in their Tidal. Also it would mean rsyncing every time you switch accounts, which is time consuming and as said you won’t be able to use it at the same time unless you use the one account active. As said all the systems employing family accounts or just different accounts don’t have any underlying database or server system based on an account. It would mean a very big architectural change that I am sure is not something they want.

I’ve just taken a Roon subscription and the lack of support for family accounts makes me realise that I should have done my homework better!. When I read that Roon supported multiple ‘profiles’, I assumed that each profile could have its own account (e.g. with Tidal, Qobuz) with its own listening history and recommendations. I should have read the small print.

Roon’s integration of the multiple devices in my home (Sonus boxes, Squeezeboxes, Chromecast and some Roon Ready devices) under a single interface is a major attraction. However, now that it seems that all these devices must be tied to a single Tidal or Qobuz account, the integration under a single Roon interface seems much less useful. My family members all listen to different types of music with a Qobuz family account and, naturally, they want to keep their listening profiles separate.

For our family, I’m afraid the disadvantage of not supporting family accounts out weigh all the other benefits of a Roon subscription. So while I’ve paid my money for a year’s subscription, I don’t see myself renewing if this feature is not implemented.

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