Extremely unintuitive ergonomics to find Tidal Playlists

[Seabreeze (Taz)]

I was trying to find some specific Tidal Playlists today. Seems simple enough, however here’s what I had to go through.

I started by selecting the “Tidal” section from the menu, and clicking into “Playlists”. Hmm lots of playlists but none of them are mine. This is misleading, but OK, I see the “My Tidal Collection” tab. Surely it must be there. I see Favorite Artists, Albums, Tracks, but no Playlists… Ok, so Roon doesn’t think my Playlists belong in the Playlists tab or be part of my Tidal collection.

I move on, The Roon Menu has a section for “My Library”. Surely my playlists should be there, but No. I see Playlists under “My Stuff”. Now I’m very confused as to what is the difference between “My Library” and “My Stuff”. What does My Stuff even mean? is my library, not my stuff?

So I finally find a list of Playlists that look familiar… But where are my “Tidal” playlists? Nowhere does it indicate “Tidal”, and there are no column headings. Against some of the rows, I see some dots in a column that seem familiar, so I log into the Tidal website. Yes!. Those dots are actually the Tidal Logo.

Ok, making progress. Now I want to see all my Tidal playlists together, but there’s no way to filter or sort that column, because there’s no headings. So I try the Filter and sort menu’s, but no option to either filter or Sort on Playlist Source. Under “My Playlists” I see a strange toggle for “Shared Playlists”. I have no idea what that means, so I try it out. Hmm… It “removes” all the Tidal Playlists from the view, but no way to keep the Tidal playlists and remove the Roon Playlists. Why the half baked implementation?

So it looks like the only option is to Scroll through all the playlists in the order chosen and mentally ignore the rows without the Tidal logo to find what I’m looking for! In the end, I found it much easier to just pull up the Tidal app, find the playlist under the very intuitive “My Collection” → “Playlists” tab, and use Tidal Connect, to play what I wanted…

[SandsOfArrakis (The Spice Must Flow)]

Now that you’re mentioning it… I have 3 Tidal playlists favorited. But they don’t show up either.

Qobuz on the other hand is much easier…

Qobuz from the menu on the left → My Qobuz tab.
And my personal playlists are right on the top.

Weird that Tidal doesn’t work that way.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

I tried that too yesterday, I have Qobuz and Tidal but don’t use the latter much, so I created a Tidal playlist, synced Tidal and indeed it didn’t show up. While Qobuz works just like for you. No idea if that’s as expected/intended

[Drake_Potter]

I always found that annoying as to why my personal playlists don’t show up via the Tidal tab in ROON like it does for Qobuz. It’s annoying having to sift through all playlists under my stuff just to find my Tidal playlists.

So I decided to create tags for my Tidal playlists to kind of get them in folders so to speak inside of Tags on ROON similar to how you can put Tidal playlists in folders via Tidal’s native app directly. For instance, I have a tag for New Arrivals to group together New Arrivals playlists I create and also a tag for Tidal Rewind 2022 to put together all of the Tidal Rewind playlists in one spot inside of ROON.

Granted, you do have to locate them first in ROON under my stuff. But once you create the tags, at least then they’ll be easier to locate for the future.

[RobOK]

There is a long list of things they could improve around Playlists and Tidal integration. Roon development team and management seem to be Album oriented. One time they asked for feedback on how to make Playlists better here in the forums, but then I am not sure they implemented any of them.

FWIW, I like you want to know my Roon playlists vs. my Tidal Playlists or Qobuz Playlists. So I append in the title of the playlist the source [Roon], [Tidal] or sometimes just [T]. It is silly that I have to do this, but I do. The benefit of Roon playlists is of course just editing them real time in the flow of music. The benefit of Tidal playlists is somewhat overcome by ARC, but I want to have at least some playlists available for mobile or for Sonos/BluOS outside of Roon. So I have two sets of similar but different playlists.

Of course the other big issue is that the Tracks in a Roon playlist may or may not be the Tracks from the Album in your Library depending on how you made your Roon playlists. There are lots of threads here on this.