Qobuz regularly replaces albums in their catalog. This causes the old Qobuz albums in your library to become unavailable. Methods have been found to identify these replacements (Focus > Channel Layout = Other), but they do not take away the significant effort of manually replacing scores of Qobuz library albums every once in a while. In this process all metadata (listening stats, tags, custom credits, custom artwork, etc.) are also lost.
What I would like to suggest is that the Roon-Qobuz integration be extended to automatically handle such replacements. This could be achieved using a very simple mapping table (Old album ID; New album ID) so that Roon can make the automated replacements in the userās library. I realize that that would be the easy part: the copying of metadata to the new version, which may not be quite identical, might pose challenges.
Before people start stating that this suggestion already exists somewhere: I searched extensively and have only found related requests but none that actually address an automated process. If I missed something though, do let me know.
@Carl I see that you merged my feature suggestion with another one. Thanks for the extra votes, though it should be noted that the other suggestion, (whose title was used for the merge?), has in fact been filled, because it is already perfectly possible to list all unavailable tracks in your library via track focus:
My own feature suggestion was mainly aimed at an automated process which would replace old Qobuz versions with identical new ones: basically the recently added āImprove playlistsā functionality, but this time for albums instead of playlists. In my experience only a few % of unavailable tracks are not simply replaced by a new version and thus are really removed from Qobuz. These few % could be listed and manually replaced with downloads using above focus criterion, but the rest, preferably, really ought to be done automatically with the āImproveā functionality.
I must say that I think the current topic title is a little āoffā, which may not help increase votes. Maybe āAutomate Qobuz library album replacementā or something like that would be better? Not sure what my original topic title was.
Thanks Geoff, but my feature suggestion had nearly all of those 41 votes (I think it was around 35) which are now still in the other merged topic which has now been filledā¦ Now my vote count here is down to 2. I said thanks for the extra votes in my previous messageā¦I take it back.
This is not true. I had a suggestion with around 35 votes. It was merged with a suggestion with around 6 votes. Then I noted that the merged suggestions werenāt really the same and that in fact the other one had already been implemented. Then the suggestions were split again, leaving all votes in the other suggestion.
Voted for this, but Iām guessing one problem with implementing this feature is that the āalbumā isnāt what comes up as unavailableā¦ itās ātracks.ā And sometimes itās only a few tracks on an album.
So, it might make wholesale/automatic replacement tricky.
I have the focus on unavailable tracks set up as a bookmark, so I can occasionally go in and see whatās gone missing. But currently I have over 1000 unavailable tracks so I need to find some time to slog out replacing them.
I have the same bookmark. I have come across quite a few albums where only a few tracks are missing, but I donāt think they ever have a replacement, itās just due to copyright issues for those specific tracks I believe. When Qobuz replaces an album, it would not make sense for them to keep a subset of the tracks of the replaced album available. So this automation would really only be for albums with all tracks unavailable.
To be honest itās been so long since this was last discussed I canāt seem to find reference anywhere!
Soā¦ is there any possibility Roon software is ever, ever going to be able toā¦
a) recognise that an album/track in your library is no longer actually available in Qobuz
b) suggest a replacement (same artist, same title should do - say run up a list to choose from?)
c) do this automatically (just like Playlist Improver does for other things but not Unavailable Tracks)
I see there is now a feature to find unavailable tracks in Focus, but not for Albums, and to be fair I have 1017 unavailable tracks at the last count, so Iām hardly likely to undertake seeking all these out manually and replacing them. I have tried using Soundiz (which works very well, it seems perfectly able to scan for similar tracks and suggest them) but for that to work I need to export tracks/albums, which I canāt do for a playlist because a playlist doesnāt know it has unavailable tracks in it.
Just asking as of now pretty much every playlist I have been compiling for more than a year say has dozens of missing tracks in it. These tracks are available in Qobuz, they have just had their ID changed as a result of some internal reorganisation of rights holders probably.
Cheers @Teun_Romme I have just removed 4 of my measly 6 votes from issues I would still like fixed, but are obviously never going to be fixed, and placed one of them here, for an issue that is also never likely to get fixedā¦ ah well, we can try I suppose!
