I am giving this a try. There are a a lot of cool things about this but what a huge mess it is for me.
It didn’t get any of my iTunes playlists. I fear that tons and tons of music is missing.
The TIDAL integration sucks and doesn’t work right at all. If I look up an artist in TIDAL on Roon it shows a couple albums if I go on TIDAL there are a lot more available.
I don’t want to sound like a jerk this can’t be easy to make a software like this but what a total mess this isn’t even close to a smooth and easy to use software like they say it is at least not for me.
Did you give it 10 minutes or what? You are such an outlier to the Roon experience I’m not sure it even warrants a response. Is it perfect? No. But it is a great platform and you need to get your install and use case figured out before you come on here and bash the work of this great team.
Have a read of this FAQ about importing iTunes library, if that doesn’t solve the problem then we can ask Support to help, but they’ll need system details etc.
What artists did you find were different in Tidal and Roon/Tidal ? It’s rare for that to happen and can be fixed if reported.
Regarding the Tidal albums, if you bring up an artist in Roon and scroll down, it should show you tracks, then albums in your library, then Tidal albums available for the artist, but not in your library. They can be selected and added to you library, if you want.
Yeah I’ve wasted hours so far. I wasn’t hoping for a situation where I was going to have to get on the forums and do all my own research to get this to work smoothly. That is not what it sounded like from reading about it. It’s got multiple problems right off the get go that are going to require fixing.
It’s taking a while just to get the app to open. It looks like it’s re-adding everything again. I let it go all night and it showed the status as still working in the morning. When I just clicked on it again it’s showing like it’s trying to add everything all again.
How many Albums do you have? We have about 700 and it seemed to take about 20mins to scan them all. We are running Roon Server on our server and Roon Control on other devices. Has been rock solid for us from day one and we have Tidal integrated too. We do have a well established computer network though with about 30 devices hanging off it. Nothing special hardware wise though just a British Telecom router and most pcs hard wired to it or via network switches.
You’re welcome to keep giving feedback about the program in this thread, but if you would like some assistance with the various issues referred to then it is best to post in the Support section and provide system details as per this post.
I have 12,000 albums. So maybe it’s the size that is the problem. I’m sorry I shouldn’t have titled the thread that way. I didn’t realize it would upset everyone so much. I read a lot about this program before trying it and it sounded like a godsend and I was frustrated to find so many individual issues with it. I spent years and years rating my music in iTunes and have thousands of 5 star rated songs. I was expecting all those things to transfer. I tried some of the suggestions to fix the playlists and still have not found it. And if there is a new song on TIDAL it should be in ROON too at the same moment, it’s not real integration if not. I mean this program is nice to look at and seems like a great music discovery tool but an end all be all fix to consolidate all your music in one place it’s going to take some work it looks like to get it there.
Greg, Is there a way to get ROON to show the album in TIDAL even if you already have it? I have a few things in say 320KB and I’d rather play it in FLAC from TIDAL.
In Settings > General, there is a selection called “Show Hidden Tracks and Albums”.
If you select Yes, it will show both albums in the Album View and under the Artist.
If you select No, then Roon should display and play the highest quality album in your collection. If you select the album, you should see a Other Version button. Click it and it will show both albums that you can toggle between. Also, with Other Version, if you have one album in your collection, you can check to see if Tidal has a better quality version.
Roon is like all software done well: it is everything that is promised in its advertising but not exactly what one thought one was buying. In your case, you have an obvious commitment to your music library and have developed your own way of interacting with it. But since my library was much, much smaller when I started to use Roon, my ‘paradigm shift’ was a lot less. Keep this in mind, Roon changes how you view your library. Perhaps the bigger the library, the more one has to ‘move back’ to gain perspective on its entirety.
I still use iTunes to manage my library (importing, keeping album tracks together, art etc.) I use Roon to listen and learn more about the music and artists and how they are connected. I still run into occasional blips and deadends with Roon but none of them involve more than me reminding myself of the change in perspective. This forum aids that change because I can read about others who are experiencing the same change.
Good luck with this and don’t lose faith. Things are never as bad as they seem and often end up better than expected. There are many, many helpful contributors on the Roon Community Forum so don’t be afraid to share more info about your library and setup. The ‘official’ Roon guys have shown me far more patience and courtesy than I’ve deserved at times so don’t mistake a chastening or sharp elbow as originating from Roon.
I’m going back to listening to Orthophonic Joy via Tidal. I just added it to my library along with yesterday’s new releases of Margo Price’s Midwest’s Farmer’s Daughter and Magnificat Scattered Ashes (Easter weekend, ya know).
Get through the slog part and let us know how you’re doing!!
Hey @ryan_stratton – sorry for the frustrating experience.
Roon is different from other music apps in many, many ways. It can be a bit disorienting at first, but many of those who braved the learning curve and kept an open mind have told us it was worth it, and that Roon changed their view on what a music app can be.
Our iTunes sync should bring in your playlists but track level ratings aren’t synced right now, as Roon rates tracks as Favorites or Banned. As a workaround, you can save your starred tracks as playlists in iTunes, and those should sync over. We are considering whether to implement more granular track level ratings in the future, but we haven’t made a decision on this right now.
We don’t do a wholesale sync of the albums in your local library to their equivalent albums on TIDAL, but any album we’ve matched to TIDAL should show you an “Other Versions” badge on the album page with a link to TIDAL’s copy.
For what’s it’s worth, 12k is a large library, but depending on your system, Roon should perform absolutely fine with that library. We have a few people with more than double that, although the performance of Roon is going to be dependent on your system, of course.
Thanks for the feedback, and let us know how it’s going.
When you access a new TIDAL track on TIDAL, you’re accessing the TIDAL db directly. Roon gets a TIDAL feed with new tracks and has to actually add metadata to these tracks as well - which is what Roon is all about. An on-line link to the TIDAL db is something TIDAL will not - and likely should not - add, as it would require TIDAL to have all sorts of control processes to prevent overuse of resources and would also make Roon slow itself. Whether Roon should have a more efficient sync method is something I understand Roon devs are discussing.
Yes, I do this all the time. Go to the album, look for button “other versions” - click it of course! - and you will see other versions of the album. You can then select to “remove from duplicates”. Done.
