Qobuz Playlist Appears Empty After Using 'Add To Playlist' from Roon (ref#B1W30V)

Support
1

What’s happening?

· Something else

How can we help?

· None of the above

Other options

· Other

Describe the issue

When I use 'Add To Playlist' in Roon to add music from a playlist created in Roon to a playlist created in Qobuz, there are usually no problems - the tracks I select to send in the Roon playlist then sync with the Qobuz playlist I selected.

When I did this yesterday, the destination playlist I had selected in Qobuz seemed to freeze. From the outside on Qobuz's My Playlists page it looks normal, ie you can see cover art, the number of tracks it contains and the collective playing time, but when you click the playlist to view it, it appears empty - no tracks are visible when you open the playlist. Number of tracks/playing time info is still visible at the right hand side, but the play button is greyed out. Viewing the playlist in Roon it also shows as empty.

I had 1963 carefully curated tracks in this Qobuz playlist, and it had been very convenient and hassle-free to use Add To Playlist to transport tracks from Roon playlists to Qobuz ones, rather than take the longer route of Add To Library, then move the tracks into the Qobuz playlist from my Qobuz favourites. I am obviously very concerned about the possibility of these tracks vanishing into thin air.

The Qobuz playlist appears empty on all devices too, whether viewed in the Qobuz app or via the Roon app, but when viewing the playlist in question on the Qobuz app on my phone, the screen seems to shimmer slightly, which worries me. My IT knowledge is very rudimentary, so I don't really understand why a function of the Roon app I had been happily been using seems to have gone so badly wrong, and why a much-loved playlist in Qobuz seems to have become paralysed. Is there any advice you could offer me? I repeat again that my technical knowledge is very limited.

Best regards

Alan

Describe your network setup

Mac OS Monterey 12.7.6
Roon Nucleus
Asus RT-AC86U Router

2

Hi @Alan_Meldrum,

Thank you for your report. Can you please provide the name of the playlist affected? Our team can use that to activate diagnostic logging and pinpoint any failures therein. We’ll post back here with our findings.

4

Hi

It is the one identified in the screenshot, entitled Qobuz Electronica 1 (not Qobuz Electronica 1 Remade, which is broadly a duplicate I have assembled in case Qobuz Electronica 1 is beyond saving).

As a matter of interest, should I be able to add tracks from a Roon playlist to a Qobuz one, or is this a practice I should avoid?

Best regards

Alan

5

Please see response below from Qobuz customer services today:

03:17 PM | Marina from Qobuz: Hello,

I have tried everything today to find a solution to your problem.
Unfortunately I had to find out that we already had such a problem with Roon in the past.

At that time in the past a Roon update was responsible.

Can you tell me if you have had a Roon update recently?

Furthermore, the technicians confirmed that deleted playlists can no longer be restored.

I had looked at your playlists in your account and still had the small hope that the technicians can still do something because the playlists are not deleted but only emptied.

But unfortunately it may well be that the lost tracks can no longer be restored.

The reason is that we no longer save playlist data after it has disappeared.

There is no kind of recycle bin where they are stored before they are finally deleted.

Something we want to change in the future, but will require a lot of disk space.

At this point in time, there is nothing I can do but wait and see if the technicians will answer and save something.

I very much hope that we will find a way to protect ourselves from such third-party app problems in the future.

Best regards,

6

Also my response below:

10:45 PM | [moderated: email address removed]: There have been at least two Roon updates in the last few weeks, so that answers your question.

I do however feel that your guidance for Qobuz subscribers like myself is quite limited in terms of how they should use in combination with other apps such as Roon, so I am disappointed that I may have created a problem for myself because there were no instructions telling me specifically not to do what I did.

Thankfully, I kept a list of the tracks that had been in the playlist in question within a Roon playlist, so I have been able to re-construct the Qobuz playlist that was emptied, but as you will be aware you have a large number of customers who use Qobuz and Roon together, so I think you owe it to them to make it clear which functions are safe to perform between platforms, and which functions are not. Music collections are precious things, and if I hadn’t backed up that playlist I would have been distraught at the thought of losing all of that carefully curated music. You should be aiming for a better level of service than this I think.

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Your thoughts on this exchange would be appreciated.

Best regards

Alan

8

Hi

Further thoughts from Qobuz from yesterday shown below. They seem to be holding Roon culpable for the contents of my playlist evaporating (the deletion at Roon).

If you could let me know what your perspective is i would appreciate it, I’ve been waiting patiently for some feedback for four days now.

Best regards

Alan

05:48 PM | Marina from Qobuz: Hello,

I’m finally getting to your ticket.

The technicians are doing everything they can to avoid this in the future and to coordinate with Roon.

This is not something that happens regularly.

We had this case once before due to a Roon update and at that time we assumed that it would not happen again.

Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee this at the moment as it is not yet clear what caused the error and the deletion at Roon.

I will gladly keep you up to date with the technicians.

Best regards,

10

Hi @Alan_Meldrum,

Thanks for the additional information. Did you happen to use the playlist improver on Qobuz Electronica 1 prior to it disappearing?

Is there a particular reason you’re avoiding adding playlist tracks to your library as well?

I’m glad to hear you were able to restore it! Have you seen any similar behavior since?

11

Hi

To answer you first question, I have not used the Playlist Improver, as I do not trust it to do what it says. For example, if I select a Qobuz playlist in Roon that I know for a fact has a couple of dozen unavailable tracks in it, you’re lucky if Playlist Improver detects one or two of these, so it doesn’t seem fit for purpose. Also, there have been number of critical posts on the forum about it, so I think i’ll wait until you’ve gotten over the teething problems before I try and use it.

To answer the second question, I tend to listen to playlists rather than albums, so I often have up to 2000 tracks in a Qobuz playlist (their limit for the number of tracks in a playlist). If I add all of the tracks in these playlists to the library (I currently have 262 Qobuz playlists that I have curated), then the 'Favourites>Tracks list in Qobuz would be never ending.

To be honest, one of the main ways I use Add To Library is to quickly identify tracks that are duplicated in two large playlists, eg Qobuz Playlist A has 2000 tracks, and so does Qobuz Playlist B. I want to know if there are some tracks in Playlist A that are also in Playlist B. In Roon, I create a new playlist, and import all 4000 tracks (within the Roon limit for playlists), then in settings I select ‘Only show duplicates’. Once the duplicates are identified then with these tracks I would then ‘Add to Library’, which would then place a heart symbol next to the tracks in Qobuz. I would then select which of the Qobuz playlists I wanted to remove the duplicates from on the Qobuz desktop app, because they are visually now easy to identify with the heart symbol. Once I have removed them from the playlist, I would then remove them from Favourites>Tracks, so I can repeat the process with other playlists.

Unfortunately Roon does not do what it says it will do with unavailable tracks, ie it routinely does not identify them by having the red ‘Unavailable’ tag above them when viewed in a Roon playlist. For this reason I also use Qobuz to identify unavailable tracks in their playlists - which are always greyed out - and then adding these to favourites in Qobuz. That will then fill up Favourites>Tracks with unavailable songs, so I can easily relocate them to a playlist such as Rock Unavailable or Disco Unavailable, and I can see all of the unavailable tracks at a glance. I would then clear Favourites>Tracks and repeat the process with another Qobuz playlist. I know that Playlist Improver is supposed to do all the heavy lifting for me in this regard, but as I said, I am afraid that after my recent experience of having a Qobuz playlist emptied because I added tracks to it from Roon from a playlist created in Roon, I am VERY wary of using a function in Roon to try and control playlists that were generated in Qobuz. You will have to give me some reassurance before I will use Playlist Improver, or use Roon in any way to manage playlists created in Qobuz. Once bitten, twice shy.

I note with some disappointment that the key question from my first post has not been addressed, ie

‘I don’t really understand why a function of the Roon app I had been happily been using seems to have gone so badly wrong, and why a much-loved playlist in Qobuz seems to have become paralysed’.

Could you please address this question, because to be blunt, if I can’t trust Roon not to repeat this scenario in future, then I’ll probably stop using it for anything other than music playback.
You mentioned diagnostics being carried out to try and find out what happened to my playlist, but you have said nothing more, which is also disappointing. I would very much like you to try and put my mind at rest, because I have yet to hear a proper explanation about what has happened, and from my discussions with Qobuz customer services, they certainly seem to think that Roon was culpable for the problem I experienced.

I look forward to hearing from you, and it would be good if I didn’t have to wait four days for a response.

Best regards

Alan

13

Hi @Alan_Meldrum,

Again, my apologies for your experience with the playlist improver so far - feel free to share any future opinions and feedback over in our Feedback category so proper Roon eyes can see it.

Yes, we were able to pinpoint the time of the error in a recent Roon Server diagnostic, and saw that the initial issue was sparked due to attempting to add additional tracks to the playlist that exceeded Qobuz’s playlist limit, which is 2000 tracks. More specifically:

Debug: [easyhttp] [49128] POST to https://www.qobuz.com/api.json/0.2/playlist/update? returned after 294 ms, status code: 400
Warn: [qobuz] [http] error result from http request: {"status":"error","code":400,"message":"Reached maximum number of tracks allowed per playlist"}
Warn: [playlist/syncqueue] _Spin loop for Playlist[40:1:4672b9c0-9521-40a3-9945-841a6243737e, Name=Qobuz Electronica 1, Type=Qobuz,  2037 Items], (2), exiting due to error Result[Status=InvalidRequest]

Note that these playlist track limits are not set by Roon, they’re set by Qobuz. While I can’t yet speak on whether the issue was sparked from Roon’s side or Qobuz’s (our team will investigate further,) you can likely avoid this in the future by keeping your playlists within Qobuz’s limits. :+1:

14

‘Proper Roon eyes’, well, you’ve got me scratching my head there. What do you mean by this exactly?

If I am reading your post correctly, it seems that if I inadvertently take me eye off the ball and attempt to add some tracks from Roon to a Qobuz playlist that has reached its 2000 track limit, I don’t get a warning window saying that ‘This playlist has no more capacity’ or ‘Unable to complete request’, instead I run the risk of losing 2000 tracks down a Roon hole? Is that honestly what you’re telling me? It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

I think in future I’ll just use Roon for playback, as I certainly wouldn’t use it for any form of playlist management with Qobuz playlists, because there is obviously a clear risk in doing so. I obviously feel a bit aggrieved because I’ve stumped up the cash for a lifetime subscription and a Nucleus box, and yet there seem to be certain aspects of Roon’s performance that you cannot explain and which could cause great damage to my music collection. Not a great advert for Roon, is it?

Having identified the issue, are your technicians able to explain WHY the playlist emptied, or was it, you know, just one of them things? From a customer’s point of view some information here would be helpful, so I would appreciate it if you could provide me with some.

Could you also confirm, are any changes made to a playlist carried out using Playlist Improver in Roon supposed to be mirrored in the playlist in Qobuz that the changes are being applied to? I used Playlist Improver for the first time to remove 3 duplicate tracks from a Qobuz generated playlist, and while they were removed in the Roon view of the playlist, when I looked at the original playlist in Qobuz the tracks were still in place. Not much use if you have to remove duplicates twice, is it?

Could you give me a brief summary of what is meant to happen to tracks when you use each of the Improver’s functions, I’m not very sure after this initial experience.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

Alan

15

Still looking forward to hearing from you.

A

16

Hi @Alan_Meldrum,

Without adding Qobuz content to your Roon library, you’re effectively using Roon as playlist manager for Qobuz, with the extra lag time built in by Qobuz’s API and the two-way sync with Roon.

Roon and Qobuz have two-way sync via Qobuz’ API, but it’s not instantaneous. If you make changes to a Qobuz playlist within Roon, it can take up to 24 hours for those changes to reflect in Qobuz’s own servers, and thus in the Qobuz app.

Absolutely. This is the best place to start, but I can clarify further.

Let’s look at one particular feature, Unavailable Track matching, since it features prominently in your workflow with Roon.

When you run Playlist Improver to find Unavailable Tracks, Roon will search your Roon library for an alternate version of that track, and then it will search any connected streaming services (like Qobuz) for a version of that track. If it can’t find a version in your library, then it requests it from the Qobuz API. If Qobuz has not yet updated recently unavailable tracks in the data they send to Roon, then there can be mismatches. However, if these tracks were added to your Roon library, then Roon would be constantly checking for their availability as the library syncs with Qobuz regularly, instead of only checking when you run the Playlist Improver. You’d see improvement by simply adding the contents of these playlists to your Roon library.

It sounds like you’re using Playlists to perform basic library management functions that are already inbuilt to Roon. This shouldn’t be prohibitive, and we’ll certainly support this use case, but beware that you are exposed to two vulnerabilities: 1) the API lag as mentioned above and 2) Roon’s library scanning and library management features won’t apply to your Qobuz tracks. You lose a lot of customization.

Concerning the Qobuz track limit, your case for suggesting a mechanism to warn users that they are approaching the Qobux playlist limit of 2000 tracks is more than valid. Please create a Feature Suggestions and other users will add their votes and voices.

I hope this helps clarify a few details. We’ll look out for your response.

17

Hi @Alan_Meldrum,

One additional note - there is a fix undergoing testing in the Early Access section right now for a particular failure when adding tracks to Qobuz/Tidal playlists.

It’s not quite what you’re experiencing, but if the behavior in the thread below seems familiar in your use patterns with Roon, then you can at least expect some relief there as soon as the fix merges into the next Roon update.

18

Hi

Thank you for the responses.

By my own admission, I struggle to wrap my head around the technical nuances of Roon, and how it works with a streaming service like Qobuz, and I am still a little bewildered.

I had thought that ‘My Library’ in Roon was principally the digital files I had on disk, ie iTunes purchases. MP3 files etc, that Roon scanned when I first started using the app, and I thought that this ‘library’ was discrete from the tracks I accessed on my streaming platform Qobuz.

In my case, listening to music via playlists rather than albums, would it be your recommendation for countless Qobuz-curated playlists I have, often with up to the maximum 2000 track limit contained in them, that I should I select all of the tracks in each of these playlists and ‘Add To Library’?

If you could advise I would be grateful. Apologies for struggling with all this, but I’m self-taught with IT, and there remain sizeable gaps in my knowledge.

Best regards

Alan

19

Hi

I would welcome any further information you could share with me regarding the issues previously raised.

Best regards

Alan

20

The Roon library contains local files as well as any streaming albums/tracks that you add to the library. Think of Tidal/Qobuz as the store from where you can pick releases to add to your collection in Roon.

21

Hi

Thanks for this, much appreciated.

A