When you play a track on Qobuz, the file you access is hosted by Qobuz, but Qobuz is in regular communication with the labels for new releases, deletions, updates, and so on. As I said, I don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes that causes tracks to appear as unavailable when they actually are available. There may be one cause or many.
If you have any insights, I’d be interested to hear them, though it appears the explanation won’t have much bearing on improvements that could be made by Roon.
If it’s unavailable Qobuz replaced the album with a different version, possibly high res or a new remaster, anniversary release etc so the old one is no longer accessible on their service or via Roon but this process for some reason doesn’t clean up the old ones and Roon has a broken url as it doesn’t automatically pick up the new one so leaves the orphaned one in place and you have to manually add the new one.
Whether this is Roons code not knowing what to do or a quirk of Qobuz sync to Roon is unanswered. It this was Tidal it would just disappear and you would not know other than in library clean up it would show stuff to clean up. When an album is deleted completely this doesn’t happen it just goes and again will show as an album to clean up in library management section. However you have no idea what’s been deleted at all. At least the orphaned ones gives you a chance to replace it.
As I’ve been replacing a few albums from the latest batch with current versions, I haven’t seen any indication that they are different. Same sample rates and dates, nothing about remastering.
Edit: to be clear, the only thing I’ve been talking about in this thread is albums that are labeled unavailable when an apparently identical album is available. I would expect versions that actually are different to appear that way.
That’s what I had thought could be the issue, but these albums are labeled unavailable in Qobuz as well, so it appears that Roon is just correctly conveying the information it receives.
There are all kinds. Some albums are replaced by remasters, anniversary editions, etc. (Often those are added as versions but sometimes a release like this replaces an older one).
And some albums become unavailable and are replaced by others with no obvious differences.
And Roon may have no way to distinguish between those cases, which makes your idea for user controlled tools perhaps preferable to an automated solution.
I think the latest batch of unavailable albums from the labels I listed above are clearly a case of the files being identified differently (for whatever reason) rather than being actually different.
Agreed as far as Roon goes. In the most recent case, which appears to have originated in a change at Naxos or in communication between Naxos and Qobuz, and others like it, you’d think there could be a fix that prevents these albums from appearing to be unavailable in the first place. Do other streaming services have this problem?
The subject implies the releases are available in the Qobuz app, just not within Roon? This implies to me that it’s API related and maybe Qobuz expect every 3rd party user of it’s API to resolve the mapping between old and new versions of releases themselves? It wouldn’t surprise me if the API just adds and removes releases and was supplied for use AS IS.
My understanding matched the title of the thread when I first posted here, but the latest albums to become unavailable in Roon appear that way in Qobuz, too.
Hmm - don’t do that. Originally the issue was to do with the fact that new albums are often pre-released by Qobuz with only a limited number of available tracks. The full album then becomes available on the official release date.
That’s a separate issue from the issue of Qobuz switching out versions of albums because of license changes or newer versions becoming available.
I’ll try and find time today to tease out the posts into separate threads
I have now split the original topic into two to separate the issues. This topic thread is for discussing the issue of complete albums (not some individual tracks) sourced from Qobuz showing up in Roon as unavailable because of changed licensing or replacement of the original album with new versions.
Glad I’m not the only one left scratching my head at the verbiage there.
Qobuz is going through some major changes regarding licensing at the moment. A lot of once available stuff is unavailable, sometimes replaced, sometimes not.
The DSP isn’t really in control of the metadata they receive and often the solution ends up being generate ‘new’ entities as metadata corrections are issued. That also doesn’t get around the ‘replaced’ issue since those aren’t communicated as changes.
In general a quick and dirty comparison is the UPC or just the track ISRCs which is often better at capturing replacements / upgrades where the track configuration is identical (this prevents distinct ‘editions’ from being matched) but the UPC has changed.
Just discovered a way to identify Qobuz albums that are no longer available - don’t use the Album browser; use the Track browser and Focus on unavailable tracks…
Was that “Available” criterion always present or has it recently been added? Whatever, now I’ve got a way of tracking down missing albums. 1,094 tracks? That’s a lot of albums… Sigh.
Both Qobuz and Tidal. However way more Qobuz albums/tracks have disappeared. Tidal only a handful.
Edit.
Checking the first listed album. It seems that Qobuz has removed the extra tracks. And just the basic version of Pyramid is offered. Both as Pyramid and Pyramid (Expanded Edition). Must be a licensing thing.