Audirvana is another app which competes with Roon. Audirvana is a one-time fee of $100, versus Roon's subscription model (or, I think, ~$800 lifetime subscripti

Audirvana is another app which competes with Roon. Audirvana is a one-time fee of $100, versus Roon's subscription model (or, I think, ~$800 lifetime subscription, which is pretty up there). I think the big thing both Roon and Audirvana achieve sub-optimally is just overall application performance and user experience. They do have a ton of features which help in managing massive audio libraries, far better than Spotify or Tidal alone. But, Roon legitimately feels like a browser app they threw in an iframe and nativefied. Audirvana is better IMO, but isn't as good as Roon at auto-discovering album artwork and metadata-ifying the connections between your local songs for hyperlinking and discovery. The critical thing that I love about that methodology of music playback is the "synthesis" they both do of Tidal and your local music. There is a ton of music out there that's inaccessible on (all!) streaming services, and every audiophile I know eventually starts amassing a collection of lossless files from Bandcamp/etc. Neither a streaming service nor your local library alone is ever the "complete" view into all the music you want to enjoy; you need both, synthesized into one integrated view. Google Play Music used to be a decent solution to this, not the greatest quality but it solved this problem well, but then Google nerfed it into the ground. There's still a lot of work to be done in this domain. To be honest, my go-to for local music playback is the same app I've been using for a decade after the fall of Winamp; Foobar (Windows). Its simple, ridiculously performant, infinitely customizable, and works great.