I am a Roon neophyte and am struggling to understand how best to use the software. Most of my owned music is in the cloud on Google Play Music. From what I gather, Roon can’t interface with that, so alas I am out of luck. No matter for most cases, as I have a Tidal subscription that satisfies 95% of my needs. For the most part, then, I am using Roon as a window to Tidal. I like the history and I like the interface. Not great reasons, and I’m starting to doubt if it’s really worth the difference, but for now here I am.
I have two laptops that I use outside of the house. When setting up Roon, I have to decide if the computer is going to be the Core or a remote. The first computer I installed Roon on is the Core. When I try to add the second one, it won’t let me create a second core, and if I select remote, it stalls indefinitely if the other laptop isn’t on.
All I really want is to use Roon as a portal to Tidal on both computers, including if I’m out of the house with only one of them. Is this possible? Do both have to be Cores? The software suggests that I buy a second license to listen to Tidal via Roon on two computers. This seems preposterous given the high price of the software.
kneville
(A feral ghoul cannot abide a chicken. )
2
This is possible. A single license only allows for the operation of one core at a time. But it is possible to switch the license back and forth between 2 cores. I do this almost every day as I have one library on a desktop in my office and another on a laptop that I use at home. I’m already logged in at home, so I can’t tell you exactly what the wording is on the screen, but it is something along the lines of Roon already being authorized to run a different core, do you want to unauthorize that core and authorize this one? A click on ‘unauthorize’ and I’m up an running in a second or 2. Tomorrow when I start up at work, I can post a screen shot, if no one else fills in the details between now and then. Good luck, let us know how you do. Cheers!
I’m at a little bit of an impasse on this issue myself. I have two annual subscriptions right now to have a library at home and at work. I can’t do the switcharoo daily because 1.) my home library has DSD and I have no room left on my 10TB drive at my office for the whole DSD library and 2.) I’m not the only person using Roon at home so there’s a chance my girlfriend would be listening while I’m still working.
I’m going to buy one lifetime license this year, but I don’t see Roon having a solution in place by the summer for someone to access their whole library at work without a second license. I could just buy two lifetime licenses, but something doesn’t seem quite right about dropping a full $500 more just to listen while I’m at work.
@kneville Excellent, I see the option to deauthorize at the bottom of the screen, had missed it before.
Does it mess with your settings? Are your histories able to be merged across the machines?
@Matt_Simpson Even paying for two full time licenses seems like a big deal to me. With an annual fee of over $100 I think running on >1 machine is a completely reasonable request…
kneville
(A feral ghoul cannot abide a chicken. )
5
No issues at all with settings. Every now and then on 1.2 it would hang while deauthorizing and would take a restart or two of the application, but no issues since the update. As for the history, I used a copy of my original database to get started on the second machine, but once I started playing music at work, the two histories diverged. It is not cumulative across machines as far as play counts, etc. A Tidal album added to one library does show up in the other, which is nice.