I am a frustrated new user, who is trying to get a straight answer of current vintage that is not months or years old,
I searched the community for a “LIST” of music services that work with the roon core, but failed to find any beyond Tidal. I cannot believe that roon would put all of it’s digital eggs in one basket. Please tell me that it isn’t so and I can add multiple music services like other platforms, e.g. Sonos, Bluesound, etc.
The last topic that I could find was dated November 2017, and given the velocity at which online services move, I find it difficult to believe that nothing has been done beyond Tidal in over one year. One year in online services is like 10 years in the majority of other industries.
Status in January 2019 . . . ?
Is the roon server stagnated and captive to a single music service–specifically Tidal?
Or can one run multiple music services simultaneously on the roon server, e.g. Pandora, Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, and qobuz (I just received the beta user questionnaire and roon is listed)?
Tidal comparative quality to other services (qobuz is an exception) is the only advantage that I can determine. Unfortunately, i discovered that searches by me in Tidal result in a shortfall for a number of classical music selections and other genre.
I want quality and choices beyond Tidal. Is Tidal the only music service supported by roon? If not, then where can I find a list of music services please?
One would think that roon is owned by Tidal. In a sense it is. If Tidal is not used then there’s no point in having roon other than library access.
Unfortunately a significant amount of my music genre and selections (classical) are unavailable on Tidal, which appears urban biased. Extremely disappointing that.
I will continue searching and waiting for the next bus to show up. qobuz is promising.
Are you sure that this is the case? I know that the TIDAL app shoves urban and pop in your face, but the service does have an extensive catalogue of classical material. If I’m browsing the TIDAL catalogue in Roon, I always ignore the “front page” and explicitly browse the Classical genre…
While there are obviously things missing from Tidal, and it’s marketing is urban driven it actually has quite a good catalogue. It would be interesting to see what you think is missing. With luck Tidal will be joined by Qobuz soon which has a classical and jazz slant to its marketed content. Maybe that’ll be a better fit.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
8
It’s definitely better than just a portal.
That is really only the front-end and I would encourage you to give Tidal a chance and dig into it. Tidal has never presented one artist to me on a home page that I was interested in. Tidal actually has a vast and deep library and I’ve never had the feel it is focused on pop/urban except in its most outer layer (i.e. landing pages and such). They do a terrible job avoiding this perception, but it really is just a perception. They’ve gotten a little better lately trying to gear landing pages to user history. Use it for a couple of months through Roon and you may see that you can pretty easily get through that outer layer of cr@p.
Hi Henry,
A friend of mine has roon with Tidal. Every time I search, I get a 50 percent return, which is frustrating. To be fair, Spotify is only marginally better, but still . . . better in availability of recordings. My queries for specific classical performances on Telarc, Angel, and Vanguard by specific conductors were missing unfortunately.
For example, try finding a complete catalogue of recordings by local American violinist, Caroline Campbell or specific recordings of composer Georg Anton Benda. I can provide a shopping list, but it is somewhat pointless.
I simply need to wait for a streaming service that is more European and classical music focused in genre.
thanks again
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
10
Yeah I was talking about indie, alternative, metal, punk, prog, all pretty well represented in Tidal. Can’t say much about classical.
Thanks James. I respect everyone’s choices for sure and sincerely do enjoy indie, alternative, metal, and punk. Yet my tastes 50 percent of the time are classical, which is where Tidal is really quite remiss and more of a “local” and not a global music service.
My tastes in music are broader and deeper than most, which is why I have 4 different home systems. That’s the other thing. I need detailed zone controls for roon also.
I am hoping that qobuz integrates. We shall see. thanks.
You will have many more issues with Qobuz, then. Unless you’re going to stump up for both services.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
13
Interesting - you use different systems for different genres? I’d love to have a house where if my mood changes I just get up and walk into a different room!
Hmm, I’ve just searched for Caroline Campbell in TIDAL (in Roon) and got 7 albums. Searching in the Qobuz app returns zero results (no releases known to Qobuz, although she is known as an artist). Are you sure Qobuz is going to be better?
Geoff
I searched for Caroline Campbell two weeks ago and got absolutely nothing. I searched several times with each search slightly different. The only results were “MISERLOU - William Joseph & Caroline Campbell (feat Tina Guo …” Maybe Tidal logs failed searches? Then tracking as an incident, they remediate. That’s entirely possible.
I conducted similar searches for a number of other composers, artists, performances, labels, recordings, etc.
I am only hoping that qobuz is better. At the very least it will give roon users another choice, and choices are a good thing and needed.
Beginning to think that I will need at least half a dozen music services at any time to meet my needs. Unfortunately, they all have issues. We are in the 15% category of subscribers globally that care about Quality of Service. And that leaves roon in the lurch for the most part, because of the reliance on a single supplier. I am probably 1% of of the 15%, which makes it worse for me.
There is not enough of a demand to generate a larger quantity of quality music service providers, which is disappointing.
I work for a global online service and there is a 50 percent chance that I might relocate to the UK or Ireland. Then who knows what happens with roon and Tidal licencing? From past experience I know that some services lack what we call portability and are not extensible, for example, Pandora simply stopped working. DRM is a global mess and changing. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.
One of the problems with classical music on Tidal is inconsistent or incorrect indexing or labeling of artists, albums, composers, and works. For example, it often takes several searches using slightly different wording or even spelling (including accent marks) to find all of the offered albums of a particular artist or group. This is a Tidal problem, and I don’t see Roon fixing it.
Bottom-line:
On a global scale we are still in the storming stage for the delivery of quality music services. Maybe in the next 4 to 5 years it will move to forming and later norming.
On a personal note I will continue waiting for roon to integrate an alternative to Tidal.
You shouldn’t have to wait long then. It will have less tracks than Tidal but maybe more of what you want to see. I was hoping something might emerge during CES but nothing yet.
Thanks Henry
Apparently less than Tidal not the case for qobuz and classical. According to The Ear “Especially if your tastes include classical music, which has a high profile on the service.”
And the mix is more universal. Plus there’s no MQA compression. Thank goodness.
