Curretly Roon allows you to add ‘pre-release’ Albums from Qobuz that either contain a single sample track, with the rest labelled ‘unavailable’, or in many case all of the tracks labelled ‘unavailable’.
This is problematic, as you need to remember to manually replace this preview/stub version of the album when it’s finally released. Made worse by the fact that Roon currently has no means of centrally displaying which albums (or rather specific versions/instances of an album) in your library have disappeared from Qobuz since being added.
Given Roon knows the release date, could it not automatically retrieve and replace the ‘stub’ version in my library (with an equivalent quality version) when the album is fully released?
This feels like the kind of functionality / convenience feature I’d expect a premium priced music library manager like Roon to be able to handle without requiring my manual intervention. In fact I’m surprised that this isn’t already existing functionality.
Tracks on albums that are pre-released become available at the release date. You don’t have to replace the album.
But I agree that it’s easy to forget that an album is forthcoming, while it is already in your library. Certainly when there is a large time frame between pre-release date and actual release date. Here, tagging the album as pre-release could help.
I could have sworn I’ve had issue with this in the past though, which was why I opened this ticket. As I just added a few pre-release albums and noticed all the tracks were listed as ‘unavailable’ and so thought twice about adding them as I remembered issues in the past.
Will keep an eye on the ones I have added, but if you say they now get updated automatically I have no reason not to believe you!
Since originally posting I’ve kept an eye out and sure enough most ‘yet to be realised’ albums are correctly updated around the release date. So I agree that in the majority of cases Roon handles this scenario as expected.
However I have spotted an example, similar to the one that prompted my original post, which I suspect is related to Qobuz changing the unique ID for an album in their system, between the date it was added to my Roon library (9th August) and the date it was released (29th September).
As of today (2nd October) this album was still showing in Roon as having all it’s tracks unavailable, despite the the full album being available in Qobuz for over 2 days.
Which take me back to my original point that without Roon handling these kinds of cases (ideally) automatically. Or at the vey least providing an easy way to find such ‘orphaned’ albums and suggesting an alternative replacement, you end up with a library containing albums with unplayable tracks. Which is a far from ideal or expected in a product that markets itself as a premium library management platform.
Sure it might be technically challenging and edge case might still remain. But would it not be possible — for example — for Roon to run a periodic (or manual) check to see which albums are ‘unavailable’ and then to check to see if a clear alternative is available from Qobuz, based on a combination of album title, track length, format etc. Or at the very least provide a means to see view a list of affected albums along with a list of potential replacements.
