First of all, I’m SO happy about Tidal integration with Plex. I was considering a Roon server, and now I don’t need it. As a Plex Premium and Tidal Hi-Fi subscriber, this integration and partnership was made for me. So thank you to the Plex team!
However, it seems the integration can stand a few tweaks unless I’m doing something wrong…
It’s GREAT that I can combine playlists and Tidal fills in albums I don’t have , etc…
But how do I shuffle an Artist…using songs from both my local library and Tidal?
Other than creating a playlist for that artist and adding everything local and on Tidal, is there a way to just shuffle an artist entire catalog across the local and Tidal libraries?
If there is a way, how? If not, it doesn’t’ seem like much of a stretch to implement considering what’s already working.
Also, it would be cool to be able to see all albums of an artist together…mixing the local library and Tidal, instead of them being segregated by library.
Actually, Plex integration of Tidal doesn’t hold a candle to Roon. Roon does MQA unfolding as well as MQA passthrough to hardware devices that can fully unfold. Roon has additional features like EQ.
There’s also an issue of audio quality. I’m not sure what Plex is doing but the sound quality from playback within the app is not great. I compared it to my HiFiBerry RPi transport last night on my home setup and there is a clear difference in quality. As a somewhat controlled test, I had my GF blindly listen to both and 5 times out of 5 she identified the RPi transport as sounding better.
While shuffling an artist with mixed content is not currently supported, you can start an artist radio from the artist’s info page and it will include both content from TIDAL and your library. The different with radios is it won’t be just that artist, but a collection of artists that sound similar as well.
Thanks randhawk, yes that artist radio is very cool and seems to be working well. For certain artist where i want to shuffle I’m simply making a playlist for that artist that includes all content. Would be great to see all-library artist shuffle in the future. Also chronological combined album view would really put the cherry on top.
I’d be nice to see the ability to augment our libraries with online providers. For example, adding my Tidal library as a “Folder” to my music library.
In fact, I’d love to see this as a generic feature that could be used later. Pie in the sky vision here – Add my NetFlix Watch List to my TV library, then stream it through Plex UI.
To be fair I don’t know what kind of DAC you are using for plex half of the test or if you are even using a external one at all. The hifi berry is using i2s as the interface between the dac and pi which eliminates a whole host of USB related jitter issues, in addition the berry has dedicated clock crystals. Therefore, even if the playback bits are the same the signal path on the Plex side would need to be pretty robust to compete with a hifi berry especially one with dedicated power supply.
I haven’t had time to conduct my own a/b test so I’m curious how you tested? Regardless, it’s doubtful the Plex player has the ability to compete with audiophile focused platforms such as roon or volumio.
