Roon Music Service API

Does Roon have plans to make a public/developer API available for integrating a Music Service to Roon?

Eg, this would present an API so that a developer of any 3rd party music-service - similar to Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Apple Music, Spotify, etc - could integrate that service, so that functionality similar to Roon’s integration of Tidal is available.

I think an API like this would be awesome.

(This is kind of a complement to “Roon Speaker” vendor services - a similar vendor/integration service, but at the Music Services end of things.)

If not a public API, would you be willing to expose enough information for interested developers to tackle project(s) like this with other internet music services/archives?

thanks for your consideration.

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Good that you bring this up. I would certainly believe Roon has such an API available. And, I hope to see more music services to be integrated into Roon, especially Chinese music services.

I believe @danny has mentioned that when things settle down a little (release wise) the API may be made public - something I’m very interested in as I have a few app ideas myself.

Rik

The API we were thinking about was simple stuff about transport controls and basic stack of what data we have, for list based navigation

A third party music service API would not work, as to get the magic we do with TIDAL, we needed their entire db backend delivered daily. They were the only service to give this to us, and we’ve asked Spotify, Deezer, Rara, Rhapsody, Qobuz, and many others. This is why most players service integration feels like a bolt on and Roon’s seamlessly integrates TIDAL with your library.

If you have sources of content + data dumps of what is available ahead of time (not via api), we would be happy to look and/or talk to you about this privately. Discogs is a big one we’d love to ingest, but I’ve never gotten a db dump of theirs to successfully download… and there is no image data in their DB dumps.

We are in talks with the Chinese services… nothing to announce yet.

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I assume you mean all the database metadata (titles, artists & production info, etc, etc), and not the associated audio streams (the music itself).

It makes sense that this would require full catalog access.

Still, it seems you could eventually expose a music-vendor api that uses a background/privileged interface to update catalog info nightly, ideally with a differential update… eg regularly calling into some Roon-supplied REST endpoints with this info…

It’s too bad that only Tidal has been willing, so far - I fear that Tidal’s survival presents an existential threat to Roon… Hopefully some other FLAC services will come aboard now that there is this compelling proof of concept/purpose.

We need to know what ids they use internally… and it’d be best if they gave us their raw label data, and not their post-munged data. We do a much better job on that identification and enhancement than anyone else out there, and its best we don’t have that data screwed up by an inferior process.

We have been planning to do this for concert data, but this is radically different, and for big libraries, this could take weeks, if not months.

We love TIDAL, because their team and product is awesome. However, we are aware of this “threat”, and have solutions in the works.

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Thanks @danny, that’s all I need :smile:

Rik

That’s encouraging, possibly that will evolve over time to integrate more-and-more music-services.

Ok … :hushed::grinning:

That’s for a full/initial copy - presumably [differential] updates are much faster, once a service is “live”. (Eg, Roon seems to stay relatively up-to-date with Tidal’s new-releases/additions etc, though it’s harder to tell how quickly Roon is updated when stuff gets removed from Tidal’s catalog.)

Thanks for these updates on your plans. I will try to compose a private email regarding the HD music-archive that prompted my question - while it is of great interest to some, I really don’t know whether you’ll see business merit there.

Hi @danny,

Any success by now? Or is it not possible to use the Discogs database? That would be a bummer, though. When Roon runs with Discogs and on Linux, I’m in… and I just can’t wait for that to happen! :smile:

Cheers!

Marc

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Any news on a Discogs db dump which would be great, as a Discogs user I like the ability to more closely match my version with the one Roon matches. I think this would be ideal with people that have OCD with there collections and metadata. :slight_smile:

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