Roland, I’m afraid I don’t appreciate either of Ronnie’s tone or his unfounded conclusions.
Fact: Roon shows Tidal masters. Not all of them? Sure. No dispute. But those that are shown could be tagged right? And new ones being added (by Tidal) would also receive the same treatment. I don’t see what could be argued here further.
Onto the API: I’ve just done a little experimenting and will contact the Roon devs directly about it but here’s what I found.
I’ve done this with Beyonce’s Lemonade album as it was the first one.
It exists in two versions from what I can tell, with IDs 59727856 and 59727869.
When retrieving the items for the album with ID 59727856, the JSON reply goes like this:
{“limit”:100,“offset”:0,“totalNumberOfItems”:12,“items”:[{“item”:{“id”:59727857,“title”:“PRAY YOU CATCH ME”,“duration”:196,“replayGain”:-4.73,“peak”:0.97174,“allowStreaming”:true,“streamReady”:true,“streamStartDate”:“2016-04-23T00:00:00.000+0000”,“premiumStreamingOnly”:false,“trackNumber”:1,“volumeNumber”:1,“version”:null,“popularity”:96,“copyright”:“© Parkwood Entertainment”,“url”:“http://www.tidal.com/track/59727857",“isrc”:“USSM11603175”,“editable”:false,“explicit”:false,“audioQuality”:"HI_RES”, […]
Note the last part says the audioQuality is HI_RES.
For the album with ID 59727869 it replies with this:
{“limit”:100,“offset”:0,“totalNumberOfItems”:12,“items”:[{“item”:{“id”:59727870,“title”:“PRAY YOU CATCH ME”,“duration”:196,“replayGain”:-4.73,“peak”:0.971771,“allowStreaming”:true,“streamReady”:true,“streamStartDate”:“2016-04-23T00:00:00.000+0000”,“premiumStreamingOnly”:false,“trackNumber”:1,“volumeNumber”:1,“version”:null,“popularity”:82,“copyright”:“© Parkwood Entertainment”,“url”:“http://www.tidal.com/track/59727870",“isrc”:“USSM11603175”,“editable”:false,“explicit”:false,“audioQuality”:"LOSSLESS”,
audioQuality here is LOSSLESS, and as above, it goes on in similar fashion for all the remaining 11 tracks.
These requests have been captured via my browser, and they were both made upon entering the respective album’s page, as I selected it from the results of the search in Tidal. Of course, these requests were also made before playing anything.
Now I’m not 100% sure of this because I don’t know what lossless and hi-res mean respectively, but unless Tidal means by either of these “compressed, lossy stream” then it appears these are the MQA FLAC and the plain FLAC respectively.