Roon Arc and TMobile Music Freedom

T-Mobile offers its customers something called Music Freedom. This allows a user to stream music from their preferred music provider without impacting any total streaming quota they may have in place (e.g 100gb).

Quite a few services are covered as seen here: Unlimited music streaming with Music Freedom™ | T-Mobile Support

Notables missing are Roon Arc and Qubuz. I don’t know what the financial burdens on the streaming service are, but I would think if Bandcamp, SomaFM, and SoundCloud qualify then Roon Arc could as well?

Bottom line. Including Roon Arc would allow me to stream unlimited amount without using up my monthly quota of 100gb.

Thanks.

-CB

As far as Roon ARC is concerned, it might not be so straightforward not least because the music, when streamed from your Roon Server, is not being downloaded from a source known to T-Mobile and Identifiable as a music streaming service.

Also, the streaming protocol is likely a Roon protocol and so may not be identifiable as music in the same way as the supported streaming services.

Given Roon really isn’t a well known service outside its userbase of way less than 500k I doubt they know of its existence or would add it as it’s not worth the admin. I have a 12g allowance and never used it up once. But I don’t see the point of lossless on the go, you can’t hear the difference with all the noise even with nc which your then using lossy anyway.

1 Like

There are some rather tiny services included. Might be worth a try and they say on the TM website:

If there’s a music streaming service you think should be part of Music Freedom, tweet us your favorite service @TMobile #MusicFreedom.

There are caveats though:

  • Don’t stream to devices using Mobile Hotspot or tethering.

Non-music streaming data

  • Most music streaming services include small amounts of non-music streaming data, such as album art and pic advertisements.
  • Non-music data does count against your high-speed data bucket. The amount of data varies by streaming partner and the device being used.

Meaning that ARC‘s comparatively large library maintenance data would still count.

And I’m not quite sure what this means:

Some music services might download song data to your device for offline listening, counting against your data allotment. To avoid this, make sure any available offline, download, or similar option is not selected for any song, playlist, or album shown.

Finally, it only benefits smaller plans, so who knows if it’s worth it for Roon:

Magenta plans and ONE Plan are unlimited so you can already stream all the music you want without worrying.