Other customers or potential customers opinions are not irrelevant. They are just a relevant as your opinion.
Ok fair enough.
Why are you so negative about a Spotify<>Roon integration?
What potential problems do you see with it?
There are no problems with it at all. I’m a spotify user myself. It’s just that there are about a dozen other threads addressing this. Roon would be happy to have it. But there is essentially no incentive for spotify to allow the very deep integration that roon requires. You can replace spotify with Apple Music and have same story.
In my opinion, Roon is about lossless high resolution music. It is about maximizing sound quality and in-depth metadata. I don’t see Spotify benefitting Roon and I don’t see Roon as a good fit for the typical Spotify customer. Roon would probably need to increase their support staff by ten fold or more just trying to get Roon working for the majority of Spotify customers. Again, just my opinion.
Look. Spotify will not allow it. What Roonlabs and any current or future Roon customers want is irrelevant
@garym ok …that makes sense. So you are both a Roon and Spotify user right? What is yr best practice so you get most from both platforms together ? Do you swap between the apps? Do you pull it all together in something like Jriver, or Home Assistant? or some other home auto platform? You sound sensible. What do you do? Cheers
You didn’t ask, but I use Roon, Audirvana Studio and 3.5, Apple Music, Tidal, and Qobuz. They all have their place and purpose.
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Thanks Jim. I’ve tried Audirvana - was a customer for years up until recently… it’s why I’m taking a look at Roon actually. Got tired of all the upgrades (and relicenses) and the quirky nature of how it worked with my DAC. I prefer subscription payments. Also would much prefer to run any core software on a linux computer (for stability) … So Roon looks good. It’s just my entire family is Spotify dependent. We all live in it’s ecosystem. And we like it. I just want to add a bit better library management and sound quality with my good gear in my Study that’s all… Cheers
My kids and grandkids all use Spotify. All they want to do is listen to music with an iPhone and earbuds. It works for them. My wife uses Sirius Radio in the car, nothing more.
Don’t see why it would be that difficult, spotify provide API access to the platform and playlists is a feature of that
I don’t integrate spotify with Roon in any way. I’m old school in that I mostly listen to my own music, about 9,000 digitized albums (FLAC). I use spotify to explore new music and also when traveling. My wife is a big spotify user. I run two systems at home. Roon and LMS. LMS handles local music , internet radio, spotify integration and also podcasts. And my wife uses the latter 3 things a lot.
The type of integration that makes Roon what it is (deep metadata, much recording-specific info) is not made available by Spotify, nor is it ever going to be, at least not in their current market position and value proposition.
The simplest answer is to make Spotify available to your endpoints via another means. For me that means running RopieeeXL (Raspberry Pi free software, supported by a remarkable developer on these forums) as my streamer. This means that I have all the feature set of Roon on my main 2-channel set-up, but I can also enable LibreSpot and anyone on my network can select “Living Room Yggdrasil” as a Spotify device and stream to it. The audio quality is noticeably execrable over a revealing system. But when we are having a party with a number of people over, it’s fine. And then you can “invite” other people to DJ with you just as on any Spotify device.
Frankly, Spotify is its app as much as its catalog. Other than Sonos they really control their walled garden, and I agree with them. If they exposed their catalog as it is inside Roon it would be frustrating. I have a family Spotify and a single person Tidal and Qobuz) that I largely use only on Roon (plus the Tidal integration on Tesla). I get wanting to streamline your subscriptions for financial or ease-of-use reasons. But compromising the actual value that Roon provides by trying to shoehorn something into it that will make it audibly inferior and less rich and/or accurate in information provided seems a poor compromise to wish for.
Happy holidays all!
Yes it is, all artist, album and recording info etc is available via the API.
It’s not even just this. The way Roon works is way deeper than any apis the platforms offer even Tidal and Qobuz. Roon allows you to fully incorporate music from streaming as though it was a local file you can organise it, tag it, even change the metadata if you wish and the cover, it also ties in with all the additional bios and reviews from separate metadata sources, they use the api for the qobuz and Tidal sections and playback to pull the streams the rest is very bespoke and they physically host all of the Tidal and Qobuz databases on Roons servers it’s not searching via the api here at all. The get regaular full database updates from Tidal and Qobuz a few times a week to manage this. Using the API alone will not do what Roon is capable of. Hence why web apis are not feasible and the same reason Apple Music isn’t available either but that’s even more complicated an issue.
There a many threads covering all this and why you won’t see it happening. Spotify just don’t want to share their data or have someone else controlling it. Without the two way street it won’t be in Roon.
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That’s not entirely accurate, both qobuz and tidal use the API for playback but metadata is also pulled back via the API for wiki info, why is that any different to retrieving it for Spotify
Why can’t they use the API for playback in exactly the same way they do for qobuz or tidal?
You seem to be missing the point about the fact that Roon gets a complete database dump from tidal and Qobuz. They are using way more than the API.
I’m not missing it at all, why does that make any difference? you seem to be missing the point that it makes negligible or no difference.
I’m only summarizing the answer that Roon owners have given several times on this forum. Surely you don’t know more about roon internal process than they do.
so you don’t know how it works either then, but have just never asked or quizzed them on their answers
Also given the lag in querying their cloud based DB I suspect that the Roon client querying the Spotify DB direct via the API will actually be much faster.
I’ve seen the Roon cloud compute frequently take 3+ secs to return data in the logs before
There are dozens of threads on this issue. All with the same outcome. Obviously you don’t like the answer that several have already provided, including roon owners. Repeating the question will not change the answer.
p.s. roon has approached spotify for integration in the past. Spotify has shown no interest. If you want to see Spotify in roon, you need to lobby Spotify. It’s all in their hands.