Why Roon is fabulous, with or without Tidal

I’m sorry, but Roon completely fails on the data front. It may be better than other offerings, but the bar is below zero. It’s terrible with box sets, terrible with classical music, terrible with artists and albums it doesn’t know (just about anything that’s escaped the attention of the the US music industry) and users still aren’t empowered to enrich the metadata. So you end up with some nice biographies, album reviews half love whilst others hate, some instances of a song recognised, a pre-built and an unconfigurable genre tree, imposed album ratings, a bunch of unidentified artists and albums, 1000’s of artists without artwork, simplistic filter criteria and that’s about it. Beyond that it’s all tech integrations into hardware. As it stands now Roon holds zero value for me as a UI, it’s a means for playback control from my smartphone, nothing more, nothing less.

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