One of the great things about Roon’s integration with Tidal and Qobuz is shear volume of music that you have access to. However, sometimes a blessing can be a curse. Last night I wanted to listen to an artist that I wasn’t overly familiar with and, when I searched on Tidal, it came back with over 600 album options. Clearly I had no idea where to start.
I’m not sure if this thread will have any legs, but I thought it would be helpful to have a place where people who were looking to find out about an artist could go to for some advice from the rest of the community as to some starting points.
To kick things off, if anyone can give me some recommendations on where to start listening with Usman Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan amongst his extremely prolific canon, it would be greatly appreciated!
As for Nusrat, I own 5 of his albums (vinyl) from late 80’s - early 90’s. I’d suggest starting with Mustt Mustt.
The problem I found with him, is that so much of his music is very similar (to my ears) At first it was an explosion of new sounds, then that initial infatuation subsided. Otherwise, I’d try to stick with his more authentic albums, as opposed to those that were deliberately westernised to reach a broader audience and make $$$ beyond his homeland.
One of my tricks is to use allmusic.com, search for your artist, then choose Discography, and then you can click on both the Allmusic Ratings and the User Ratings colmns, in the pic below I clicked on the User Ratings column, then try out the 5 star rated albums.
Well, that is super helpful! I am always slight dubious of some of the Allmusic ratings since they gave a 2 to an album I love (that may be the topic of another thread) but with Nusray Feteh Ali Khan in particular, there was very little data. I didn’t realize that Allmusic tracked user ratings as well!
By the way, in that pic, the blue Arrow is one of the Allmusic recommendations, but they also give track recommendations, select an album and look for the arrows.
Also, inside Roon, thats where the Album and Track Picks come from, so if you add some of these to your library, then you can either use Focus to find and play all the Picks or find and play them when you select each album from the Album view.
