The auto-import of albums from Tidal when installing Roon has really messed up my Tidal library.
I didn’t anticipate that it would drastically modify my Tidal account/library on the install, I suggest that should really /not/ be the default on a new install.
Anyway, after reading in these forums I found out how to use the Roon browser/focus to select all the albums tagged with imported Tidal genres and delete those. I have a couple of concerns about this:
a) As a brand new user, it was hard to figure out in the first place
b) I suspect that this ‘remedy’ may not cleanly undo those imports- what if a few of the albums had already been in my Tidal library before I installed Roon, wouldn’t this now delete them from my Tidal library (incorrectly) ?
But moreover, it didn’t work! Most of the auto-imported Tidal albums were correctly removed from my Roon library (there were a few omissions that remain, for some reason) - but they were /not/ all removed from my Tidal library.
So my Tidal library still has a bunch of albums that Roon added, and I can’t see how to remove them without doing it all manually in Tidal. I’ve tried rsync’ing Roon to Tidal (from the Services preferences form), but all these extra albums remain in my Tidal library (but not in Roon).
Yuck! My first few days & impressions with Roon have been dominated by dealing with this misadventure with my Tidal library. It’s very frustrating.
Is there something else I can do to force Roon to update the Tidal library properly? I see many users report sync problems between Roon/Tidal libraries in general, so I’m concerned that this will never get straightened out properly- even if I hassle with removing all these albums from Tidal manually.
I really have to emphasize, doing this to our Tidal library should not be the default behavior on a new install. The prompt for whether we want to add all the “100 essentials” and etc did not make this clear at all.
Focus/Date Added
Focus/Inspector/Storage Locations/Tidal
Select all (ctrl-A)
Edit/Delete Album
That should eventually remove the albums from Roon library and Tidal favourites, but it can take some time to work its way through both. If you want to delete them from favourites in Tidal more quickly then I don’t know any method other than individually “unstarring” them.
As I recall installation there was an option to add various genres of “essential albums” from Tidal and we could say Yes/No. I agree that the word “essential” is potentially misleading; really a bit of hyperbole from Tidal which could be confused for an essential step in an installation procedure.
What sort of information would you like to have seen on that screen ?
@jimmyb – as @andybob you should be able to remove these albums in about 6 clicks, which will clear them out out of Roon and your Tidal library.
To be clear, one collection is checked by default, but the albums are only added when you click Add Albums To My Library. That said, we’re considering some changes for this feature in the future, since a number of people have been confused by it – apologies for the trouble @jimmyb!
It removed all of the imported albums from Roon, but only some of them were removed from Tidal. After that, there were no auto-imported albums in my Roon library but I could still see dozens of them in Tidal.
It was like that for a few days, now Roon has reimported the albums that had remained in Tidal. NONE of them are tagged TIDAL:xxx anymore, even though thats actually how they got there! (To confim: these were added as part of the essential-albums/etc during Roon install- they weren’t in my Tidal library before I installed Roon.)
While I could now browse/select all ‘tidal storage’ and delete- that would remove all the albums that were in my Tidal library before Roon, which would be really bad.
So, these sync issues between Roon imports and tagging from Tidal have led to compound errors. I hope this makes sense.
As a result, I need to clean the Tidal library up by hand at this point- no Roon browse/selection/tagging actually reveals the Roon additions accurately anymore. (As I detailed above, I hope.)
Once I do that, how can I do a clean re-install of Roon? I’d really like to restart from scratch with Roon at this point.
I have a couple of suggestions for how this might be done differently, but i’ll mention later in hopes of some brevity here, describing my current dilemma.
PS. Thanks for the help and support! I’m excited about Roon, despite this (hopefully understandable) frustration with the wholesale/awkward Tidal library changes.
Since this thread was referenced in another post, I just wanted to confirm that the Roon suggestions to fix this (above and elsewhere) simple didn’t work-
Instead, the auto-imports were removed from my Roon library, but remained in my Tidal library.
(Even after waiting many days for the sync to resolve. And, nevertheless, other/ongoing syncing continued to work correctly, as I added/removed new Tidal selections from within Roon.)
So- as I described above, eventually I had to remove each auto-import selection manually, from within the Tidal app. Since then, things have been fine.
That’s a pain in the proverbial and not the user experience that Roon is aiming for. I’m pretty sure @mike and @jeremiah will want to change it. The setup procedure may already have been changed (I haven’t checked) and I know there is ongoing work on Roon/Tidal synchronisation. It does seem much easier to include an album than to remove it, particularly at the Tidal end.
Thanks for checking back with feedback, hopefully we will see some changes in forthcoming builds.
FYI, I encountered this problem when I started using Tidal in April, 2018. When Roon prompted me to add “essential” artists to my library, it’s (still) not clear that this will make permanent changes to my Tidal favorites. This took about an hour to manually undo, and if I’d added more genres, would have been practically impossible to undo without resetting Tidal.
The Focus -> Inspector -> Storage trick doesn’t work because “Select All” selects all albums, not all visible albums on the current screen of albums. Unless someone has no existing Tidal favorites, “Select All” just means they’ll need to un-select the ones they want to keep rather than selecting the ones they want to delete. Un-favoriting each one manually takes forever because each change syncs immediately. The fastest way I found was to right-click and select many, then Edit -> Delete.
The best-case fix is to redo the “Add albums to library” onboarding interstitial. The next-best fix, and something I’d argue Roon should do immediately, is adding bold text to that interstitial that says something like "Important: This will change your Tidal favorites. Roon will add these albums to your Tidal favorites."
(Note: I edited this comment to remove a paragraph about a problem that I can’t reliably repro)
Albums added through Tidal Collections are tagged and can be removed in bulk by selecting all albums with the relevant tags, see this KB article.
The choice to add Tidal Collections has been removed from the on-boarding sequence for new users in Roon1.5. This should cut down the number of people inadvertently adding Collections before understanding what they are.
