Roon and apple music

[DrTone (Jeff)]

@tudupka

It would be nice to have a real answer not 'I believe…" and bot’s type of answers

Are the official replies from Roon:

@danny

Apple is not allowing any integrations, so Roon is definitely not next.

I think they are doing Sonos begrudgingly, as Sonos has such a large market share. It’s very uncharacteristic for them to care, but they are afraid of Spotify.

@danny

This API is not sufficient to do an integration.

[tudupka]

r/apple - I started building an Apple Music web player with MusicKit JS

Search github and there are apis in Go, Swift, Python.
Amazon Echo can do it.

Yes, I’ve read the official replies many many times.

Probably, need to figure out what language is Roon in and try to make some examples myself

[DrTone (Jeff)]

I don’t think you understand. Roon won’t integrate the music service if they can’t do it to to the level they have achieved with Tidal and Qobuz.

Apple’s API doesn’t give them what they need to do it. Apple are not open to changing it and Roon is not open to a lesser integration.

[DrTone (Jeff)]

Just an FYI, I would love to see full Apple Music integration as well.

[tudupka]

May be I don’t understand. That’s the reason it would be nice if Roon quantified what constitutes “a lesser integration”.
I used Qobus and currently using Tidal integration, so it would be good to know specific reason or what is missing with Apple’s.
May be we can go and ask Apple(they are still people) to open up those APIs.

[ged_hickman1]

You may go and ask them. Roon already has and been rejected.

[MusiPhile]

I’m late to this party, but I agree with everyone else here, I’d love for Apple to allow integrations. Unfortunately, though I hate all things Apple, they remain the service with the largest catalog, by far, of a number of genres I’m interested in. Not even Spotify touches them. So I’m locked into Apple and their iffy sound quality if I want access to all the music I want. Google and Spotify come close, but have huge back catalog gaps in some genres Apple simply is more complete on.

Unfortunately we will likely never, ever (ever) see Roon able to support it, since Apple doesn’t actually care about Apple Music, it’s just a tool to sell the Apple & iTunes ecosystem…and as a library manager, Roon is effectively a direct competitor to iTunes. I doubt they will ever allow such integration.

Also unfortunately Roon is snappy, fast, and friendly on touch screens. Everything iTunes is not… but if we care abut music, we’re locked into needing Apple for now in addition to our lossless/HR service

[Simon_Arnold3 (Simon Arnold)]

It’s not a case of just being able to browse the catalogue, it being able to add their catalogue to your library like you can with Tidal and Qobuz and then use the advanced library features Roon offers. With out this it’s nothing more than a portal which is not how Roon works.

[MusiPhile]

Very true! With other services there’s at least the hope they may someday allow it. With Apple, I fear they’d be explicitly against it forever since the whole idea of adding it to the library is how iTunes itself already works (unlike every other service.) Roon & iTunes are more alike than different versus other streaming services, where it’s also a library manager and database and integrates local and streaming libraries, and Apple is very keen to push iTunes. Apple’s the one and only service it’s probably safe to say “zero hope of Roon integration, ever.” Depressing though that may be since they also have the largest catalogue (if questionable sound quality.)

[anon97951896]

I’ve only been a Roon / Tidal user since May of last year so I’m still a newbie when it comes to Roon and streaming in general but I have formed some opinions about Roon partnering with other streaming services.

I believe most people will accept that most Roon users would like their favorite streaming service ( Spotify, Apple, Amazon etc. ) integrated into Roon. In my opinion this will never happen. Not just because there is no real benefit for them to work with Roon but more importantly because they have realized that controlling and managing their subscribers is of great value.

This market share by revenue chart is from the first half of 2018 so it’s a little dated but I think it shows where we are headed.

While I could not find updated numbers for this I recently saw a report that Spotify now has over 100 million paid subscribers plus another 120 million or so subscribers to their free ad based service. The big keep getting bigger.

The top eight services had 86% of the market and I suspect that number is higher now. Three of them ( Tencent Music / China, Pandora / US and MeION / South Korea ) are primarily focused on one country which excludes them from consideration as a Roon partner in my opinion.

Of the remaining five services it appears to me that Deezer at 3% market share is the only one who might have an interest in partnering with Roon. The other four are just too big and focused on their own agendas.

What of Qobuz and Tidal? They are in the Others slice that had 14% of the market and probably has less today. Hard to see how they survive in the long run.

To summarize, I fear Roon has all the partners its likely to ever have and I’m not optimistic for their current partners long term survival. My Roon library has 1,074 albums and 1,000 of those are from Tidal. If Tidal were to shut down I would switch to Qobuz but if Roon ended up with no streaming partners that would be it for me.

Tim

[MusiPhile]

There’s a lot of truth in that diagram, but I think it’s also overhyped and there’s a lot more complexity in the music distribution industry than it covers. Spotify has market share, but they also bleed money. They’re as solid as their investors believe they are, and not a penny more. It would take less to upset that apple cart (pun intended) than one may think. Apple and Amazon are the more permanent players. Apple’s 100% closed and will remain so. Google is fickle. They’d be a possible partner, I think given their work with USB Audio Player Pro. It’s not Roon’s ultra tight integration standards, but if push comes to shove they’ll no doubt take what they can get rather than just folding. Apple is all-in (and will never share with Roon) Amazon’s service is awful…but popular because of Prime freebies. There’s always a lot of speculation about Tidal, and Sprint owning a chunk of them ought to be a concern. Yet, they keep enhancing their product. Qobuz was bankrupt but found financing and did a (disastrously botched) launch in the US. I hope they can pull it together…but given a chart like this, why would they even try?

Deezer is strange. On one hand you’re right, they’re into their own ecosystem. On the other they did an amazing job with their SONOS deployment and seem into vendor integrations overall (in all the wrong products for them.) Apple’s SONOS app feels like they made it because they had to to appease their customers but didn’t put an ounce of effort into it at all. If you’ve never used it, it’s terrible. Most of the Apple Music features either don’t exist or don’t work normally in their SONOS app. Deezer’s SONOS app (their former exclusive integration partner) is actually better than their stand-alone one. And their library is bigger than Tidal’s. Yet they persist with no lossless support on mobile, they have broken Chromecast support, but they just redesigned their Android app which nobody asked for. Their priorities are misguided. Roon, IMO, would be the best thing that happened to them (though maybe the worst thing that could happen to Qobuz…Deezer’s catalogue is a bit better than Tidal’s and has more Qobuz than Qobuz in it.)

But then there’s the dark horse. Napster a.k.a. Rhapsody. Their own service is a ghost, but they mostly private label services for others. I don’t think all the competitors can necessarily survive but I’m not sure we really know who the survivors will be based on the chart. Qobuz is certainly in the weakest position.

It’s easy to say “the future is Apple, Google, or Amazon and everything else fails”, but in music and audio there’s always unfulfilled niches. And the labels certainly don’t want to face that bargaining power either, so they’re going to be eager to keep competition up. Once Amazon/Google/Apple owns the whole music industry, the whole industry is in deep trouble - the labels themselves won’t matter anymore.

There’s the worry here that without streaming partners, Roon can’t survive either. The local library management market can’t be terribly large at this point and is shinking, and most of that market is using iTunes. I do think alternatives will exist, and Roon will find someone to work with. IT may not be as tight as what we experience now, but I can’t imagine that such a competitive market will wholly fold to the 3 giants and leave niche markets on the table.

But on the Apple topic…iTunes is their product, not Apple Music. No Roon, no Chromecast, no anything else, not ever, IMO. I do hate myself for liking Apple Music though. Best catalog, fantastic radio feature. If they ever go lossless the industry may be as bleak as you say. (and hardware compatibility becomes a mess.)

[oradba69 (louis)]

Cant believe its been nearly 4 years since I started this threat. The best workaround to the lack of apple is to use soundiiz to convert my apple playlists to Tidal, Never perfect but the best workaround I could find.

[goodsource]

roon folks any scope or hope of integration with apple music. they do have something called music kit api

MusicKit - Apple Developer

i think music kit will definetly work on mac and ios for sure… would be good start.

since apple music is supported both on android and windows i guess it can be made to work on other platforms too for roon.

please give it a shot

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

API will not work. I wrote what we need in many places… here is one quick search for “data dumps” i found:

Qobuz News and Correspondence [closed thread]

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 …

I repeat: It will not work.

[Christopher_Zapf]

Why not just support the DRM/player part with the new API to be able to play local already added/downloaded Apple Music files and playlists containing those files?

They would basically be treated like local MP3/AAC files, but at least I could use Roon UI to play them.

Cheers,

Chris