I’ve been exploring streaming over the last couple of years, and I currently use just Tidal via the BluOS app in my Bluesound Node. For the price, I’m happy with the sound quality, and I really appreciate being able to effortlessly explore new music, however I find the limitations of the streaming model frustrating.
Let’s say I search for an artist, and click the heart icon for that artist, one or two of their albums, and one or two of their tracks. There’s very little else I can to in terms of making those selections easily accessible to me in future. Tidal allows me to add individual tracks to a playlist; reorder those tracks; and create single level folders to organise playlists. That’s it. There’s next to nothing in terms of taxonomy or metadata. Playlists only recognise individual tracks, so they’re of little use for multiple albums, symphonies, and so on.
Every artist, track, and album should have a slew of metadata readily available: genre, sub-genre, country, year, and so on. It should also allow me to create my own tagging system, and, optionally, import tagging systems created by others. It should have a way of filtering these taxonomies so I can check some boxes to show only the music I have that’s e.g. chamber music from Germany or Austria from the early 20th century, and easily add individual tracks, works, or albums to the playing queue, or to a playlist, for later exploration.
I’m aware that Roon does the metadata and tagging thing to some extent, but my impression is that its primary function is to organise digital music from multiple sources into a single interface, which is admirable, but not something I have a big need for. But I’m not aware of any software that will give me the functionality I need, so I will sign up for a trial subscription at some point, when I know I’ll have enough time to really explore it before the month runs out.
Happy to be told I’m missing something here, of course 