Spotify or Spotify HiFi in Roon [spotify will not allow this]

@Kim_Jensen I couldn’t agree more.

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I agree with the addition of MQA is it becomes a viable entity in the future.

If this is correct and Spotify come under pressure from Facebook might they become more amenable about talking to Roon?

Spotify got 50 million paying customers and is growing… much faster than any streaming service providers out there. There’s no reason why Roon will not integrate Spotify into their ecosystem. It will definitely bring huge revenue to Roon when it starts streaming lossless audio.

When this happens I will jump ship as they are so many albums out there simply can’t get it in Tidal. To further sweeten the deal if subscription (lossless HiFi) fee is lower than Tidal :grinning:

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[quote=“MusicEar, post:148, topic:10562”]
There’s no reason why Roon will not integrate Spotify into their ecosystem
[/quote]A part from getting the green light for Spotify :frowning:

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/spotify-hi-fi-launch-imminent/22138/12?u=carl

I am confused… @Danny why is Roon not using the open libraries for Spotify?

There are a few solutions out there for it and other custom OS are using it…

The open libraries are only open for non-commercial products, and they are deprecated and unsupported.

but using this API would also result in a very lame integration.

Actually, I would hesitate in even calling it an integration. Certainly, not in the style that users are accustomed to with Tidal.

Ah! and now it all makes sense :wink:

Thanks!

It might be the case that most Roon users have large libraries of own music. But if Roon should survive, it will be dependent of a music provider such as Tidal or Spotify. And since Tidal is willing to work with Roon, and Spotify not, my argument is clear - I will support Tidal. I hope it can survive, this might also be the only way to get someone like Spotify on board.

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A Comment:

There seems to be a lot of doom and gloom in this thread regarding the necessity of Roon to integrate with Spotify to succeed in the future.

I am of the opinion, as probably are the majority of the hardcore Roon users, that the streaming integration is just one nice, peripheral, feature of Roon but is not a deal breaker in any way.

For me, if Roon cannot, for whatever reason, work with Spotify or even loses Tidal because Tidal fails or changes it’s policy regarding 3rd party integration, it does not change my commitment to using Roon.

First and foremost, I look to Roon to make sense of my own digital collection of music. I always treat Tidal albums as inferior, the second best option, if you like.

There is something about the sense of ownership (previously Vinyl>CD>HDD stored material) which streaming cannot replace (Can streaming allow us to lovingly scan all our artwork and liner notes and display them at hi-res?). The very nature of the streaming services, ie the ephemeral aspect of not having one’s own copy of the data and the fact that one is at the mercy of what data is made available or is removed does not lend itself to any form of long term loyalty or feeling of actually having a music collection.

At it’s core (no pun intended :slight_smile: ) Roon is for the perfectionist, the OCD of the audio world, if you like. I count myself as one of them, obsessing over collecting and filing and listening to a highly personalised collection. It’s why there are so many more threads about collating box sets, or album art of a certain album not being displayed “just so” than about the future of streaming integration.

Roon is a niche product, aimed at a highly specific audience, with wider implications (eg hitting a more main-stream audience with multi-room applications and streaming integration) but it will always have it’s quite substantial band of fanatical followers and supporters whether it is integrated with Spotify or Tidal, et al, or not.

I would even go further and say, in some ways, the purity of Roon is even tainted a little by the Tidal integration. It’s just a psychological thing but those Tidal albums in my Roon collection of curated HDD stored “perfect” albums somehow taints it for me. It’s a faint and irrational feeling but it’s there. Maybe I’m not the only one to think this :slight_smile:

I only discovered Roon a month or 2 back and within minutes I was hooked completely. A whole new vista for organising my own collection opened up for me. I am quite sure that there are many, many thousands of potential clients for Roon on the worldwide stage who will jump on it once they are aware of it.

Roon has the benefit of having a fanatical fan base which the me-too streaming services cannot lay claim to having. Roon, provided they manage cash-flow, expansion and feature development wisely, will be here for the long term because of this (to my mind the development of other language options would be a great priority item for them to allow other cultures and countries to benefit from the Roon platform, I am an anglophone in Switzerland and my music buddies are loving what they are seeing, but are stumped because of the language side - sorry, digressing).

To summarise, and sorry for the long post… Streaming integration is just icing on the cake and I always tend to leave the icing :slight_smile:

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@Sallah_48 Very well put and you quickly grasped the incredible power of Roon.

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Icing on the cake - yes, totally agree. However, I’d prefer my icing to be Spotify flavoured as it’ll keep the rest of the family happy. My other half spends a lot of time exploring new artists etc which is just pathetic (in comparison) in Tidal (unless it’s one of the promoted artists). Also, the social aspects of Spotify - shared playlists in particular - are awesome. I would jump ship in a moment for this functionality if Roon were allowed to launch the integration!

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Sorry i do not agree.
I’m part of the population that needs a (lossless) streaming service to explore new music.
I would never commit to Roon wh that service!
My own library of redbook is relatively small , ~700 albums. I do not perceive lossless streaming as inferior to my ripped cd’s.
I have emotional relation with mucis not with hardware. I already have sold my vinyl collection 25 years ago and have boxed my cd’s ready to give away.

Just to put some counterweight to Sallah_48 opinion.

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Good point Jules. I chucked my vinyl in the skip about 10 years ago, and haven’t touched a CD probably in as many years, other than to rip them to HDD. I can understand your position and wholeheartedly support it. I do like to use Tidal to find new music myself, don’t get me wrong.

However, the point of my post was to counter the mood of doom for Roon simply because it was running into a roadblock with Spotify. I wanted to highlight that it may hamper expansion beyond a certain point, but the basic profitability of the business model is assured.

There is a whole swathe of Roon users for whom the streaming integration feature is just that, a feature, and as such Roon is safe as an overall business venture; we love Roon for it’s handling of our own data, its integration with online info, metadata, etc, and also I did not mention the community and feedback aspects make us all feel part of the development, which is not to be underrated either.

Streaming services themselves such as Spotify and Tidal are probably much more precarious in terms of longevity than Roon due to the fact that they are at the short-term mercy of the music industry itself and its whims. I recently read that Spotify is barely breaking even despite turning over 100’s of millions of USD. That’s not the sign of a profitable business. I’m sure streaming and probably Spotify will exist in one form or another over the next decade, but in this day and age of mergers, acquisitions and the evolving nature of the industry, we just don’t know what the map will look like in 10 years. Roon is in the prime position to weather the industry’s storms by offering a solid and unique niche-platform intended to optimise a very well established data set (ie hdd stored music).

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Vinyl collection in the skip!!! Dude that is an unspeakable act !

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I hear you. I made a big mistake of putting them in the cellar in boxes and they got damp :frowning:

It did hurt!

I think you’ve described your use-case for Roon with great passion, but Tidal integration is a substantial part of Roon’s value proposition for me, to the extent that I moved streaming provider to get it (well actually, doubled-up on providers because my daughter still likes Napster too much :rolling_eyes:) .

We all have different priorities.

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I think that if Roon added Spotify connect to Roon it would satisfy at least some of the Spotify “moaners”

Preferably Spotify should see your RoonCore as a device so you can add upsample and DSP functions to the Spotify stream and stream it to multiple RoonBridge devices.

This would be very much inline with how Spotify want you to stream to SpotifyConnect devices.

Yes I know that we all want it to be fully integrated just like Tidal, but Sotify are not going to let that happen,

So adding SpotifyConnect to the RoonCore would be second best, but our family members would be able to use Spotify like Spotify wants them to.

And before any of the Tinkerers says that you can already add SpotifyConnect to your RoonBridge. I will say I have already done this myself and it was far from plug and play with my DAC. And remember not everyone want to / are able to add it themselves.

Another thing I am wondering is that those that complain about Tidal suggestions being too main stream. Have you tried going into genre instead and look at suggestions there?

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This is worth highlighting. Tidal content is a lot more diverse than their front page would suggest. It may not be as intuitive as Spotify to access, but interesting playlists are definitely there through the genre specific links.

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