The Lumin app has flexible playlist management and can combine, say, Tidal or Qobuz stuff with local stuff. I never use this feature because I’m an album listener. I pick an album, listen to it, then I go select another one.
I don’t actually want my playback app to merge my local library with the streaming subscription. I use my streaming subscription to get recommendations from the streaming service - I discovered that different services give very different recommendations. So what I do is keep a streaming service for a while, collect the recommendations I like, then I buy them on physical media and enhance my collection. Then I stop the streaming service and listen to my own library for a few months, until I feel like having something new again. Rinse and repeat with another streaming service. I feel this maximizes the search space.
When I heard about Roon, I looked up its feature set and I thought it deserves at most a shoulder shrug. I don’t need a UPnP wrapper, and the merging of Tidal/Qobuz with my local library is undesirable (no idea if it can be turned off). I don’t need a third party product to get “bit perfect” reproduction for my local music - NAS to amp or NAS to streamer/DAC is as bit perfect as it gets.
So normally I wouldn’t comment on it at all. Then I discovered the ridiculous subscription payment model and the laughable Nucleus hardware, both indicating what I consider to be a toxic, unbelievably greedy business model. I don’t like at all that such a company is successfully pushing its proprietary protocol into amps, streamers, processors and receivers, and, under the guise of uniform convenience aims to make us monthly subscribers to play our own music.
