Article: Roon 1.6 With Qobuz Integration and More

[jhwalker]

28 minutes ago, sdolezalek said:

Oops...Although it works great on my desktop system, Roon version 1.6 seems to have broken the ability to work with my HQPlayer/NAA setup as HQPlayer no longer recognizes the NAA and Roon gives an error message in connecting to HQPlayer: "Playback failed because $ couldn't connect to HQ Player."

 

HQPlayer working fine here.

[jhwalker]

49 minutes ago, left channel said:

2,000,000 is the approximate number of tracks, as given in Qobuz press releases and stated by Qobuz managers in interviews. The number you found refers to albums, and contains a typo: it is missing a "1" in front of "170,000". The number you quoted later in your post is 175,000 albums, and below I'll address how you get to the number of tracks from there.

 

I arrived at "about 1,850,000 more Hi-Res tracks on Qobuz than MQA tracks on Tidal" by subtracting the approximate number of Tidal Masters tracks I found the last time I checked MQA_List.csv which you can download from the first post here.

 

 

Yes we know that.

 

 

OK, so 170,000 to 175,000 albums. What is the average number of tracks? About 12? Adjust that by the number of singles and EPs, and we get approximately 2,000,000 tracks.

 

 

The "import" feature in the desktop app downloads and plays Hi-Res tracks. I don't know about iOS, but the same feature in the Android app downloads in selectable resolutions and I just did that at 24/96 kHz. The app then played back the album, reporting 24/96.

But at the moment, there is a problem. I don't know about iOS, but the Android OS resamples everything that comes out of the Qobuz and Tidal apps to 48 kHz anyway.  So regardless of that the app is reporting, the final result is not full resolution. We can get around that on Android by using a third-party app like UAPP, but then you do not have offline mode.

 

(I'm told the Tidal app bypasses that resampling for Masters tracks, but only on phones from LG and Essential with their own internal Hi-Res DACs and perhaps even then not reliably, while for all other tracks even on those phones it does not bypass the OS.)

 

 

 

 

The iOS app allows downloading any available resolution you've paid for.  So the top tier subscription allows downloading full resolution (e.g, up to 24/192, or whatever they have), while lower subscription levels allow downloading CD quality, etc.  You always have the ability to download any albums you've PURCHASED at full resolution.

 

And if you use the camera connection kit to output via USB from your iDevice, it outputs the full resolution - it only resamples down to 48k if you're using the headphone out or connecting to an external device via Lightning port.