See Danny’s post referenced above:
"Spotify has actively shut us down … "
Nothing seems to have changed that might yield any hope that Spotify is interested.
I really miss Roon…
Tidal is not an option, neither is separate purchases of HD content.
Spotify ticks all the boxes, except Roon integration.
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Just some feedback on this from our family (and ignoring the disparity between sound qualities for a minute):
My other 'arf and I previously used spotify and having made the transition to Roon/Tidal the bits of spotify I miss are to do with the UI, speed of search and ability to share playlist creation between friends…just fantastic!
However, my better half, being much more social than I, sits firmly in the @Lundmark camp and we have a lot of sympathy for the points he has previously raised. I think it comes down partly to curation - spotify is just so much better, faster, easier to find new music with than tidal and certainly roon. Recommendations for new music based on playlists etc is just great (and I am sure that this is on the Roon horizon if playlists are explored further).
Basically, I am constantly being told that spotify is great, tidal sucks…and this is something that will have to be addressed if Roon ever has pretentions at expanding its user-base beyond us lot. Me…for the little I use Tidal, I’d be happy playing my own music in Roon for the quality and then use Spotify for parties, car…pretty much everything else except sitting on my own in my lounge…but then that would be a bit of a shame…decisions.
I’m new here; installed roon just about 3 weeks ago. I am firmly in @crom and @Lundmark camp. That said I am a roon subscriber and am very exciter to see the platform evolve over the next 12 - 24 months. I am hedging my bet with an annual subscription for now.
I’m using roon for the local content support (bootlegs and other non-commercially-available content) but the great majority of my roon hifi listening is through Tidal streaming. However, almost all of my music discovery is done through Spotify, which might seem anachronistic given Roon’s mission.
I started using Spotify a year ago (very late to the party) and I’m beyond impressed with it. Their social playlists and Discover Weekly feature have really expanded my listening horizons; their family plan support makes it economically viable for my 2 teens and spouse to avail themselves of very good quality streaming (as opposed to youtube, which is what the kids used previously). Tidal does have excellent quality, but the playlist curation and the overall performance (time between selecting an album and music playing, or response time to track changes as compared to Spotify) leaves a lot to be desired.
Because of this, I’ll be adding a Chromecast Audio dongle to my living room setup, to enable Spotify and Pandora support on the ‘big system’ (via toslink). It will be interesting to see what the mix of Roon vs CCA listening becomes over the next couple of months.
One last point that I would like to see addressed by Roon some day: I use roon at home but I cannot access that system (easily) from my office where I spend many, many hours per week. I have a decent hifi setup in my office that’s 100% pandora and spotify powered by necessity.
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Spotify goes lossless and adds support for Roon. Problem solved.
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I’ve been using Spotify for years. I love it. But I use it to discover new music, or listen to an album before I buy it (on high res/vinyl/cd and in that order) It’s a great way to make sure you want to spend your hard earned money on an album that could turn out to be crap if you’ve only heard a few songs.
But integrating it with Roon, I am unsure about that. Unless there was a high res service.
I have a LOT of music on my Synology NAS from MP3 to FLAC and DSD. I do not play any MP3’s via Roon though.
We use Spotify to our Bluetooth speakers by the pool for music. That works well and all we need. But inside the house it’s Roon all the way.
I’m not a fan of Tidal, and unsure if I’d like to add any streaming service to Roon. But I want MQA 
Now, where is my Pioneer XDP-100R for my trip
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Glad for all the responses. Great to hear all the different opinions.
I’ve stopped using Roon entirely since I made this thread and gone back to Spotify. I miss my local iTunes music which I rarely play because it’s so cumbersome now, and I miss Roon’s multi room and queue features.
What I don’t miss is the lack of music to listen to, and the extremely cumbersome, website-like music management features.
I’ve also found that the Spotify apps have improved substantially in the time that passed. They where great before but now they’re really killing it. So good.
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I will ask again… Still no way to get Spotify into Roon?
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I am trying to get a discussion going on a two-tier approach to integration of additional sources here. I am loosing hope that any other major streaming provider will grant the type of access required for tight integration of content as was done for Tidal anytime soon. One way out of this situation could be the addition of a second type of sources, maybe resembling what has been done with Tomahawk.
I agree that it would be great (and important for the long term) to have additional services such as Spotify, pandora, siriusXM, a podcast streaming manager, and a radio stream service like TuneIn. None of these have to be integrated like TIDAL. But these services would allow ROON to replace completely LMS or Sonos. I currently have to use both Roon and lms to get everything I need in my steaming needs.
Radio streaming has been in for a while now.
The radio supplement is a great start but I haven’t been able to add some beloved stations so I’m looking forward to further development in this area.
If you’re talking about manually adding URLs for radio streams, yes, that’s there and I appreciate having it. But it is not the same as having a comprehensive service (like tunein) where one can search by call letters, city, genre, etc. and then select the station to play (and tunein handles understanding the URL, etc.). For example, this is the way LMS works. One can either enter direct URL and save as favorite or use the radio streaming service to find things.
p.s. of all the things I mentioned, radio streaming is at bottom of list (because we have the ability to add URLs and play). Things like podcast manager, spotify, SiriusXM, etc. are much higher on my list. Of course none of these relate to high quality music playback…but they do relate greatly to my full use of a home networked audio system.
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yes, almost everyone !!
I have to say Spotify can sound pretty decent, and obviously it sounds better than no sound at all when we are talking about tracks that cannot be found on TIDAL. Spotify with HQPlayer upsampling (through Roon) might actually be pretty good - I might try it by capturing a Spotify stream, saving it, and playing it with HQPlayer - only for test purposes that is!
It would be the extremely rare individual ( and rare tracks as well) that could distinguish a Spotify file from the lossless version in a properly administered ABX test. The advantage of the tidal integration is the seamless metadata integration, which Spotify doesn’t offer.
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I should feel dirty, but I don’t: Spotify upsampled and room corrected is actually quite bearable.
For me – the main advantage of Spotify is that it has gotten to know me quite well over the years. I listen to release recommendations and the daily mixes regularly and oftentimes find new music I like because of it.
Not tripping over Tidal’s house artists every time I open the app or Roon’s overview page is a valuable added bonus.
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What’s your playback chain?
Pi2/Digi+Pro / Librespot > SPDIF coax > MiniDSP DDRC-22D / Dirac > SPDIF coax > Meridian DSP5200.
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Ok, I have done this test. I captured Spotify for the titles below to 48/16 AIFF files, and compared them with the following:
a- Shirley Horn - Hit The Road Jack (TIDAL vs Spotify)
b- Shirley Horn - New York’s My Home (CD rip vs Spotify)
c- Michael Hedges - Aerial Boundaries (DSD64 rip vs Spotify)
Playback in Roon using HQPlayer upsampling.
The quality of Spotify is very close to the “lossless” source, including the sense of space and decay (particularly on Aerial Boundaries). Remarkable.
The case ‘b’ is one I chose on purpose: the CD version I have comes from a master that is worse than Spotify’s so the Spotify version sounds a lot better. I have tried to get a version that sounds as good as the Spotify one, but this is a tough CD to find - and it is NOT ON TIDAL!
So in summary: I WANT SPOTIFY IN ROON!!!
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