Is there a way to disconnect my Tidal account from Roon, have Roon completely forget everything it thinks it knows about music from my Tidal account (e.g. any Tidal albums I have added to Roon), then reconnect and reimport my Tidal library?
Tidal made a mess of its initial rollout of MQA, Roon made an even bigger mess of it when syncing my Tidal library, and I’ve made a few mistakes myself in trying to figure out how to fix the messes they made. I’d love to be able to just start over with a clean slate in Roon, and reimport the Tidal library that I have spent countless hours curating.
Hi @Andy_Spinks ----- Thank you for the post and the question!
Moving forward, before advising on the above I would first like to clarify what exactly you would like Roon to “completely forget”. Are you wanting Roon to forget about edits, favorites, play counts etc, or do want to forget about the actual contents of the library?
What I’m trying to accomplish requires a lot of explanation, but here goes:
When Tidal first rolled out MQA (Masters), these albums were listed in the Tidal library alongside the Redbook versions. It was possible to “favorite” a track from the Redbook version without favoriting the same track on the Masters version and vice versa. This was (perhaps) complicated even further by the fact that the Masters albums were visible on Tidal’s mobile and web clients, but they were not labeled as such, and the tracks were either downsampled to 16/44.1 or a 16/44.1 version is substituted when playing back on these clients. (When an MQA track was called up on the mobile version, substituted with a 16/44.1 version, then favorited, I’m not sure which version was actually added to the favorites.)
I believe this is the source of my Roon library’s utter confusion about how to identify and clump these albums. (I posted a support request about this ages ago, but I never got a resolution.)
I have spent hours trying to sort this out manually, track-by-track, but I still have lots of misidentified, mid-clumped tracks. The first thing I am trying to accomplish with this is to purge duplicate tracks that got added to my library while Tidal was listing both versions separately. (I have spent a lot of time merging albums together in Roon, but this was because Roon misidentified/mis-clumped them. Hopefully that wouldn’t happen in the re-import.)
While working out the process of how to manually fix these duplicates, I manually added a lot of Tidal albums to my Roon library. Unfortunately, Roon still lacks any means of syncing Tidal favorites and Roon favorites (something that, in my opinion, should have been automatic from Day 1). The only way to mark my 3,000 or so Tidal favorites as Roon favorites is to remove any album tracks that aren’t Tidal favorites, so that is another thing I am trying to accomplish here.
Also during this process, quite a few albums (and parts of albums) would get stuck. Once I deleted Tidal tracks from Roon, they simply could not be added back. (Click the “Add to Library” link, watch the spinning wheel, then nothing changes.) In a few cases, I also had tracks that could not be deleted. (I highlighted them, went through the half a half dozen or so clicks to delete, then get a message that the tracks could not be found. Yet they remained listed in my Roon library.) Another thing I am trying to accomplish here is to get these albums out of Roon purgatory and be able to add/delete them as intended.
There are some playlist, tagging, and other things that I might like to avoid having to re-create in Roon, but if starting over completely will fix the issues above, it will be worth it.
Hi @Andy_Spinks ---- Thank you for the follow up and providing the requested insight. Very appreciated!
Continuing forward, I would like to have you test with a fresh Roon database in place to see what the experience is like once you have added your TIDAL content back into Roon. As you are aware, the Roon database is going to hold any edits you may have performed so information for things like tracks that you have grouped together are going to be held here. Let’s see what a fresh Roon DB reveals in terms of your TIDAL content and then you make a decision on how you’d like to proceed. Kindly see below for instructions.
Before anything please make a backup of your current Roon database.
After the backup has been created please close all active instances of the application.
Now that we have a backup made and Roon is completely inactive please move your current Roon DB out of the way temporarily by performing the following:
On the device hosting your core locate your Roon database according to these instructions
Rename the entire Roon folder to roon_old
Relaunch Roon, sign in, and configure a new install (be sure to add your TIDAL content during this process)
How do things look in regard to your TIDAL content in Roon with a fresh database in place?
Is it necessary to shut down all the machines running RoonBridge, or just Roon Server and Roon Remotes?
Given that my core is running Roon Server, is it the Roon Server folder I should be renaming?
Renaming the whole folder also changes the path to the application, right? So do I need to re-download and re-install Roon Server in order to make sure the application is starting with a completely fresh database?
Hi @Andy_Spinks ---- Thanks for getting in touch. Kindly see below.
Is it necessary to shut down all the machines running RoonBridge, or just Roon Server and Roon Remotes?
You should be fine with stopping the RoonServer process from running on the core machine and closing the remotes.
Given that my core is running Roon Server, is it the Roon Server folder I should be renaming?
Yes, please re-name the “RoonServer” folder to “RoonServer_Old”
“Renaming the whole folder also changes the path to the application, right? So do I need to re-download and re-install Roon Server in order to make sure the application is starting with a completely fresh database?”
No need to re-download/re-install the application. After the RoonServer folder has been re-named, the next time you start the process up a new RonServer folder will automatically be generated/put into place.
After setting up a clean database and re-importing my Tidal library, it seems to have fixed many of the problems that I was having (many of the ones that were unique to me, at least):
I can’t find any cases where Roon is clumping the tracks from MQA and redbook together as duplicates (shown as multi-part works) in the same album. I can find some cases where the favorited tracks are split between the MQA and Redbook versions of the album and even some where the same track is favorited on both MQA & Redbook (including some of both where the Redbook version isn’t listed separately in the Tidal desktop app). However, these are Tidal issues, not Roon issues.
Done.
All of the ones I could remember being an issue worked fine with the clean database. Albums that could not be added before can be added to the new database on the first try. Ghosts of albums I had previously deleted albums no longer show up the way they did before. I did notice that if I delete a partial Tidal album in Roon, add back the whole album, then attempted to delete it again, I get the file(s) not found error and the album won’t delete. This somehow also results in it being added, at the album level, as a favorite in Tidal itself. (That may be a bug worth checking into.)
Overall, starting with a clean database seemed to fix almost all of the Tidal problems that I had hoped it would. So, once I restore my real Roon library, is there a way to just clear out and start over with the Tidal portion of it? I don’t mind also re-importing my local library and favorites (and even my playlists and tags, if necessary), but I really don’t want to have to go back and re-configure all my endpoints, DSP settings, volume leveling, and all that.
Excellent! That seems to have resolved most of the issues that resulted from the upgrade to Roon 1.5 back in May. No albums that I can find are incorrectly identified/clumped (#1), all tracks that aren’t favorited in Tidal have been removed (#2), and except for the issue noted above, no issues adding/deleting Tidal albums in Roon (#3)!
I also had some Tidal albums that were “unidentified” in Roon, and those are fixed as well.
