LittleBITS: Apple Pay Date Quirk, Apple Music Sing

The music service with the most hype at the moment is likely Roon. It’s been around since 2015, but it’s a premium paid-for service, aimed at a music audience who want a very serious backend focused on music.

Essentially it runs on a server backend to simple clients model, so means you don’t necessarily need heavy playback devices to play/transcode hi-res audio. It has very strong classical music metadata tag functionality too, should you also need that.

It seems to be the best in the marketplace at both handling metadata tags absolutely correctly and in full, offers an override to optionally choose metadata derived from their database of online sources, while also linking to other connected artists stuff (i.e. a discovery service) with bio’s, reviews, and suchlike, and has in-service API’s to Tidal &/or Qobuz streaming services, should you subscribe to them. Amongst a load of other audio control functions.

The ‘problem’ for many will be the price: it costs $15/mth, or $12.50/mth if paid yearly (or a whopping $830 for lifetime) – and that’s with no streaming service. At that price the user has to be seriously invested in wanting the best backend.

While this is a cost, surprisingly you can set it all up on affordable desktops/NUC’s/NAS’s, much like something like Plex – Plex unfortunately doesn’t do anywhere near the same job for music, but is obviously significantly cheaper.