New music discovery needs Tidal/Qobuz, please tell me it ain't so?

Hi All,

I cancelled Tidal thinking all I would lose was Tidal music, apparently I was wrong, Roon seems to depend on a paid for cloud music service to populate “external” similar artists, influences, followers and associations that are not in library?

So every artist I click on only shows similar artists, influences, followers and associations from artists I have in my library.

Am I missing something, I thought a huge selling point for Roon was all the data on other similar artists, it would use it’s knowledge of what you like to recommend new music?

Obviously I would now have to check out the new artists on Amazon Music and then buy it and add it to my library…but now I don’t even find out about these artists.

I’ve seen other posts about Roons cloud music strategy and I’m not a fan. Why on earth would anyone buy Roon if all they had was Tidal, seems like a complete waste of money to me.

Cheers
Richard

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Roon makes recommendations based on your overall catalog of sources. If your available catalog of sources does not include a streaming service then you’ll only see your library.

However, a hack / workaround might work for you. I’ve seen in the past people have linked a Qobuz download account. That is, an account at Qobuz that does not have any streaming service attached to it. That makes the Qobuz catalog part of your larger catalog. However, if you try to play anything it will error. Not elegant but may provide some of the missing functionality you’re after.

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Thanks @ipeverywhere, much appreciated!

Sadly Qobuz is available in limited locations…at least without some skullduggery :sweat_smile:

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Just a thought here.
I know using the Tidal free tier you can’t play Tidal music through Roon but would it work to “seed” new discovery??

It can’t hurt to try I would think.

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Thanks @wizardofoz, I’m in Oz so I’m OK!

I honestly thought Roon had an enormous music database that it used to provide recommendations and such but that appears to not be the case?

Yeah, I’ve been scratching my head a lot more with Roon recently. I mean the Roon video on the homepage talks about the three things that make Roon unique:

1: A rich interface for browsing and discovering music
2: Compatibility with almost any audio device
3: A playback engine designed to deliver the best possible sound

So you can only have discovery if you have expensive niche cloud music subscriptions, or keep your fingers crossed that Qobuz doesn’t limit access to their API for download only customers.

I created a feature request Allow users with no cloud music subscriptions to discover new music through Roon which is basically a request for Roon to use the last.fm artist.getSimilar API call to populate similar artists for people like me that are local library only.

This is an honest question, regarding Roon’s wish to gain lots of customers without local libraries, am I missing something, why on earth would anyone buy Roon if all they had was Qobuz or Tidal, seems like a complete waste of money to me? I mean I personally wouldn’t pay $18 AUD a month for a funky interface on top of Qobuz or Tidal, add to that, your music is in the cloud but your funky interface only works at home…I can get Netflix for $18 AUD…

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So just seeing is enough without hearing them? I’m sorry that wouldn’t work for me… seriously if you are really into discovering new music a subscription cost should not be stopping you. IMHO

Perhaps discovery within your own library is more one of rediscovery

Seeing is enough for me, I would go “oh I haven’t heard of that band” and look them up (hopefully in Roon) and make a note to check them out on Amazon Music, if I liked it, buy it and add it to my library. I have no problem doing that for a saving of $144 a year.

One of the reasons I cancelled Tidal was because of Roon… Local vs Tidal: Why does Roon stream from Tidal instead of playing the higher quality file locally?

I’m a bit old-fashioned, I tend to listen to albums in their entirety (and browse similar artists while I’m listening) I mostly stick to my local library, I enjoy Roon more now that Tidal is gone.

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OK I see where you are coming from but that might cause some confusion for users who think oh great but then can’t play suggested titles.

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100% @wizardofoz, I would be happy if it was an optional setting, the customer has to enable it, perhaps with their last.fm account details.

Try the Tidal free tier and see what happens.
I’m curious myself now.

I have both T and Q so I guess I am good…plus a 300K+ track local library :wink:

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Quite a library!

I’m just consolidating my various smaller HDD onto one single 8tb Seagate drive.

1@4tb and 2@2tb…bout time all music was just on one drive.
It’s taking a while to transfer though…lol.

How much space does 300k tracks take?

Going to depend on your formats…but mine is a 16TB and 6TB drive one system on W10 with internal SATA drives, data is 13.5TB and 5TB also backed up to a NAS also the other system is 2 x external 12TB on MacMini M1 on TB4 externals… both pretty full.

Think mine are 90%flac and rest are WAV files.
Just regular albums ripped from my CD collection, no hires downloads.

Figure I will have about 1tb free when complete.
138k tracks

Roon takes 3-4 mins to load in the library on a restart tho so sometimes I just turn off (disable the drive locations) and live with T&Q streaming

I can’t fathom people having over 10000 CDs (and the process of ripping all of those), I have around 1000 and I had to chuck away the jewel cases because they took up too much room. To listen to 10000 albums would take you something like 3 years listening at 8 hours a day.

I’m actually looking to remove some of the music that I never listen to and replace it with classic albums.

I’m going to stick with a 1TB ceiling on my library, I’m at about 800GB, all flac or above.

I really do think it would be good to have a source to recommend artists that doesn’t depend on Qobuz or Tidal, they could both go the way of the tasmanian devil!

That would be a support nightmare. The only switch it on when they needed isn’t a valid argument for support.
A huge number of support issues on this forum.are people switching in things that they hadn’t a clue about.

Uh, huh, not sure what to say to that.

I ran a Qobuz trial a year or so back. I can still access the account post expiry, but can’t stream. Works fine for browsing or searching the Qobuz catalogue in Roon if I enable it.

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