So I am a new Roon user… and have set up the following:
Raspberry Pi running RoPieee (extremely painless set up, wrote image on SD, answered 3 questions on a webpage, plugged in… done) connected to my Denon AVR
Win10 Running Roon Core, my desktop machine, that also has an RME interface and some Focal monitors
iOS devices (various) with Roon remote
I also signed up for TIDAL. First things first… I spent 90 minutes last night doing nothing but listening to music and exploring my collection. Roon has provided a very nice, and importantly, different way of exploring my collection. It’s mine, I should know it right? But no, Roon has been teaching me things I never knew about my collection!
Today I signed up for TIDAL as well, not so much for me, but for the wife… who has grasped roon remote quickly and easily, and wanted access to a broader selection of tracks (her taste of music is a little different from mine)… and she is loving it too!
Roon promotes itself as re-creating the experience of digging through album covers and inserts, and I was extremely sceptical of $10/m software… but I’m sold.
Thanks both to Roon and the community that made this happen (ie RoPieee).
Harry, I just want to mention that I have tried to donate a few times using my tablet and PayPal. Each time at the end of the process, after completing the captcha, I get a message to the effect that I must “fill in an amount other than zero.” I have specified a donation amount prior to getting to that point. It happened again today, twice, after I was reminded by this discussion that I should try again.
Just a quick update… I have since moved Roon Core onto my QNAP (TS670), which is somewhat under powered… however, I upgraded the RAM to 10GB (from 2GB), and am using an SSD for my Roon DB… and it is fine, even with multiple streams playing.
So… I remain very happy Much less so with TIDAL, I doubt I’ll continue my TIDAL subscription. Roon is a keeper tho.
What is it about Tidal that has disappointed you ?
Having come to Roon from Tidal I have to say that Tidal seems to perversely hide the richness of its catalogue and that it takes Roon to (start to) fully expose it.
So, to be clear, I haven’t used TIDAL before using Roon, so maybe the native interface allows what I expected, but I was hoping to use TIDAL as a way to find new music, however, at least with how it integrates with Roon, it doesn’t seem to allow that. Any song or album I ‘focus’ or let the radio play, the majority of times it just plays tracks from my library.
The only way it seems to really work, is to look for new albums in TIDAL, and add them that way, but it doesn’t really help me find new music. I may as well just use youtube or bandcamp etc to find new stuff. last.fm for example has a much better “similar” music matching algorithm.
Secondly, the track selection in TIDAL seems a little US-centric, and isn’t as deep us Deezer.
It is possible I have been holding it wrong, but while I see the value in $10/m for Roon, I haven’t found value in TIDAL at $20/m (lossless).
Now obviously YMMW, and it is entirely possible depending on your existing library and music choice that TIDAL will work better for you. I fully appreciate that the music I like is not mainstream, and somewhat niche.
With Tidal the experience is a little odd and a little different from your own library. I don’t think it is down to Roon but more the practicalities of them being able to effectively index the entire Tidal catalogue
It works ok if you find music on Tidal and then add it to your library. Effectively you’re telling Roon which bits of Tidal to index. But it isn’t going to go out and find things on Tidal that aren’t in your library. Would be great if it could. Who knows. Maybe Tidal would open their api to allow Roon to have a server indexing it.
Yeah the mobile UI is weird. I changed to my laptop and sure enough there is an input box before you get to the captcha with the amount. The mobile version seems to not have this fairly significant part!
I found Tidal through Roon opened up entire worlds of new music for me. I mainly used the “Similar To” etc. links at the foot of Artist entries. Following Artists through various bands. Also the Genre categories in Roon/Tidal.
One of the main sources, however, remains the “What are you listening to now ?” thread on this forum. Tidal means I can sample what others are listening to very conveniently.
Tidal does hide it’s library behind a wall of hip hop and rap. However everything is there if you look.
New to Roon but not very excited about it’s metadata which is simply recycled reviews , not always reliable, from AMG books that I read years ago in book form. Where’s the liner notes? Links to other review sites? User reviews? Even amazon gives that.
Roon is a somewhat user friendly dsp app, easier to figure out than JRiver.
Much room for improvement.
Much less so with TIDAL, I doubt I’ll continue my TIDAL subscription. Roon is a keeper tho.