Playlists and tags should allow changing sources

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1

Mac, Roon 1.8, Ropieee + USB DAC

This is more of a general question than a specific issue. Sorry if this is the wrong thread or this has been discussed before, I couldn’t find a solution.

Ideally, I’d like to use Roon to keep and organize a library of albums that I love listening to. Over time, the sources may change. Now I’m using Tidal for most of my listening, but if it’s going out of business next year, I’d still like to keep my library. Currently, the Roon library is inextricably tied to Tidal if I add items from Tidal. Let me mention two specific examples that happened in the past month.

Example 1. There’s an album that I listen to a lot, several songs are in a playlist that I listen to daily during work. One day I noticed the album is gone from Tidal. I bought the download, and added it to the library. The songs now disappeared from the playlist, and I have to ‘heart’ my favorite songs and add them again to the playlist. What I expected to happen was that the metadata remains in the library, but instead of the Tidal source, it will now play from the local files. Why doesn’t it work like that?

Example 2. I experienced frequent skipping of songs when streaming from Tidal. This is an issue I don’t like to have, as I’m spending on Roon + Tidal to enjoy music in high quality and have a reliable streaming service, and songs stuttering and skipping 5 times during dinner is not what I expected to get. Sometimes I have to switch to playing spotify via bluetooth, at least it doesn’t skip songs. A song is like a few MBs, on broadband it takes ~1s to download, why isn’t it cached by the core and by the endpoint? Anyways, I thought I’d give Qobuz a try, maybe the streaming is more stable than with Tidal. For the trial, I tried disabling Tidal to see how it works. The result: not at all. My tags are empty. Songs in my playlists are unavailable. Most playlists that I created over many years on different platforms (imported through tidal with Soundiiz) are completely missing. Again, why is the Roon library not persistent? Why do tags, playlists, etc rely solely on the Tidal ‘collection’? When I got into the Roon ecosystem, what I expected is that I get to build a library that can work with various local and streaming sources. What I got, apparently, is a 3rd party player for Tidal (in my typical use case).

I still love Roon for the streaming quality, the player UI, the DSP, and the library tools (especially for classical music that is a pain to browse on any other platform). But I want a library that exists in Roon metadata, and does not depend on the streaming sources. How do you manage your library, especially tags, given these limitations?

Thanks!

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2

This isn’t a Roon based solution but it does reputedly solve your issue.

Good luck.

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Thanks for your response! What this does tough, is that it takes a playlist that only works with Tidal, and makes one that only works with Qobuz. What I’m asking for, I guess as a feature request, is that Roon has playlists that can work with dynamic sources. There’s a layer of abstraction missing from the Room libraray. A playlist should be a list of things in the metadata database, with pointers to content (local or streaming service). Instead, it’s a list of pieces of content, and you can’t change the source for a playlist or tag entry.
It’s hard to understand why this is missing, because when I’m browsing the library, everything gives the impression that it works the way I described. E.g. I can see an album available from 3 sources (local, Tidal, Qobuz). But then if I add that album to a playlist, apparently it becomes ‘dumb’, and only works form one source.

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4

Because once they’ve got you there’s incentive to keep you…locked in or you’ll lose all your playlists.

Be mindful.

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5

I’m looking for this too and don’t think the answers provided previously really answer the OPs question.

I use tags a lot but it’s frustrating that they’re firmly linked to a specific album on a single service and can’t be moved easily to other library versions. I’d like to cancel my Qobuz subscription for various reasons and move everything I have saved to Tidal, but the inability to move my tagged albums en-masse makes it very difficult to do this (I have several thousand albums tagged with multiple tags each). If I cancel my Qobuz subscription, I just lose all my tags permanently and essentially my library system disappears overnight even if identical albums exist locally or on Tidal - despite using the Roon features as they are intended. This is a Roon issue and not related to the streaming services wanting to lock you in.

I guess an optimal solution would be to have the option to link tags against the actual album (regardless if a local copy or any streaming service version) rather than the specific release

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Not for me. My Tags are applied to specific release versions, not, the album as a conceptual entity. The rip of the early CD release of Genesis Trick of the Tail is a completely different album than the 2007 remixed version available on the streaming services. To me, they are not equivalent, and I would not want tags applied to one automatically moved to the other.

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Appreciate that - I specifically noted it should be an option for this reason.