My understanding of Spotify Connect is that it is essentially divided in:
1- A rendering engine (think of a Chromecast connecting to Spotify’s servers and rendering a stream to an audio output),
2- Controlled by the Spotify app.
The key here is the latter: As far as I can tell the whole setup hinges on the Spotify app’s control of the output while the sound routing is executed by some other separate component (sometimes not physically in the same place) as the control device.
Spotify is adamant about theirs being the ONLY control app (and for good user tracking reasons). If this requirement is not relaxed, this precludes any Roon integration as far as I can tell.
I previously made a point of Roon negotiating with Spotify by providing something that could be valuable to them in order for them to relax the control requirement: user library contents. I don’t see any other way.
The reality is that it would be a comparatively small investment for Spotify to replicate all of Roon’s features.
Edit: IF what you’re suggesting is that Roon implement a Spotify Connect renderer to take advantage of the DSP engine, then I would argue that’s not Roon’s objective - it would completely skip the Roon interface so why bother.
Yes SpotifyConnect is bypassing the Roon interface, but I do not see that as a problem because it will just be there to keep the rest of the house hold happy.
I agree, Tidal HiFi integration is a big part of Roon’s value proposition for me as well. The seemless music discovery that Tidal integration enables in Roon is truly amazing.
It’s to the point now that I really need to make a list of the Tidal albums in my Roon library just in case Tidal or those albums suddenly disappear for some reason. For the streaming albums that I have gotten around to buying on CD, I can’t detect any difference in sound quality, so it’s hard to make that spend a high priority normally.
As far as Spotify goes, it’s nice to see them validate the market for lossless streaming. At least we’ll have an alternative to Tidal for lossless streaming if JayZ throws in the towel… even if through a separate UI. I do also keep an Apple Music subscription for the family as well as for their larger library, but over time I’ve found fewer and fewer albums that are available on iTunes, but not Tidal.
It would be nice to have more streaming services integrated with Roon, but even the now defunct Classics Online service didn’t seem interested in integrating with Roon.
It was recently rumoured that Spotify ‘would’ be releasing lossless. Would be interesting what that meant because if they went for that market, Roon support is something they should seriously look at, their current market wouldn’t have any idea what it meant until they figured out why their data bill went up - and that’s likely the extent of their comprehension.
If you have a computer dedicated to music and if your DAC has both a USB and toslink connections, this is what you can do (at least on a mac):
1- Connect your DAC to both the USB and optical outputs of your computer
2- Run Roon and set it to output to the USB DAC
3- Run Spotify client and set it to output to toslink
You can now play Roon (using the iPad app say) and Spotify vis Spotify Connect (using your iPad Spotify app to control your computer client) and all you need to do to switch between the two is switch the DAC inputs. Piece-of-cake.
I love Roon… Been a lifetime subscriber since July 2015. But seriously hjow many people are we talking about? 10,000? If someone knows please PM me, I’m interested in knowing.
Roon subscribers presumably represent a tiny proportion of Spotify subscribers - therefore Spotify aren’t giving much up if they were to allow Roon integration. Presumably they can still monitor which tracks have been streamed so I can’t really see how they’d really be losing out on user tracking.
Similarly, the numbers are so small that Spotify won’t be worried about losing, potentially, every Roon customer to Tidal (unless Roon numbers swell to a large degree). I don’t see the value of giving up info on our owned collections and listening habits to Spotify as a bargaining chip - in fact, I’d be minded to think of it as a rather bad idea to share all that personal information.
I suppose all we can do is make out voices heard at Spotify and hope that they care enough to change their mind and allow Roon to implement their integration solution.
For me, Tidal is becoming more and more embedded in my listening life. A move back to Spotify is difficult without Roon integration as my lounge audio system is no longer ‘Spotify Connect’ enabled. I do miss some of my Spotify playlists, though.
Did you listen to the samples? Awful, why wouldn’t they have samples with a wide dynamic range? All sounded same to me but I really couldn’t be bother to try to discern differences from poor sources. My analogy would be to shoot a foggy golf course to illustratre the differences between different lenses.
They were poor samples to use in my opinion but I guess that was intentional to make it harder.
I actually got them all right so either my hearing isn’t as bad as I think, I am very lucky or there really is a noticeable difference if you take the time to listen properly.
There was a very interesting section on this in one of The MQA videos with Bob Stuart and Bob Ludwig along with the chap from Mytec as to why the loss of upper frequency has less effect on your music enjoyment than you may think.
It’s to to with the Logrythmic scale use to measure things and how we perceive sound.
If I find a link I will post it but the upshot is your still able to enjoy great music.
Chris
C’mon folks. We all know the future is Amazon Music Unlimited…
Ok. Seriously. Spotify has got too big. I got Sonos when it first came out and they started offering Spotify through it. It worked for Spotify - they were small and needed subscribers. A few years later there seemed to be an issue and Spotify wasn’t available for a while.
Roon are better off finding smaller providers (maybe like Slacker Radio) for whom the subscribers of Roon as well as the hardware vendors it opens up to them are attractive.
If you’re not happy Spotify isn’t on here then go complain to Spotify. Oh. And buy a subscription to Roon. By ditching Roon it’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. Get behind Roon so they’re more attractive to other services.
