The Elephant in the Roon: Tidal Connect

Let me know if you get a response. That would be very odd. Wouldn’t make much sense unless Tidal made direct streaming exclusive to Tidal Connect via a Connect partner license. That would be aggressive for no apparent reason since streaming through Roon still nets Tidal a user license.

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I agree. I think someone just mistakenly jumped to that conclusion. That conclusion makes no sense. Tidal is not a Roon competitor, they are a Roon partner. Tidal Connect is designed to increase the Tidal customer base by adding people who are not Roon customers. Of course, a few Tidal customers might drop Roon in favor of Tidal Connect, but I doubt it will be significant.

Agreed. Most of the music I stream is in Tidal but there are a few things in my library that Roon makes instantly accessible. But for the pure streamer Connect saves you 10 bucks a month. You lose the library integration, UI and signal path simplicity. I’ll pay 10 a month for that.

Where do you see Tidal not working with Roon ?

Tidal Connect may be good, when the hardware manufacturers catch up, but it will mean switching between apps , ANO music player and Tidal

The integration of Tidal into Roon is deep and cannot be replicated with 2 Apps

As long as Tidal exists Roon will integrate it , I hope

Tidal Connect is only any good when you ONLY use Tidal

Well, we’re all on the same page here at least.

Andrew, thanks for adding to the forum. As long as you hear the music you want it doesn’t matter how, what, or why you choose a service. Don’t be phased by any roonboy angst at your comment. I’ve talked to Jim before and he’s cool. Just trying to trace a rumor he heard somewhere. Later entries may be just doing that “how dare you say that you dope” thing so popular online. Don’t take any guff from these f’ing swine to quote Hunter S.

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Sorry everyone for having an opinion

Not a problem. We just wondered if you had some additional information that we didn’t have.

Yes Andrew. My comment was in no way directed towards you. Your use case is different than mine but I see why you wrote what you did. I was responding to those with strong opinions who can’t seem to keep their fingers off that all caps key. Fanboys are often overbearing and I just wanted that to stop if possible.

I dislike seeing spurious statements like “the integration with Tidal is deep”. That’s just BS. The integration is simple and shallow.

  1. Roon makes calls to the Tidal API
  2. Runs the returned dataset through a DTD to map the Tidal schema to the Roon schema.
  3. Presents the Tidal data set in it’s own UI frame.
  4. Grabs the Tidal featured list from the API and presents that in the Overview.
    None of this is deep or complicated.

Where it does get a little interesting is how it deals with assets that are in both Tidal and your Library. This one had me puzzled for a bit but now I see what they’re doing.

  1. When Tidal sync is clicked they retrieve your Tidal favorites and compare it to your Core library db.
  2. When they see a match they have a choice, 1) create new Tidal asset or
  3. Use version control to update the Library asset with Tidal information.
    This is a great use of version control. Overlaying the Tidal icon and new version blue banner over the asset thumbnail image is a nice UX touch.

While on the subject of UX touches, the signal path display is really nice. I have never seen an event log displayed to the user in such an intuitive and practical way, Kudos to the UX designer(s)!

Now, what is truly complicated and no doubt becoming more so is the Roon Radio recommender system. That is a neat piece of engineering. So cool that I’m thinking about how to integrate it with a music classification tool I have on my development roadmap.

Sorry to those who may not be interested in all this. But when I see conceited ignorance on display I just have to say “So - you wanna talk MAM system integrations? Cool. Lets do it. I can even do it without reverse engineering Roon in plain sight.”

Why all the hostility?

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Where was that in this thread?

Sorry guys. I’ll chill. One guy kind of set me off with the overbearing repetition of what we all know. I wasn’t going to respond until I saw Andrew reply today. There’s just no reason to be condescending when people just express their thoughts. Especially if you don’t know what you’re talking about

You’re right, I shouldn’t have let him have it. I’m gonna look at the latest episode of the Madalorian which seems to have conpletely descended into children’s programming, and then do some work. .

Again, my apologies for that little rant. Won’t happen again.

Sorry if my systems analysis skills are wanting , I was merely using what I see on the screen as a guide !

I am far from a fan boy, my comment was based on trying to see a way to use Tidal Connect to bin Roon,

So far juggling 5 apps and Tidal nothing comes close to Roon’s slickness.

My streamer, although promised doesn’t yet support Tidal Connect so it’s all academic …

Sorry Mike. We are agreed on Roon. I could probably get away with Tidal Connect for 90% of my listening. But I like the job they’ve done with Roon enough that I’ll subscribe to support continued development.

Me Too , I keep an eye open for anything new but so far nothing , I have a fairly large (150k Tracks) local library with very small Tidal use so I’m the reverse.

I have a Cambridge Audio CXN which apparently will be Tidal Connect supporting so I get the best of both. The Cambridge Audio app gives me Tidal already this will be icing

This is my audiophile roadmap.

  1. Purchase a pair of Formation Duos and use my Wedge in my work from home office.
  2. Purchase a pair of Meze Empyreans
    3 Purchase a Monolith THX DAC headphone amp.
  3. Connect the DAC to the laptop running Roon core for playback to the Empyreans. If I’m correct this will give me a lossless signal path to the headphones.

It’s nice being in an arena where spending $10k+ to listen to music is not unheard of or considered extravagant.

Perhaps I missed it, but will TIDAL connect allow you to join different system throughout a house so they are all playing the same music in sync like Roon Ready devices can? If not, that is a very good reason to keep Roon as that is a feature I use all the time.

Other than that, TIDAL is not a definitive catalog of music. I find good albums all the time that are not in TIDAL and I also digitize a lot of albums that are very hard to find and not in TIDAL.

I think TIDAL Connect may keep people from considering Roon if they only use TIDAL, but I’m willing to bet that most audiophiles don’t rely on just TIDAL for their library of music.

Another key benefit of Roon over Tidal Connect, IMHO, is the integration of classical music.

The Roon interface gives you far more effective search of classical compositions by composer, date, orchestra etc. Roon’s interface is much more powerful at finding classical music from Tidal than the Tidal app!

The only other option is Primephonic, which is - all said and done - about the same price as an annual Roon subscription.

It’s academic for me, however, as I use a Raspberry Pi with a Boss Dac as my renderer and v. unlikely that will ever be Tidal Connect enabled.

Just to say from what little I understand about it, the above is not really correct. Tidal, Qobuz and Roon integrations are more complex than just calls to the public APIs. If it were that simple then there would be no reason for Roon not to integrate Spotify, Amazon et al as well.

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Just use whichever one works for you, or both. Sometimes it depends on what you are doing and which system you might be using at the time. It’s not necessarily an either/or decision.