I am thinking of staying with Qobuz too and need to get my playlists over too.
It’s $119/year, with no monthly payment option. That’s on top of whatever you’re paying for your streaming services. There’s a lifetime subscription option at $699. Details are here.
And since it’s functionality is so powerful and varied, the value proposition can seem a bit off if you’re not using a good chunk of its functionality.
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Thank you!
I reluctantly purchased Roon late last year. I say reluctantly as the price is a bit steep, or so it seems. Break it down to a monthly equivalent and it’s cheaper than streaming services at $10/mo.
What sold me was the playback quality, being able to incorporate local music with streaming music libraries seamlessly, and their metadata is beyond amazing. It is hands down the best library management and playback software available today.
Exploring it deeper I’ve found the DSP and device management to be extremely good too. If it’s on my home network, I can play music to it. Because each device has it’s own DSP settings, I was able to finally get the bloated sounding Riva Festival in my garage to sound great, and I never need to mess with it again.
I still don’t recommend Roon unless you have a local collection of files to play. You can get along fine with just Tidal or Qobuz if that is your only library. Otherwise, it’s completely worth it.
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This is a great call as my CD collection and Vinyl collection hasn’t been transferred to my computer and I don’t plan on it. So I would only be co using it for online.
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Yeah, I have close to 1TB of music sitting on a NAS that I’ve collected over the years. Anyone who’s tried to manage the Tag data and filename / folder structure for a large collection will immediately fall in love with Roon. It just does it, almost flawlessly.
If Tidal is your only digital library, and you do not plan on ripping your CDs to a computer or network share, the only benefits Roon offers is DSP and the metadata being a little bit better.
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Audirvana is a good alternative to Roon if you only want to use streaming services… also with Qobuz and most streaming services you can download your playlists for offline usage… you just need to “check in” within their specific timeframe to keep listening offline
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Rad that might be exactly what I am looking for! What is it’s cost?
Audirvana dang phone and auto correct… plus my fat fingers lol
Ahh cool, will it work for Mac and Iphone too? Edit I went to site and it sure does!! Thanks man!
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Mac or Windows.
There’s a remote control app for iPhone, but that just controls the Audirvana player on the Mac or Windows machine.
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Awesome thank you! Going to dive into it with Qobuz I am feeling like if those two pair well and Qobuz keeps expanding their selection of music and can keep to a yearly price of $149 its a no brainer vs the other services. I was listening to Michael Jackson album the other day and it was strange it wouldn’t play streaming as it said it didn’t have the rights to stream it. You would think an artist that universally popular it would have the rights to that album. Then many other smaller artists from the electronic house electro world are not even in their catalog.
Edit: maybe MJ is not universally popular from a personal standpoint to many.
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You guys think Qobuz will get to the 50 million tracks currently offered by AmazonHD and Tidal this year? I am definitely finding I enjoy many things about Qobuz over the other streaming services but still find some albums or tracks and in some cases artists just missing from Qobuz.
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Qobuz is already at 50 million tracks, at least in Europe.
It’s a slightly different catalog to Tidal or AmazonHD, but the quantity is there and rapidly expanding in the US as well.
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Ahh maybe not in the us yet, only showing 40 million.
Another major feature in Roon, beyond it’s core purpose (metadata and discovery/exploration) is that is an insanely good multi-room/distributed audio solution.
You can set anything playing in any zone, in parallel, with different content on any device (or synchronized playback on multiple/all of them) of which you can have as many as you want, from any other machine/device running the client.
The feature set is extremely rich, the UX is gorgeous, the only real downsides are that there isn’t a good mobile solution (other than switching your core on the go, which is supported, but not ideal) and its viewed as expensive (which it is, if you don’t use all of its features).
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I love ROON’s database, articles, and the opportunity it provides for discovery. I also like how it reads TIDAL’s catalog far better than TIDAL, and will show you different selections of the same music - different mixes, masters, and fidelity options. The more I use it, the better it gets.
I still have not wrapped my head around what I like in current music. I’ll listen to some TIDAL selections for me, and if I like them, I go to ROON and let ROON know. And while I’m listening to something, I may read the ROON article, which tells me some influences and then I go back and listen. This is great for older music, learning about pre and post war (that’s WW II) jazz and latin, sometimes looking at old world music. Things that I can’t learn from anybody.
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Well I did it and subscribed to Qobuz and going to let AmazonHD trial expire. If AmazonMusicHD can ever fix some of the annoying issues with their user interface and true bit playback I would consider coming back to it. For the great deal of $149 for a year for Qobuz it seems like it’s worth trying for a year. The one thing I noticed is on Qobuz’s website it does show 50 million tracks but on checkout for the Studio Plan it shows 40million so not sure if that is just something that needs to be updated or they are actually giving less music choice for people who sign up for the yearly option. Also on the checkout screen it showed ”Studio Plan” not ”Studio Premier” it didn’t look like there were any other options but the studio plan or sublime plan. So I am thinking it is just that the checkout area needs to be updated. What would be really cool is if those of us who are using Qobuz regularly started creating cool playlists we enjoy and shared them with each other. That is one area of Qobuz that I think is a little behind on the other music services. I also wish I could get Dark Mode through the desktop Like I can through the iPhone or IPad, but maybe this is where Audio Nirvana comes in.
You get dark mode for Qobuz when you pay for Roon. 
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Lol I know I know! I don’t wan’t to! Hahah
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