Everyone has different ways they listen to music. Some people build up their collection through the years and others enjoy the convenience of easy streaming?
What do you use for playing your music? If there’s anything else you think should be added to the poll let me know!
0 voters
I rarely use online services or “hard” media like CDs. My speaker and headphone setup uses Volumio as a media player pulling lossless files from my NAS.
Roon almost 100% of the time. I have ripped about 80% of my collection to a NAS and stream to my system via Roon.
Volumio looks pretty interesting. Was it fairly easy to set up? Intuitive design?
Roon is my primary player/server - in conjunction with it’s connection to TIDAL.
Apple Music, Spotify and Amazon Music all have their places, though … and then there’s the vinyl replay in my speaker rig.
I really like Roon.
I wish it was easier to get set-up and use for those that are a little more technology challenged though.
My dad lives about 18 hours away and I tried setting him up with it but he ended up giving up during set-up and stuck with Spotify for his M50x.
ummmmmm…not sure if this is the proper place but…
I looked at several services and kept turning away once I read the required permissions. If you agreed to one of the more popular ones, you also agreed to give up all rights to any data that was gathered by them, for the next 25 years; you gave them access to your files and contact lists (including pics), agreeing that the service could use these in any way it wanted, without recompense to you. Once I pointed this out to my kids, they promptly wiped it from their phones. Folks, pls take the time to read the agreements and be aware of what you are agreeing to.
Reminds me of the South Park episode “HumancentiPad” (Content Warning: Links to a South Park clip that may be offensive to some).
I was surprised I could only pick 1… I’m a Roon lifetime subscriber as well as a Tidal and Spotify subscriber. I’m Amazon Prime too but I don’t think I’ve played my music from there…
I think it all depends on the use case but I bet I’m not the only responder with more than one.
You might consider including Google Play Music . Never herd of roon either.
Roon is really neat. Not a music service in itself, but a great way to manage and play music across a variety of equipment.
Sounds something like Sonos, Chromecast, plex, maybe?
Spotify if I’m at work or in the car, Foobar or Spotify on home PC, CDs and networked streaming through Squeezebox Touch on main rig.
I use JRiver ver.24 through a Fidelized 64 bit custom computer
Sort of, but more geared toward hifi than any of those
I pay for spotify (waiting for their lossless service to come out) and use foobar2000 for my collection.
I was paying for Tidal for 6months, but I found the interface/search/selection really frustrating. (Only Peter Gabriel live albums, Tidal? REALLY?)
Roon looks interesting, I’ll probably try that out based on the recommends here.
Ya, Spotify is really crushing it on user experience. It’s great for music discovery too - I’ve been really impressed with their algorithms. I’m just hoping people start to demand higher audio quality from them.
Any word on the Spotify lossless service? I heard they were testing it but haven’t heard much since.
You can stream Tidal from within Roon and that works pretty well. It replaces the clunky Tidal UI which is nice.
I also heard Tidal was going out of business in the year. It may not happen but that was the latest I heard.
Wish it had better interface as I’d be happy to use it over Spotify but it’s such a pain to build any sort of library with Tidal.
They’ve been tested Spotify Hi-Fi for a year, supposedly people are getting beta invites, but I don’t know anyone that’s got one.
Well this is an interesting topic. Note that the question was, "What SERVICE do you use for music playback? but the survey was more of “What do you use for playing music?”
My answers are different. A lot different.
When I really want to listen, I use vinyl. I have a VPI Prime Scout turntable, with an Ortofon 2M Bronze cartridge. This goes to a Musical Fidelity phono stage and a Wyred4Sound STI-1000 integrated amp.
I have Rectilinear III Highboy speakers (Stereo Review’s Julian Hirsch gave them his “Speaker of the Year” award in 1968, although mine are 1972 vintage). Or, I can push the output to some oldie but goodie STAX SR-5N electrostatic earspeakers, or run the signal to a that new HeadRoom Standard headphone amp to listen to other headphones.
But yeah, music services… That’s a freakin difficult question these days. I have some SONOS in this house and the house my wife inherited from her folks. I used Deezer, but pulled the plug on it. Need Apple Music for our iPhones. Got that. Have been considering Tidal, but am really waiting for a bit to see what settles out in the current format and high-res streaming scene.