My first post and hope it’s a useful and constructive one.
Roon is awesome. Expensive, but awesome. You get what you pay for I guess. The only major piece that is really missing for me is integrated curation and discovery between home and mobile. I realise there are plenty of posts on making roon ‘on-the’go’ on the forum, as well as many on being able to push playlist changes, favourites etc. back to the attached streaming services. But for me, these two requests are part of the same issue.
The way I discover new music has changed with the advent of streaming. Having a virtually limitless catalogue at your fingertips and some software smarts has transformed music discovery and is really exciting. Roon Radio, Discovery and the streaming services equivalents like Deezer’s Flow, or TIDAL personalised playlists are the best aspect of streaming services for me.
The problem is that if a new track pops up that I like when using Roon at home, I can add it to my Roon library - but this isn’t reflected in TIDAL. Similarly, if I love a track in TIDAL it doesn’t become a favourite in Roon.
There is a disconnect between music discovery and curation between when I am at home and when I am out and about. Because this discovery and curation happen in real-time while I’m listening, trying to manually re-synchronise after the fact is annoying and significantly impacts the experience.
To solve this problem there needs to either be true two-way syncronisation between the streaming service and Roon (i.e. the ability to edit TIDAL playlists, have TIDAL tracks that are favourited in Roon reflected in TIDAL etc.) OR Roon needs to be available mobile.
My preference is the latter since the Roon UI is so great. I know this is on the road map, and I really hope it isn’t too far off. I can stream HD movies from my Plex server to my mobile from anywhere with a half-decent wifi connection so why not Roon? (he says, knowing that it will be hellishly complex to implement. But hey, we’re paying for the best right?)
Here’s Plex’s intro into their TIDAL integration which, even if the implementation is imperfect, indicates they understand the problem for users with their own digital collection. Note also that you can alter TIDAL playlists and add tracks to your ‘TIDAL collection’ from within Plex which shows it can be done. A mystery why Roon can’t push changes to TIDAL…
Currently I’m using Roon at home and Plex on the go, with Soundizz gluing things together. It would be great for it be simple!
Any advantage to using Plex on top of Tidal on the go? I use Roon at home and Tidal on the go, was wondering if I’m missing something. I am not using playlists a lot.
With Plex on the go I can access my personal music library as well as TIDAL, rather than just TIDAL. The integration between them isn’t as nice as Roon, but is OK.
hey @mentalfloss I like where you’re going with this, and it’s an untapped resource for sure! Our clicks and likes while away from home. You know how Pandora has an automatically curated playlist of all our Thumbs-Up, perhaps simply sharing playlists between streaming services would do the trick. And I’m gonna plug these playlist sync guys again, https://soundiiz.com, because they’re terrific.