It is refreshing to see Qobuz forging ahead in new directions after their financial woes. Whether it results in a more open attitude to Roon remains to be seen. While we rightly praise the Roon devs for the Tidal integration I suspect we may be overlooking the continuing effort made by Tidal to enable it to occur. It takes two to tango. I agree with Nick that the best place to make a difference is by telling Qobuz what we want.
Also, although I don’t listen to Tidal’s owners music much I can assure you it could be worse. If I owned Tidal it would probably emphasise prog rock and trucking songs !
I have been impressed with the incremental thickening of the Tidal pop/rock back catalog, but accept what the classical/jazz folks are saying. I hope something can be done here.
@Easysqueezy: Good luck! I’ve contacted Qobuz a few times and posted in their roon discussion many times and not a single reply. Honestly, I’m not impressed with their communication with customers (I was a Qobuz subscriber but quit after 6 months), so we could take this as a sign…
This is much more critical for Roon than with other software, where integration would be done primarily through the streaming services API toolset. As Roon’s custom integration pretty much requires a provider to hand over their entire database on a regular basis (at least from what I’ve gathered from various discussions here), this no doubt needs a company with aligned goals as well as person(s) at their end devoting a fair bit of time to the partnership/process.
As a Roon lover and lifer, I have to accept that Tidal could well be the only provider that’s up for this, and therefore the only service we’ll ever see in Roon. I hope that’s not the case, but I think we have to accept the possibility that the requirements might just prove too much for other companies for whatever reason.
I suppose in the future Roon may come up with a way that would circumvent such specific requirements - maybe utilising API’s indirectly - perhaps Roons servers running continuously in the background to generate (and constantly update) their own feature rich version of the database which can then be called by Roon.
For now I get by, but I have started to feel that being locked into Tidal (as well as being locked into my home hifi) could well be things that might make me go back and re-evaluate my overall music strategy. As much as I love Roon (and I really do think its amazing and am one of its biggest promoters on other forums I use), the inconvenience of having one ‘player’ for home and other ‘players’ (and/or various workarounds) for listening away from home, is starting to make me think….
I asked Qobuz a month ago whether integration with Roon was likely as it would affect my decision whether or not to renew my Qobuz Sublime subscription, and they replied with the following:
[quote]Thanks for your message.
We are still in the process of discussion for Roon.
back to the first answer from Qobuz; Their answer was “there some constraints from their part that we are not ready to accept”
Concretely, I guess ROON wants to take a cut on Qobuz sales that does not seems acceptable. Either the principle itself, or the amount.
I think it’s more likely to be about metadata requirements. Qobuz’s metadata is, in fact completely rubbish. (I just downloaded 110 CDs worth of music from them last night, and will be spending many hours cleaning up the mess.)
I’d be amazed if that was the case and I can’t see any basis for assuming it. Roon’s requirements are far more likely to be as to the extent of metadata release. I recall the devs saying that only Tidal was willing to go as far in that direction as deep integration required.
And I seem to recall talk of Qobuz not wishing to give the required level of access to their database/information. To sustantiate your accusation you would need to prove that Roon’s current agreement with Tidal gives them some monetary recompense, which I’m fairly certain does not happen. Not sure why you are headed in this direction ???!!!
I think the partnership with Roon gave Tidal an opportunity to build their customer base. I think they struggled to engage customers, especially subscription to the higher resolution services. Qobuz are just emerging from a period of uncertainty and they will want to get their own plans in order before they commit to a possible partnership. This may still emerge. They did mention in their conference about more open access to third party involvement. Deezer will perhaps be first but I’m hoping Qobuz will follow .
“Wir sind bereits mit ROON bezüglich einer möglichen Kooperation im Gespräch. Leider können wir hierzu noch kein genaues Datum nennen. Wir gehen davon aus, dass die im ROON integrierte Qobuz Music App für einen maximalen Hörgenuss sorgen wird.”
Translation:
We are already having a conversation with Roon about a possible cooperation. Unfortunately, we cannot give you an exact date. We expect that the integrated Qobuz app in Roon will result in the best listening experience.
This is very encouraging news. I’ve tried to love Tidal, but it’s just so far behind Qobuz for classical music. Tidal is OK within Roon, but the Qobuz app on the iPhone is much more pleasant to use for mobile listening.
I just signed up for a Tidal trial, but all I can say after playing around for a few hours is, that content quality sucks compared to Qobuz. Guys, when you really care about audio quality, then Qobuz is the way to go. OK, you can stream in CD quality on Tidal too. But when the guys in the studio did not do their job well, the bit rate of the content does not matter at all. In my opinion, Qobuz offer more quality work.
