Probably why AWS and Azure never really got off the ground.
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I don’t understand. Here’ my story: I had about 100 albums in November on my NAS drive. Most were MP3s that I ripped from CDs I had purchased along the way. I went thorough a brief period of buying FLAC albums, but that got expensive. I had tried Tidal in the past but didn’t feel it had a good music selection. I tried Spotify and Apple Music, but neither suited me. I wanted hi-res audio that I could play on my high-end sound system.
Fast-forward: I subscribed to Tidal. I subscribed to Roon. I set up my Roon account to point to my NAS. I let it index my albums and off I went. I started letting Roon Radio kick in after an album was over. When I heard a track I liked, I started adding the album to my collection. Within a few weeks I doubled the number of albums that I had in my collection.
Can’t you do the same thing? I don’t know anything about Qobuz but I’m guessing you can download albums for no extra charge.
Now I’m going through my MP3-based albums and deleting them and adding the FLAC versions from Tidal. When I’m done, I’ll have the same albums that I had before but no more MP3s. Also it’s given me an excuse to, say, download all of Jackson Browne’s albums. I had most of them before but no all. So now I have the best Jackson Brown collection ever.
Roon was the catalyst for this. I can’t imagine what a “Roon Lite” would do. I think someone else mentioned that you do have a Roon Core. It’s the Roon Core that does all of the indexing and metadata collection. The Roon Remote does the presentation. You can either have a Roon Core on your PC side-by-side the Roon Remote (plus Roon Remotes on your phone and tablet if you choose) or you can put the Roon Core on a NAS or a Roon Rock. I decided to build a dedicated server for my Roon Core and it’s amazing, but you don’t have to go that far.
I think you just need to learn how to use Roon. It is perfectly suitable for what you have described.
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I can see a possible market for a hosted version, consumed through a browser. Especially as @danny was sniffing around asking about interest in cloud backup. A hosted Roon instance would probably have more utility than just cloud backup, and no competition other than local instances.
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I understand what Bill is getting at, but having Roon be cloud based application would add a layer of potential problems that I don’t want on my audio player. Timing is everything and seems like that would go out the window. I built my own little Roon Rock (PDF White Paper) and it just sits there doing it’s job, locally and CLEANLY. It cost about $700 but it’s just perfect for my needs. I didn’t chime in to chat about that: I have a related question. I have a bunch of playlists on Tidal and Qobuz that I play through Roon. I’d really like to be able to manage them from Roon. There must be a way to do this, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Any advise would be appreciated.
I don’t think it would be for everyone, by any means. Perhaps only 5% of Roonies would consider it, but maybe some more potential Roonies would consider it who wouldn’t otherwise. And there would be compromises for sure.
There isn’t unfortunately. The metadata flow between the streaming services and Roon is not fully bi-directional. And playlist management is one of those areas that suffers.
I was able to make a local Roon copy of my Tidal playlist and now I think I can edit that local Roon copy. That should work for me. Soundiiz might also help me migrate some lists over. I currently have Tidal and Cobuz, so I need to consolidate. I just don’t want to loose all those beloved Tidal playlists!
Via Roon, you can add albums on Qobuz and Tidal to your library but they are most certainly not downloaded. They are streamed in real time when you play them. You do not have a local copy so any interruptions in Internet service also would interrupt your ability to play music in your library that was not your own.
With a little bit of imagination you can do both: either by offering cloud storage for personal files (makes more sense than the music backup solution you are fishing for) or just by linking the data base records to to the local stored files. And you use a serverless (from the user point of view) application (roon client as it is right now for example) to connect the core engine (now running on roon servers) with the streaming services (still on roon servers) and with the local storage.
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The client-server architecture is not a result or limitation of using local files. You can deal with personal library without a server (see Kodi if you need an example).