Hi,
I apologize in case this has been asked before. I search for “format priority” and also for “primary version”, and I’m afraid I found loads but nothing that was entirely on point.
I understand that I can mark a specific version of an album as primary. However, if I don’t do this (or haven’t done it yet), the automatic selection of an album is occasionally very strange. I have seen this many times, but I have forgotten the exact situations. So here’s one recent example. I searched my library for “Five Peace Band Live” - I have the album in FLAC and MP3 formats on my own server, and there are FLAC versions in both connected Tidal and Qobuz accounts. I played the album and was wondering about the lack of dynamics - then I noticed the yellow light in the Roon player and it turned out that the MP3 version had been selected automatically.
I certainly never did this, and it wasn’t the primary version either! (Though admittedly I don’t understand why the primary version was the local FLAC version - I don’t remember setting that before for this album.) It seems that when I searched and tapped a result item, the MP3 version was somehow chosen.
I looked around and was really expecting to find an option somewhere that would allow me to configure my own order of priorities - you know, perhaps highest bitrate first, local vs remote copies next, preference of remote service in the case of conflicts, max bitrate per remote service, MP3 last (or even not at all?), etc etc. After all my searches, I guess such an option doesn’t exist, which is sad. But in any case the automatic mechanism seems to be a bit random.
Enough said - hopefully this can be improved! Please let me know if I can help with any other details or tests.
Thanks
Oli