People want to listen to their music! They want to do that, if possible with 1 application. This gives the freedom of having all your music, no matter the source, in a user-friendly environment.
Applications should have that in mind. Right now, we must choose an application for it’s functionality in certain aspects. We are a little bit in the early years of mainframes… The apps are not for the users, but the users must make poor choices.
I have looked at the Tidal integration in Roon. I did not get a happy face. It is a lame extract of the Tidal desktop app. And the Tidal desktop app is already not very user friendly.
Tidal is betting on the MQA wagon. But I see more and more resistance from leading companies around the world.
Besides that, the American influence in Tidal is more noticeable. Big on R&B, hip-hop and Latin. Poor on all other genres,
Unfortunately, the only 2 companies that have a very good interface and management system (Roon) and high-quality library with high-res streaming (Qobuz) cannot coop together.
So has Audirvana.
And AURALiC.
And Lumin 
However, lets be fair to the Roon team: If Qobuz or any other service doesn’t want to integrate with Roon because they have delusions of grandeur, then there’s little the Roon team can do.
I don’t know the details required for a proper Roon integration like TIDAL’s but I presume it is more than what the API (the connectivity method that is used in Audirvana et al) can provide.
The Spotify case is interesting: They have effectively abolished all integrations across the board (eg the early Sonos implementation) in favor of Spotify Connect. This is frankly brilliant in the Spotify case because a great deal of their business model is to collect deep information on what you listen to, what you search, what you click on even if you don’t play it, what you skip over, etc etc. I am pretty sure they will never integrate with Roon, unfortunately.
I wonder what fraction of the Qobuz user population is a Roon-like customer. Probably pretty high?
I use Qobuz quite a lot lately.
Right now I stream via Audirvana or via the Qobuz app into BubbleUPNP, and there with the help of Sonore into any DAC.
I prefer their playlists over any other streaming service. And: NO MQA!
I would like Roon with Qobuz integration, but that might not happen.
I’m not listening to Qobuz as much anymore precisely because it’s pain to run it on another app. I’ve told them that their brand is invisible to a large number of audiophiles and as Roon is likely to become the de facto music controller, they will be missing out. This has been met with usual Gallic shrug of the shoulders…,and much like Devialet, who’s products I also j’adore, they still want to “Go their own way.” Apologies for the poor Meetwood Flac pun.
how do you stream from the native app to UPnP?
we require post-normalized & pre-processed data dumps from the labels on a daily basis, of all new content, plus some interesting data like gain analysis, MQA information, and region copyright information.
post-normalized means: labels deliver the data in multiple formats. the streaming services normalize those formats into 1 format. we want that 1 format.
pre-processed: label metadata is messy and terrible, and streaming services clean that up to make it presentable. this is one of our core competancies, so we’d rather not have the services’ processed data since we feel like we can do a better job.
The native App now has the possibility to communicate with Bubble UPnP.
Just go to the popup menu hiding behind the 3 dots besides every Album or Playlist.
There you see Bubble UPnP if it is installed in your network.
And from there via a Sonore product into any Dac.
Works ok.
But it is no replacement for Roon.
thanks- is this integration specific to Bubble UPnP, or will it work with any UPnP server? i’m running LMS on a separate box, with the UPnP plugin, but don’t see any option to stream from the native Qobuz app.
i have a bluesound node in one zone, and can play Qobuz there, but the BluOS integration is not as nice as the native app.
I’m having the same issue. Is the ‘native app’ the Windows desktop application or the IOS application? I’ve tried both but I don’t see a way to stream from it. I have the Windows version of BubbleUPnP running.
I dont know if it is specific to Bubble UPnP.
I didnt try anything else.
I used the Win version
For mac users Audirvana is a much better alternative, and it works with both TIDAL and Qobuz. Also, I think Audirvana would be able to play to a Rossini for example, over UPnP (I saw my Rossini in the Audirvana list, I didn’t try playing).
Agreed. Audirvana on Mac is choice numero uno.
Bubble is for the Android world.
If the streaming company is able to deliver a unique identifier for an asset, is it not possible to ignore their processing and metadata? Much like users can overwrite metadata in roon?
If that unique identifier then matches with another data set we have, yes.