Until recently, Roon would show the bit depth and sample rate of Tidal flac and MQA files, which is especially important if there are different versions. Now… not helpful at all.
Seeing something similar might be a Tidal metadata issue . This album out today shows two tidal versions one with sample rate one without.
Yes, that may well be so. I just wish to point out that Roon’s value proposition depends largely on its library integration of local and streamed content, but there are only two streaming services integrated into the system. And the integration of one of them, arguably the bigger of the two, has ever more usability problems. Tracks in disorder, wrong metadata, now missing version identification. I’d think it is in Roon’s best interest to review the status of their Tidal integration and work with Tidal to overcome these problems. I now spend too much time and effort reviewing and correcting metadata and I am not happy anymore. If I decided to report every album with problems to Tidal it would become a full-time job. I expect that Roon would take this problem up with Tidal, not on an album by album basis, but as a more general issue.
This week my annual subscription renewed, but I spent some time making up my mind about that. If these issues with Tidal can’t get worked out or even get worse, this will be my last year with Roon.
And no, this is not the only album with this problem. In a couple of minutes I found several more.
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Not sure Roon has any sway over Tidal. Most metadata issues I find with Tidal are present in their app. Same as All music it’s stuff is often wrong to. You cant expect Roon to monitor every album released for it’s metadata. As there isn’t one body responsible for collating metadata for music and verifying it’s correct not sure it’s ever going to get sorted as each one passes the buck, likely Tidal get little from labels some times or someone’s having a bad day and missing stuff. What ever app you use if the source is wrong it will be wrong. Roons equivalence could be better though and easier to sort these things out.
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Yes, that’s true. I’d like to abandon Tidal, but Qobuz is not available where I live and I don’t like those workarounds with VPN… So, if Roon hasn’t any sway over Tidal or doesn’t care to iron out the problems of their Tidal integration, I will abandon Tidal together with Roon. Roon has features I like well, but my point is that they must take better care of the problems that are creeping into their Tidal integration.
But the vast majority of streaming users don’t care about detailed metadata, they just play whatever arrives. As can be evidenced by how crap the metadata is and continues to be. No one can afford the effort needed to correct it if the originating label can’t be bothered to add any or get it wrong.
Roon certainly can’t
This particular hobby horse has been ridden around regularly on this forum.
Isn’t the rich and enhanced metadata precisely what Roon proposes as its added value? If I didn’t care about detailed metadata, I wouldn’t pay for a Roon subscription. If I now can’t even see anymore if a given Tidal version is AAC/FLAC/MQA, that to me seems very poor, indeed.
And there may be a problem with today’s new releases which Roon can take up, because not all albums are affected, nor did I notice that just a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know. I just want to voice my preoccupation with the fact that Roon doesn’t show format, bit depth and sample rate info on newly released Tidal albums. And that info seems necessary to me.
Usually the albums with metadata problems on Tidal show correct metadata on Qobuz. So it doesn’t seem a problem with record labels, but with Tidal.
And no, this isn’t a ‘hobby horse ridden around’. That an album’s tracks appear in the right order and that the album’s format info is displayed seems to me quite basic expectation. I would rather enjoy that and forego the rest of enriched content, than have a beautiful picture book with tracks in disorder, wrong titles and no format info.
I can assure you that we care, A LOT. Hopefully the way that we’ve responded to your reports in the past lends some credence to that.
Let me provide some insight into what you experienced here. This wonderful Uchida Beethoven album (now added to my library, thanks) was released on the 8th, the very same day you reported your issue.
Occasionally, there are slights delays in streaming services getting metadata to us on some new releases. Metadata can also be incomplete when the title is first made available by the streaming service. In most cases the delay only lasts a few hours. Once we’ve synced the title with our index server, Roon analyzes the stream to confirm the format, bit-depth, and sampling frequency.
That appears to have been what occurred here, a brief delay in displaying metadata details due to it being a new release. This is covered in the TIDAL article in our help center. We apologize for the inconvenience, Andreas. The metadata processing takes a bit, that can’t be overcome. All the information seems to be updated now.
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Thank you @jamie, it seems that you are right about the metadata delay. I just checked this and other recent albums which now do show the version identification. Thank you for responding.
Now, if we just could bring Tidal to do something about their classical releases with tracks in disorder… I have noticed that this affects only some labels, in particular those of the French Outhere group (amongst many others, this is home of the excellent Alpha label). At the same time, on Qobuz the tracks of these albums are in the right order, so it seems the problem has something to do with how Tidal handles or processes the metadata provided by the labels of Outhere. Linn is another label affected…
Thank you again @jamie, good to know you care!
Hey @Andreas_Philipp1,
Thank you for letting us know. If you could gather a couple of examples of albums on both of those labels that exhibit this issue we can bring them to their attention.
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Thank you @jamie. I have spent some time clicking through albums in my library from diverse labels belonging to the Outhere Group. Of course I had corrected the vast bulk of the albums in my library, but still came up with 17 albums and there undoubtedly are still more. I’ll now check these albums on the Tidal app to collect the Tidal URL for each one, and then I’ll send you the list via PM.
This has been a long-standing problem, and at first I wasn’t aware of this and that’s maybe the reason I had the impression that this lately had gotten worse. Of the detected albums in my library with tracks in disorder, many or most are not recent releases, though. But this still happens with recent releases, too. Just nowadays, being aware of the problem, I usually correct the track order of these releases with Roon’s tool, as soon as I save them into my library. Most of the time correcting the issue is no big deal, but this simply should not happen. Tidal must take care to assure that the track order of their releases is correct. Certainly, this problem is especially annoying with classical music which is work-oriented. You listen to an album and suddenly become aware that the last movement of a work is missing, and instead another thing is played. And the missing movement comes later some tracks down the list. That doesn’t make any sense.
Thank you for your attention!
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