Album / Tracks not any longer available in roon but still available in Qobuz as a new version of the exact same album

I add very often albums from qobuz to my Roon library an add tags etc.
In several cases the Album / Tracks are not any longer available via roon after a certain time. I get than the error message “Not any longer available in Qobuz”.
If I search in Qobuz I find the album / tracks and can stream them without any limitation.
It seems Qobuz has added the exact same album again and has removed the rights for the previous version of the same album.
To make the album available in roon again I have to add the album in Qobuz to my favorites and if it show up in roon after a certain time I have to add it again to my library. Sure I have than lost all my tags, references to playlist and so on.
Example:
Acoustic by Candlelight von Brian May
Silje Nergard von Silje Nergard

Any idea what to do to keep my references and tags in these cases?
Thanks

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You can’t really at the moment. To Roon, the album you had has gone away. When you re search and add it again you are actually adding a new album with no relation to the previous. This happens all the time for licensing and other legal and contractual reasons.

It’s annoying isn’t it. Qobuz do at least leave a breadcrumb trail of leaving the old entry but with no available tracks, Tidals just disappear and your non the wiser. All streaming services do this it’s standard practice. Nothing Roon can do to about it and they are new albums again with no links to previous version. Its the same for all apps that use the APIs the services put out so it’s not unique to Roon.

Thanks for your response. I expected that I have to live with this issue. Not my understanding of user-friendly and all the nice features like tagging etc. are partly useless under these circumstances.
But I agree, it isn’t a Roon problem but I thought the Roon community is a better place to discuss this issue than the Qobuz forum.

This is precisely why I buy either the download or the cd. It’s also why I b uy films usually from Apple because they are mine, I can download them and keep them on my hard drives. I can only play back on a Mac, I assume.

I worry about the films I have bought off Amazon Prime because one cannot download them. What if they decide to remove them? They do it with stuff that is ‘free’. You can be watching a series and it suddenly disappears before one has finished.

I refuse to pay for video content on any platform as its tied to it at least Amazon content can be played across devices and platforms unlike Apples fully locked in approach. The reason I ditched their eco system a long time ago. If I buy something I want the freedom to choose the hardware I want to play it back on.

This is so annoying, I have just been cleaning up my playlists, loads of tracks now showing ‘not available’ yet when I search for them again they show up re-listed on Qobuz.

I understand it’s effectively a new album as far as far as the Qobuz API that Roon sees is concerned but this really is pretty poor data management on the part of Qobuz.

If an album is exactly the same release as a previous one, it replaces, then their API should reflect that, even if internally they want to give it a separate ID for licensing reasons. Technically there are enough way to achieve this automatically if they wanted to.

In terms of Roon, a nice feature would be to allow to to search and re-add the newer version of the album if it exists. I’d be more than happy with a single click button — without any extra UI dialogs — that did a drop in replacement if a single unambiguous match was found.

As it is I have having to painfully work though my playlists and:

  • Search afresh for the album on Qobuz — made even more painful by the fact that Roon doesn’t let me cut and paste text.
  • Add the new version of the album to my Library
  • Switch back to my playlist to remember the name of the Track that was part of my playlist
  • Switch back to the Album and add that track to the end of my playlist
  • Switch back to my playlist and drag the new version of the track to the correct position in the playlist
  • Delete the old ‘not available’ track form my playlist
  • Rinse, repeat for every other track now saying ‘not available’

Surely there has to be a simpler way, or at least a way to improve the user experience here?

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