Coming to Absolutely Loathe TIDAL "Integration"

I logged into the desktop version of Tidal and unliked every single Tidal pick. 24 hours later they were gone from Roon without me needing to do anything else. Since then I have picked a playlist and a single LP on Tidal. I search for what I want and don’t see 200 options ‘selected for me’. Only my own library of rips. Just get it done. It takes 30 minutes of repetition then you are done. For the record I like having Tidal, it was purely about preferring to see stuff I own or have picked myself.

Yeah, with some advice provided here in this thread, I’ve gone into Tidal and for whatever reasons, individual tracks that I would have marked as ‘favorite’ on one particular album have now been split to other versions of the album (Deluxe! Remastered! Remastered and Expanded!), or worse, to singles. I’m not sure why this suddenly happened out of the blue, but it looks like it happened within the last two weeks and it appears to impact about 40% of my library - or about 2000 albums.

What a frickin PITA fixing this is going to be. Just another reason to decrease my reliance on Tidal I guess.

Wow, one of the things I have absolutely loved about Roon is its Tidal integration.
One always has to keep in mind how Roon displays favorited songs and favorited albums.
As you noted, whenever something looks goofy in Roon, go into Tidal to see what they have mixed up.

I have similar issues with Tidal and Roon. If I have favorited an album or song using the Tidal app on my phone, it appears in my library in Roon. It would be nice to tell Roon, if there’s a 16/44 version of the same album in my local filesystem and in my Tidal Library/favorites/playlists(whatever), the always favor the local one’s and don’t display the Tidal songs (when there are duplicates).

It might also be nice to have Roon be smart enough to recognize that MQA albums are probably worth a checkbox to keep in our Roon Library and not disable with the above lot.

Seems simple, but I’m guessing that it’s not because you’re having somewhat similar issues.

All available versions of an Album, both locall and Tidal, can be seen under the Versions tab. Roon automatically selects the highest resolution version as primary, preferring local to streaming where resolution is equal. MQA is treated as higher than a local version of same resolution. Users can manually select a different version as primary if we prefer.

Chris,

FWIW, I have been dealing with this issue for 3 years: Roon/TIDAL integration woes when it comes to tracks and albums randomly switching from what I’ve chosen in TIDAL to what I end up with in Roon.

Like you, I Favorited tracks instead of albums in TIDAL. As a result, I also had to deal with the tracks I selected changing from the album version I chose to some random “Greatest Hits” or some other version of the album. I ended up with multiple album versions and hits albums that I never chose ending up in Roon.

I worked with Roon tech support via PM, and it seems that the Roon/TIDAL integration works best when you select an entire album in TIDAL and not just your favorite tracks from that album.

Since I’ve started favoriting albums instead of just tracks in TIDAL, the integration with Roon seems to work better.

The bad part is that now I have to go through my entire Roon library, album by album, and add the whole TIDAL album to get just the track I really want. Then I have to delete all my TIDAL favorite tracks and just rely on Roon’s UI to favorite/ban TIDAL tracks.

It’s a double-edged sword: I have to invest many more hours in curating my TIDAL favorites in Roon, but I also have found more good music through the process than I would have otherwise found.

So far, favoriting albums instead of tracks in TIDAL has created a more stable Roon Library of TIDAL music. My next step is to start favoriting individual tracks in TIDAL from whole TIDAL albums that exist in my Roon Library and see if the Library remains stable. Stay tuned.

Best of luck from your brother in Roon/TIDAL pain,
Jeff

1 Like

In just Roon without Tidal, Roon prefers albums over singles. I have several folders of singles of different genres, bit rates etc. and Roon will not recognize the individual album art for each song from different albums even if you have them properly tagged. It seems that Roon is album oriented and it considers each folder as a album and it also seems that when someone in Tidal tags a single, then Roon will search this individual track out in Tidal and list them all as albums even though this was not the objective at all.

–MD

How does Versions selection of preferred version affect Roon’s behavior? I have Tidal versions of some things, commonly an artist I’ve heard on Live From Here, liked, added their album from Tidal, and thought well enough of it to buy their disk and add a FLAC transfer to Roon.

How does favorite marking (heart thing) influence Roon’s behavior. Will Roon Radio user Preferred versions and liked tracks in preference to others. Radio appears to prefer local media to Tidal tracks but I’ve not seen that stated as a required behavior of Roon Radio.

I have the exact same problem, double, triple, guadruple albums plus many artists added I don’t even know who they are. Very troublesome, hope to see an answer for this here soon. Thanks for posting
Scott

The answer is to remove them. It isn’t hard to do. Just time consuming, but once it’s done, it’s done.

Time consuming is a very kind way to put it…

:tired_face:

It was actually a kind of education because I was a Tidal user before I came to Roon. So on the list were things that Roon selected for me based on my very first visit when I didn’t know any better! Plus stuff I had downloaded to my old iPad, plus a few things I hadn’t favourited while using Tidal but had gone back to a few times. But I did it while the Wife was watching Soap Operas, so repetitive as it was, it was still better than watching TV! :grin:

1 Like

If it’s really terrible I guess you could end your current tidal subscription and open a new one. Start from scratch…

1 Like

I have enjoyed a problem-free relationship with roon (lifetime subscription) and any problems with Tidal (small glitches) were resolved by going through the Tidal app, not Tidal via roon. Also, my LS50W speakers are working flawlessly as is my sonicTransporter i5. I mention the latter as I have read “rants” about both viz roon.

With many tens of thousands of roon subscribers, these rants are but those of the .00001%. These jaundiced complaints taint one’s overall perception of roon unfairly.

2 Likes

Yes, my bad for coming to a Support forum and explaining the issues that I am having with a service that I have paid for.

It doesn’t matter if an issue relates to only a single user. Roon Support is here for that user and you (@Chris_Ferneyhough) are in absolutely the right place.

@norris has received your response to his questions above and is checking with other staff about the best way to proceed.

It is likely that the issue is associated with selection of Tracks as favourites in Tidal (see this response in another thread by Mike) but how that relates to your particular situation is still under investigation.

Hey @Chris_Ferneyhough ,

First off, our apologies for the frustration here. Noris brought this to my attention and after reviewing the thread, I have some theories about what might be going on here.

First, it’s clear from the replies in this thread that most users of Roon and TIDAL aren’t experiencing the issues you are, and while that may not seem helpful it’s a really good data point for us to know, because it tells us that something is different for you – once we figure out what that is, we’ll be much closer to getting this resolved for you.

I suspect this is part of this issue:

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with this, just that the product generally emphasizes albums over individual tracks – we give you a big “Add Album To Library” button on every TIDAL album, but things like adding (or hiding) individual tracks are hidden under menus. I suspect that some of what you’re seeing is related to how you’re using these features.

Another thing that’s jumping out here relates to how Roon groups tracks into albums. In most apps, most metadata lives at the track level, but in Roon albums have their own metadata, as do artists, composers, performers, and so on.

So, album data is tied to a specific grouping a tracks. This means that once you make changes to a given grouping of tracks, Roon considers that group “special” – once an album has been edited, Roon will never automatically split up the tracks or change the tracklisting, because that would result in a new album, which means you would lose your changes. So, the track listing is “frozen” once an edit has been made at the album level, which is what I’m guessing is happening here:

I don’t know why this would’ve changed in the last two weeks, but I suspect something about your work flow is “freezing” albums, resulting in “orhpaned” tracks which Roon is mis-identifying. The important thing is, if we can identify exactly what you’re doing I think we’ll be able to understand what’s changed, and why Roon is not behaving as expected for you. This very well may be a bug, but we need to understand it to fix it.

A potentially useful test here is to load your TIDAL library against a fresh Roon database – this will give you the same list of tracks, but will sidestep some of the “stickiness” in Roon that I think you may be fighting against. @noris can walk you through how to temporarily test with a fresh database if you’re game.

A few other questions to help us get a handle on this:

Can you explain a bit more about exactly what you’re doing here? There may be an easier way we can point you towards.

It would be helpful to know exactly what you’re doing here as well.

Again, these are really just theories Chris, but I wanted to make sure you know we’re looking at this, theorizing about what’s going on, and trying to understand why your experience has been so frustrating. If we can figure that out, I’m confident you can continue to use Roon and TIDAL with way less frustration.

Thanks for your feedback and your patience with this Chris. Let us know the info above, and Noris and our team will be in touch soon.

1 Like

Hi @mike,

First of all, thanks for reaching out. It is much appreciated. Second of all, I think I’ve found a solution to my issues based in the feedback others have provided. Namely, I’m going through my albums one at a time with both Roon open and the Tidal app open, and I’m adding full albums (through Roon), hiding tracks I don’t want to hear, and then unmarking ‘favourite’ tracks in the Tidal app. It’s incredibly tedious, but it appears to be working.

While doing this, I’ve learned something that might explain some of the issues I’ve been having. If I have never edited an album’s title, and I add the full album through Roon, it appears as it should (and then I go through and hide the tracks I don’t want to hear). However, if I have edited the title of an album at some point previously and then I add the album, it shows up as a second album and I then have to merge the two albums together to make the one proper full album (and then go through and hide the tracks I don’t want to hear). This has happened in pretty much every case where I have edited an album to remove things like “Remastered” (personal preference - I don’t want to see ‘remastered’ or ‘deluxe’ - I just want to see the actual album title).

I’ve been doing this off and on when I get a chance over the last few days, and everything has been ‘stable’. I haven’t seen tracks or duplicate album version pop up all over the place like what had been happening.

I think ultimately the way that I have been using Roon (adding tracks rather than albums, renaming albums, adding MQA versions to replace non-MQA versions) has created a perfect storm with both Roon and Tidal which has lead to my issues. My new focus of adding complete albums and the hiding some tracks appears to be the ‘proper’ way to go about things.

But man, I can’t tell you how tired I am of seeing random crappy compilations showing up in my library. I mean, the friggin ‘Joe Dirt’ soundtrack showed up because I had originally added the album version of Hold Your Head Up by Argent. No one should see David Spade’s face show up in their music collection!

3 Likes

Hi, just an info for all who face reappearing of “delated” albums. If you store your albums e.g. on a SYNOLOGY NAS please do not forget to “exclude” the trash folder from your albums location. If you forget this will happen: you delete an album, roon rescans the library, find a “new” album in the trash folder and voilà the album reappears. To recognize this behavior will help reducing stress :blush:

3 Likes

Yup, sounds like it. Glad we at least figured out what was going on here!

Basically, it sounds like once you edited an album (meaning a “clump” of tracks), Roon is faced with a choice when you add more tracks later – either create a new clump (thus throwing away your edits), or making the new tracks into a new clump, which it sounds like we’re then identifying as a compilation. Which is unfortunate… (cc @joel)

Anyway, glad we got things going in the right direction here Chris, and sorry again for the frustration!

2 Likes