Thanks for the reply. Tidal doesn’t work whether its downloaded or not. Its just plain bad. How difficult can it be to get this right in carplay. Even Radio Paradise knows how to do this and is superb in carplay .
Spotify is going to eat Tidal & Qobuz’s lunch when they go lossless. Iplayed Spotify today in the car and you can really tell in a not perfect environment that the audio quality is not that good. I’d say even Apple Music has better audio quality
Kind of wished Spotify would release more info. I’m still on my 30 day trial with Spotify but I may cancel and then rejoin once the lossless tier is out. Besides not knowing the release date, I don’t know if my streamer will need an update for Spotify Connect to play lossless. It’s uses commercial version of RopieeeXL and the creator basically said it’s too early to know anything about the update as this point.
Do you all posting here expect that Spotify will have from one day to the other all the lossy offer complemented with at least CD quality or will it be like with Tidal that this comes with time and first subscribers might first have a limited lossless offer for some of their albums used to stream from Qobuz and Tidal? Actually the same happened to me as Qobuz user when I had to subscribe to Tidal as it was at the time the only streaming service in Roon. Tidal only offered lossy format of a Biffy Clyro album that Qobuz had as lossless. At that time I evaluated Tidal as under par compared to Qobuz until I saw they streamed in lossy quite an important amount of their catalog, but it was not transparent, not on Tidal, not in Roon.
My assumption is they’ll be able to offer their whole library in lossless like Amazon did when they offered HD level. Maybe that’s why they’re not turning it on until later this year to fill any missing gaps. If they offer this as an extra change, I can’t see them only have partial library in lossless. Most people would be upset and just cancel.
By which metric is this track ‘high dynamic range’ ?
I’m not questioning whether you are correct by the way… it’s a genuine question.
Not that it should matter because I’m only asking a technical query above… but I like the song and the album…
The bass in some of her tracks is off the charts, real deep and dirty.
Actually, I don’t even have that track or album in my collection. But if I did the dynamic range would be displayed next to each track in Roon. I was going entirely from casual listening and my imperfect ears.
But now I am curious as to what the range is for that track. Here is a link to one dynamic range meter: MAAT DROffline
Roon uses R128 I believe.
Roon needs to put a major effort in to secure a partnership with spotify to stay afloat.
Roon needs to decide what their target is. If its augmenting tidal/spotify, they’ve got their work cut out - because the native apps are only going to improve. If its home-server based music libraries, they’ve lost their way somewhat lately. If its music discovery, and curated playlists, there’s Spotify.
One thought is that pehaps Roon could buy or recreate something like Soundiiz does, so people could at least import their Spotify playlists and likes into Roon and match them up with Tidal or Qobuz. Of course one would still need two streaming subs. But considering we still can’t get My Mixes playlists from their OG partner, Tidal, it wouldn’t be a breath holder, that’s for sure.
Ironically, Spotify updated their apps today “for a simpler experience”, just as Roon has complicated it.
Nobody can beat Spotify, but everybody can. I see a future of roon if they would open up a little more and welcome more community plugins, probably open source the bridge and RAAT, but not if the follow behind Spotify in its footprints and eat the leftover. People who pay for Qobuz are quality concious and respect the work done by roon.
And they’ve just done the opposite by tightening it up, and alienating many with Roon ready gear that suddenly isn’t. Everything with a network port has Spotify connect it seems, making it too easy.
My personal take on this. I have relied on streaming for a long time. My personal collection of albums is small. I have used Spotify for years. I wanted higher quality audio so I am now checking out Tidal/Roon.
CD quality is fine for me. 90% of Tidal is (“only”) CD-quality. And I don’t hear the difference between CD-quality and hires or MQA. So, in the future, Roon/Tidal will have nothing to offer me in terms of audio quality.
Spotify’s algorithmic music suggestions are great (daily mixes, discover weekly, release radar, autoplay). Even if you have a very eclectic taste like me, it usually manages to serve you what you want (to discover).
Spotify’s UI is very straightforward. And Spotify Connect works flawlessly with almost any possible device. At home, on the road, wherever you want…
Spotify makes it possible to listen to the playlists of friends. This is great. But not essential for me.
In what domains can Tidal/Roon offer something extra/unique?
I like the extra information on artists, albums, etc in Roon. In the past, I looked that up in Last.FM. However, Spotify can team up with (or buy) Last.FM or whatever service they want whenever they want. So I am not sure this will remain a unique selling proposition for Roon.
What - for me - will make the difference (or not) is the possibility to create my own musical listening/discovery experience. Instead of relying purely on an algorithm (in the form of daily mixes etc), I want to be able to outline the parameters of the queue I want to create. E.g. I want tracks from period such, with personal tags such or such, that I have not listened to in the last year. Or even better: I want one third I have never listened to, and two thirds I can’t get enough of. And if a couple of hours later or the next day, I want to set new parameters, I do that. On top of that I don’t only want to hear tracks in my library, but also (x %) tracks from a streaming source that are similar to the parameters I set. This is already more or less possible within Roon with a combination of playlists, tags, focus, and radio. It just needs a lot - but really a lot - of improvements, within the UI, and probably also in the underlying database (one important step would be to abandon the difference between library tracks and non-library tracks (that can e.g. be found in playlists you have). I don’t see Spotify offering that kind of selection possibilities anytime soon. If Roon manages to offer that (in a user-friendly and efficient way), I will not return to Spotify, not even if they also offer CD quality at one third of the Tidal/Roon price.
What I was hoping for was roon to allow their focus feature to work directly on the streaming service. Pick genre, year, country, label. That kind of thing. Now just have focus after I’ve already pick the artist. That’s focus doesn’t help discover.
I found Spotify can basically does some of this with their whole library. Don’t think you can do country but you can do a range of years and add genre and label all in same search. This was what I wanted from roon.
#5 - Unique offering - Tidal works with my Astell and Kern DAPs. Factory installed service links. Subscribe to Tidal and it works. I don’t have a Roon capable DAP, but they are now available at a price.
I had been going solely with Qobuz, but have returned to using both. Each service has its strengths.
Tidal is readily available across many services and equipment.
My current suggestions (Release Radar) from Spotify are broken due to Spotify adding artists of the same name into the queue. I end up with totally the wrong music in my suggestions list. I have eclectic tastes too, but I am really challenged by some of the same named artists even though I like the genres. Dubstep instead of Folk, Grime instead of Hard Rock, etc. For a database driven system I am so surprised that they’d match two artists based on name. It’s hard to catch them and remove them from the lists and so every play reinforces the learning meaning now my playlist is full of dubstep and grime. Spotify support struggled to understand the problem and gave up.
If Roon/Qobuz can give me what I had before and allow me to delete some artists from the algorithm then I can do without Spotify even as they move to Lossless.
These are great examples of what I had hoped Valance would do, either as “dynamic playlists” or "Roon Radio Stations (Pandora-esque, not internet radio). Here is my feature request:
see full list:
Spotify Connect is Spotify’s killer feature. With Apple airplay you have to stream from your phone which sucks up battery and is prone to interference. Spotify Connect connects to their servers and you can close out the app on the phone and its still playing off your music server ,player.
I plan to subscribe the minute they go lossless.
Yes it is. The Spotify app and playback device don’t even need to be on the same network.