Roon with mostly streamed music

I’m interested to know what the Roon experience will be like for users with a very modest personal music collection.

I have grown up as a part of the streaming generation and have only really purchased music that hasn’t been available to stream or I really wanted to own.

Does Roon intergrate Tidal well enough to give a full experience without amassing a large collection? Do recommendations and meta data function the same in both personal and streamed music?

Matt

Yes, the experience is great.

From Roon’s perspective, your library (our word for collection) consists of, Local audio files, Tidal Album Favorites, and Tidal Track Favorites.

When you favorite things on Tidal, you’re effectively growing your collection. Streaming content in your library is treated as a first-class citizen. Pretty much the only thing you can’t do with it is export it out to lossless files and walk away with it :smile:

You can also fully browse Tidal content without adding it to your library, and the experience is very good, and very different from what you see on Tidal’s native apps.

Very excited about this. It seems like a natural but excellent progression for music as a whole. Can’t wait to see it in action…

Should I wait until Roon is live before organising my new Tidal subscription?

If you organise the subscription now you can already populate your favourites (which will later appear in Roon with full metadata). Whether you can listen satisfactorily before Roon is available, is dependant on your system.

It does mean though that you can hit the ground running come mid-May.

Thanks Ludwig - I wan’t sure if there was a two way sync in as much as I could update Tidal to include my current local files for playlists etc from Roon.

Hi @gmt. @Ludwig is correct, and we do sync your Tidal favorites both ways.

So, anything you mark as a favorite on Tidal will automatically appear in Roon interleaved with your local library. And when you’re browsing Tidal content in Roon, anything you add to your library will show up as a favorite in Tidal.

We have some other features planned, so let us know if there’s more you’d like to see here. Thanks!

Hi @mike

That sounds amazing. Would you mind letting us know if the Roon favourites then stay in Tidal so you can see them from a Tidal only interface e.g. my PC at work. This would save me a significant amount of time. I can’t wait to see the interface in action.

Thanks

When you’re browsing Tidal content in Roon, and you find an album (or song) you really like, you can add it to your Roon library. This does 2 things: the album will now appear in your Roon library just like if you had the files, and the album will be marked as a favorite on Tidal.

So, once you’ve added a Tidal album to your Roon library, it will show up in your collection, and will be available in your Tidal favorites when you’re away from home.

Also, note that we have a different concept of Favorites in our app – it’s more akin to bookmarking, and generally speaking it stays in Roon, making it easy to find the songs you’ve flagged along the way.

Hope that’s clear!

Thanks Mike - That’s clear! I would like to replicate my Roon tracks with Tidal so that I always had “my music” with me. This is what I meant by a two way sync. I can see why this would be difficult to reproduce.

Cheers

@gmt, thats coming… it’s more like a scan & match feature for your library with Tidal.

Probably not at launch, but soon after.

Thanks @Danny - I’ll leave that side of my Tidal organisation until later - that’s great news for me and I’m sure a lot of your customers will be very pleased with this feature.

Cheers

Hi.
I am also looking for a streamed music solution.
Is the “standard” Tidal functionality will remain in Roon, e.g. browsing through Tidal’s newly created and “exclusive” playlists as well as their “themed” playlists, which my other half loves a lot?
Thanks

@Dmitry, yes!

I remember reading in one of the threads about profiles, will I be able to have one Tidal account and have the same functionality for different users?

Matt

profiles are just for your play history, favorites, and playlists