Just bought a Bridge 2 for my DS in preparation for MQA.
It has arrived and I am getting my dealer to install it in his system first.
I downloaded Bubble UPnP and it works great with my Oppo into my DS - actually the best sound I heard out of my system (as I rang up my dealer and excitedly told him) - hope it will be better again with the Bridge because because I was blown away with it into the Oppo.
Once its installed will go down with my mobile and Bubble UPnP, while my dealer has Roon and we will see how each sound especially compared to USB. He actually makes the Curios USB cables which are very good so it should be very interesting.
However I was reading a thread where people were having problems with Roon and/or Bubble UPnP.
Have they now all been sorted out or is there something we should be aware of?
I have used both Bubble and Roon with my DSD with Bridge 2. I much(!) prefer Roon. Getting Roon to connect with the DSD/Bridge was extremely easy, even for this computer novice.
Although the Bubble app can play Tidal, it is not integrated with your other music and it is very difficult to search for other artists. Roon puts everything in one tidy place…your music, Tidal, music reviews (All Music Guide), recommended other similar artists, etc. It also sounds great to boot (IMHO, it sounded better than Bubble and JR21).
I have Roon (one-year trial) and Bubble UPnP as well as a DS/Bridge II. I much prefer the control and convenience of Bubble driving MinimServer and streaming TIDAL. Roon strikes me as an overpriced resource-intensive hot mess. To say that Bubble is not integrated with one’s music other than TIDAL is incorrect. Install MinimServer and you can search easily on Bubble for artists, albums, etc. The best thing to do is try Bubble/MinimServer and Roon and see which one you prefer.
I’ve not tried Roon so I can’t comment on your comparison, however I can confirm that Bubble/MinimServer is a brilliant combination. It provides all the search and select options I’ve ever needed for playing music from a 87k track library (largely classical). I’m deterred from giving Roon a trial by the need to have another cpu running permanently - the processor in my NAS can cope with MinimServer but not Roon.
I have Roon (one-year trial) and Bubble UPnP as well as a DS/Bridge II. I much prefer the control and convenience of Bubble driving MinimServer and streaming TIDAL. Roon strikes me as an overpriced resource-intensive hot mess. To say that Bubble is not integrated with one’s music other than TIDAL is incorrect. Install MinimServer and you can search easily on Bubble for artists, albums, etc. The best thing to do is try Bubble/MinimServer and Roon and see which one you prefer.
I’ve been using Roon now for almost a year and to me it’s the best application since Microsoft Excel. I don’t use it as a Tidal frontend, I don’t even subscribe to Tidal. I use it access and play all my ripped CDs and digital downloads. I also use it for streaming radio. Yes it is expensive but isn’t so much in this hobby of ours.
Why do I love it? I feel like I’m back in the 70s again where I can read album liner notes, credits, etc. Roon also allows me to add to the metadata compiling reviews, webpages, etc along with the album meta data for easy access.
It’s expensive but for me it has brought all the fun of music back that I haven’t seen since the invention of the CD.
@raymond: Since you do not use TIDAL, you avoid what I consider perhaps the most annoying aspect of Roon, i.e., the way it merges one’s FLAC and DSD files with one’s TIDAL favorites. (I gather that many people like this feature, and perhaps there is a way to disaggregate hard-disc music files from TIDAL favorites which I have not yet discovered.)
Using Bubble UPnP and MinimServer creates a bright-line distinction between hard-disc music on the one hand and streaming music services on the other. And that works best for the way I search for and listen to music.
You might have a valid point here. I monitor the Roon forums and I see post after post of people with issues integrating Tidal and Roon, then posts debating fixes for said problem. I really don’t read them (no interest) and just weed them out.
What Roon offers beyond simple playback (album notes, website links, etc.) sounds very enticing – I understand Raymond’s point of view completely. I need to upgrade my NAS in the next year or so, but to get one that can run Roon would cost 2/3x what I was planning to spend. Then there’s the fact that Roon will not use the custom tagging that I have worked so hard on since it’s not a UPnP/DLNA system. And, like Bootzilla, I prefer to keep the music own separate from streaming stuff. So I guess not.