Listened to my Brothers records in the 70’s, had many tapes and mixed tapes in the 80’s, had few hundred CD’s in the 90’s. And then started my digital music collection with free Napster in the 90’s. I was Apple enthusiast and jump on iTunes when it first started, feeling a little more responsible paying for digital music. At that point in the 90’s I stopped buying physical music and went straight digital by burning my CD’s, my Napster collection and buying all new music through iTunes and creating my Digital Library. That Library was in iTunes/Apple Music until about 3 years ago when I found Roon and converted it meticulously to a Tidal/Roon Library.
Through all those changes of different ways of listening to music what matter to me was Quality of Sound, Cost, Ease of Use/Discovery, and Maintaining My Library. If considering all four of those things I could have a better experience I’d change. And still will.
Problem for Me
At this point maintaining my library may actually be the most important of those 4 core things. My Library is me, it represents a lot of who I am. And my problem is since I went to a digital Library depending on other companies to have “My Songs” to be there for me to play, I’ve learned that those songs can come and go. I am just a renter of those songs. And I get that, that’s part of what I considered - Cost. But often times I realize that the song is in iTunes library or Tidal’s library still. What happens is they got rid of my song on the Album I had but now have it on another version. But what happens to me is I just lose songs in my library without notification. And until I start listening to that group and realize that “Hey I used have that song, Where is it.” I don’t realize one of my thousand of songs is gone. It drives me mad. I’m losing part of what I built for so many years.
Solution for Roon
Roon seems to me like the best one to solve this problem. The Music providers don’t want to tell you, that they and Record companies are playing around with your library it would be a problem of trust with their clients. So they hope you just don’t notice. Roon, I don’t know the technical of what you do to get us all the meta data of each song/album/etc in our library but I believe you have stated you use many sources including but not only the Music Provider Tidal/Qobuz but also companies like ALLMusic and others? Can you create a solution that shows us all the songs we’ve lost in our library. Maybe even going further to show us where we can get it. Maybe Tidal no longer has it but Qobuz does? But at the least something like creating an automated playlist of “Songs No Longer in your Library” So we don’t have to discover by chance we no longer have something. We can go to a place to see what’s missing and decide what to do about it. This would be a huge problem solved for me that I think few other companies you compete with would be willing to do. Because they are tied to the Music Subscriptions.
I came here to make the same suggestion. My library is 90% Tidal and they have a habit of ‘refreshing’ albums - swapping originals for remasters, deluxe editions, MQA versions etc. Whenever they do that, the original album drops out of my Roon library without notification - every White Stripes album disappeared from my library a while back because they’d updated them with remasters.
The Naim app dims any lost album covers and text to show that, while they used to be part of the library, the app can no longer find them, making lost albums easy to identify and update manually. It would be so useful if the Roon app could do something similar.
Currently I’m surfing the Naim app to spot the missing albums to replace in my Roon library - today it’s Hotter Than Hell (Kiss), Fear Of A Black Planet (Public Enemy) and A Secret Wish (Propaganda). Out of 1700 Tidal albums in my library, it’s generally around 8-10 a month that need updating.
Well, you have chosen to rent your music libraries. The issues you raise is a part of that deal, like it or not.
The OP had 4 reasons that lead up the the choice of going digital. They are not too far away from my own, even if i have chosen differently. (i buy whatever album i deem relevant to my library)
So i have compromised on the cost part, to aquire availiability (and in some aspects sound quality).
But the request is a relevant one, even if i want it for different reasons, and there are many requests on the subject.
One is here:
This has been a long term issue/Feature Request and source of annoyance for many. I would like the equivalent display to ‘Skipped Files’ whereby all ‘Deleted Files’ are listed and exportable as a list. It would also be nice if Roon informed the user at login that there are new ‘Deleted Files’. This could be done via a pop-up or using the existing ‘Red Exclamation Triangle’ method used for notifying backup issues.
Absolutely, I fully accept that Tidal are going add/remove albums all the time, I’ve no issue with Tidal, or renting digital formats more generally. My point is that in terms of library management the Naim app has an easy way for me to identify which albums have gone, but Roon doesn’t.
Feels like an amalgamation of these two requests (along with the ability to also identify missing albums) would cover most bases here.
Agree the ability to identify a replacement track at the point of playback (or to flag them so they could be identified/reconsolidated later) would also be useful.
