Roon Radio using Tidal

Is there a way to get Roon to use the available music on Tidal for the Roon Radio feature?

I LOVE going to Pandora (or some other services), selecting an artist or track I enjoy, and then having it play similar stuff. I end up finding new things I enjoy that way. For me, I don’t care for Tidal’s implementation of this feature. I really love Pandora’s version.

I’m hoping I can get Roon to take the place of Pandora by using the songs available on Tidal.

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Currently no, but I believe the devs have indicated they would like to implement this if possible. Radio is supposed to pick up Tidal albums in your library at the moment (although this happens very rarely for me) but does not currently play Tidal material not in your library.

I’ll turn this into a feature request for others to comment and drop a flag for @brian to let us know if it is feasible or not.

Thanks for turning it to a feature request!

It’d be wonderful if Roon could do that. Failing or in addition to that, adding Pandora or other services would be great too.

I’ve been spoiled by how easily and effective Sonos can access so many services. I’d really prefer Roon to implement all of that functionality so I could use better hardware though. And as good as Sonos’ interface is, Roon has it beat!

Adding additional services would be great and the recent reports of discussions between Tidal and Apple can only add to the reasons for Roon to diversify.

You mentioned that you preferred Pandora to Tidal for music discovery. What does Pandora do right and Tidal wrong ?

It’s totally subjective.

Tidal just doesn’t come up with songs I seem to enjoy. It even occasionally picks the same artists, but not tracks that I enjoy as much as the tracks Pandora picks.

I have the same problem with Spotify though. It’s been a while since I used LastFM, but I remember thinking it did a pretty good job too.

I’m hoping this functionality exists and I’m not aware of it (I’ve searched and looked at the knowledge base to no avail) so consider it an enhancement request if Roon doesn’t already do this.

I’m a Tidal subscriber. My personal library of tracks is reasonably large (about 45K tracks) composed of various genres. I use Tidal, and Spotify, mostly for music discovery.

I know that if you play a particular track/album/etc that Roon radio will play “similar” tracks when that one ends but have found that it mostly selects tracks from my library. It would be nice if it had a setting that allowed you to choose a range from 0 (my library only) to 10 (Tidal only) for selecting new tracks to play.

An additional enhancement to this idea would be another setting for how “adventurous” Roon is in selecting those tracks i.e., if I have the above setting on 8 so that it would mostly prefer Tidal and I play a progressive rock track as the starter for Radio it would play predominantly prog rock tracks but occasionally step outside the genre to techno, rap, etc.

If there’s already a way to do this I’d appreciate info on how, otherwise consider it an enhancement request.

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Roon radio only plays from within your library so feature request.

Thanks for your reply Ged.

In thinking about it, I’d like to broaden what it is I want beyond the scope of Radio. Although this still might be a feature request (if it is possible to do this already I’d appreciate if someone could tell me how). I realized in thinking about it that my listening pattern is frequently to select a genre and then shuffle play.

In this mode, Roon does select tracks from Tidal that are “similar”.

So it would be nice if there were a setting similar to what I described previously where I could “prefer” my own library or “prefer” Tidal on some 0 to 10 scale. This would be of considerable value to me since I subscribe to Tidal and Spotify mostly for music discovery.

Still an enhancement request? Perhaps.