Yup! Roon just did what I was trying to avoid for months now…ruining my Tidal favorites library…a selection of songs I had gathered over 3 years of dedicated listening with close to 2000 of my precious gems… mostly gone!
How? Well, lets start with a request I made a few months ago where I mentioned that it is damned hard to manage Roon favorites in line with Tidal favorites…let me explain. Roon’s Tidal tab has a Tidal favorites tab…yes! but what that cant do is (and its pretty stupid) to sort songs by recently added songs (You can do it in the ‘Tracks’ tab in Roon…more on that later!). So, if I liked a song last night whilst listening to Roon, I would ‘add that to my library’ and that would update the Tidal Favorites tab as well as the Tracks tab and in turn would update the Tidal’s own back end db so I could see that in Tidal’s own app too. However, if and when I add an Album to favorites via the native Tidal App, ALL songs of that Album would automatically get added to both the Tracks tab as well as Tidal Favorites tab and via a return update to Tidal’s own backend db, get added to Tidal favorites in the native app too (hoping it maked sense)…coz unlike, adding an Album somehow is read by Roon as if one likes ALL the songs in that Album which is hardly ever the case. Whilst in the Tidal app, if you favorite an Album it goes into the Favorite Albums folder and does NOT update or add ALL songs in the Tidal Favorites list.
Then there is the Roon search problem where you often cant find albums available in Tidal but not found in Roon (linked to Tidal). Try searching this album which started it all for me:
Anyways, When I couldnt find this album in Roon to listen to, I searched for it in Tidal and found it. I had no choice but to Add this Album as favorite Album in Tidal app so that it appears in Roon Tracks (as Roon stupidly adds ALL songs of any added Albums in Tidal App there…and it did!) and so I could listen to it. I generally then had to go to Tracks tab in Roon and delete ALL the songs just added by Roon except for anyone of those added songs so that it let me access the Album via Album name and then I would listen and add only the songs I liked to Favorites/tracks as I listened to that album. It happened the same way this time as well, in order to delete the album songs in Tracks tab…I selected (only) THAT added Album songs and deleted them except for one song of that album…except Roon went ahead and deleted a lot more than what I had selected for some reason. I know you might be thinking I selected ALL those songs to be deleted…Nope, I did double check before deleting and the library just messed up and deleted more than it was supposed to. Things got updated in Tidal’s own db and I lost my Favourites at the Tidal server too…well most of them anyway!
Now, I cant prove that Roon deleted more than I asked it to (although would be interested to know if anyone else faced this before) to but here is the thing…the amount of scrolling and effort needed to select 1500 odd songs to delete (which ended up being deleted) isn’t something one can miss…i selected the 1st and the last song of the same album (some 21 songs I guess) within 5 seconds and deleted them…also, I shouldnt have to do these wasteful loops in the first place…
I have yet tried to restore Roon to a previous date only to find that Tracks tab is live linked to Tidal.
TL;DR:
Roon’s Tidal Favorites doesnt have a sort function - pretty basic thing missing there;
Roon’s Tracks tab updates Tidal favorites whereas only the ones ‘hearted’ in those Tracks should update Tidal as favorites;
Roon takes an add album command from Tidal’s own app (where Tidal only adds the album and not ALL its songs to Favorite Albums) to function as add ALL songs from that Favorited Album to Tracks and in turn adds ALL same songs to Tidal Favorite list;
You cant sometimes find Tidal albums in Roon;
Roon deletes more much more songs than you attempt to delete from its Tracks list (in my case it deleted most of my favorites) which when updated to Tidal servers mean you lose them everywhere!
Anyways, I have asked Tidal to restore my account to one day earlier status to see if i get my songs back, but honestly dont know any other way to recover my gems!
Thanks but no thanks Roon. And Roon is supposed to be a SOTA music and library management solution!
Skeptical about Roon deleting stuff you’ve not marked for deletion, but ya Roon do love their long unsortable lists because they decide for you what sort order is important to you.
Are you sure it was done by Roon, not by yourself ?
Maybe you just haven’t learned how Roon works and are now bearing the consequences of your lack of full knowledge … think about it please.
That’s always been my conundrum with ‘rented’ music. You don’t own it so have you really lost it? My ‘gems’ are all on vinyl and copied to three different hard drives ‘just in case’. I bought them all so all dues paid. I like streaming as it gives me chance to ‘try before I buy’ for example I thought the alarms new album was fab so I bought it, I had a listen to earlier stuff (post 80s) and wasn’t so keen so didn’t buy it.
Tidal or any company may go bust at some point so you would then lose it all.
I guess I’m trying to say in my case I buy all my ‘gems’ as a contingency, in your case it may be best having screen shots of them all so if the worst happens it’s easier to replace?
Maybe a bit off-topic, but personally I would NEVER rely on an online service to manage something as important as my personal music collection. I mean, Tidal could go out of business tomorrow and then “my 2000 gems” would be gone forever. What I do is that I use Qobuz, Tidal and to some extent Apple Music to find and listen to new music. When I find something that I like and would like to keep, I try to buy it on some media that I’m in 100% control of - it could be downloadable files, CD/SACD, vinyl or even reel-to-reel tape. Since it’s not always possible to buy all music new off the shelf (could be OOP), I quite often buy from Discogs - can be quite expensive but I have always managed to find what I want.
That said, I hope you will be able to get your gems back!
Why ask Tidal to restore your account to one day earlier? You should have set up Roon’s Backup to snapshot your collection on a backup schedule. Then just restore a Roon backup that was taken before you did your deletions. That will restore things to where they were.
Also for backup of Tidal/Qobuz you can sign up for a free Spotify account if you don’t have one and backup playlists there with an external app or website.
Your putting a lot of time and trust into Tidal a d your precious list
it’s on the rocks at the moment losing $50M per year.
JayZ won’t sustain that for too long
I’d think about a service such as Soundiiz.com that will sync playlists and library between services for free.
I’ve moved all my Spotify lists over to both tidal and qobuz that way
Aw man, that sucks. I’m not going to be that guy who says Roon might not be for you, but it’s always been really clunky for track-only adding and favouriting. Horrible in fact. I’ve never encountered it en masse because my listening and curating is 99% album-based but I do know where you’re coming from.
I don’t know whether it will be helpful for the future but it might be worth investigating the banned tracks flag in Roon → so add the whole album then select all but the track(s) you want to keep, ban the rest and have some kind of bookmark/view that displays non-banned tracks. They also shouldn’t appear in any shuffle/radio use.
That is a bummer. A complete bummer. Sorry to hear it.
I do tend to are with others that anything that I don’t control could go away, and I deal with that uncertainty. So I do use a number of products to keep exported lists of what albums I like (in text / Google sheets, not in structured proprietary data) so I don’t have this kind of experience, or at least if tidal / Qobuz went belly up I could recreate those faves in Spotify or go buy them. But that’s not to “victim blame”. Whether there was user error or not (and none of us will ever know, but let’s presume not) you were counting on a piece of software to keep track of things for you, you weren’t overly paranoid about it doing what it said it would, and it didn’t act like you thought it was going to. Using Tidal/Qobuz faves is inherently a fragile data structure.
Most important thing here: I really do wish Roon used its data structure to say “hey, I really like this album, it’s in my Roon favorites, even if I don’t currently have a copy locally or in streaming” and then could present you with ways to get that album. It could also suggest albums that you might need to purchase that are available somewhere else (download or physical album) - this has been one of my gripes/wishes for a while - it thinks more primarily about recordings and sources vs albums/pieces of music and only then “where can I get this piece of music”. Which has a number of impacts which I don’t think are great.
But the important thing is - that sucks. Good luck!
He’s lost metadata. A subtle but important difference that really makes the rest of your post not relevant to the problem.
I not sure it would, because the sync between Roon <–> Tidal is not properly bi-directional between tracks and albums, as was exhaustively set out in the OP.
I like the Playlist idea, I’ve been wondering how I could find all my Fav music if I got rid of Tidal or Qobuz. I could never afford to buy everything I have saved to my library from Tidal or Qobuz, but I could go buy, say my top ten Favs.
So a Playlist would or should work to save them, but I also have LastFM, which identifies my Fav Artists, Albums & Tracks, back at least 5 years, Roon now does that but I have more history with LastFM.
Interesting, I tried to save one of my Playlists to an Excel spreadsheet, but found out that it only works for music in your library, so I spent months saving each Track’s album to my library and then 1.8 hit and I can’t find how to export my playlists to Excel anymore
AM I missing something here? I have my backups intact and did try to restore only to find that after restore, Tracks seems to load songs from Tidal’s sever and not from my backup status/list.
Man I just feel one shouldnt have to go through these loops to add what music they want! The only reason I use Roon is coz it sounds better than playing directly through the Tidal app on my Windows PC. And yeah! Roon sucks at library management.
In an attempt to restore my old Roon backup (I just reset my ROCK a few weeks ago coz it wasnt working…a topic for another time…thanks Roon for keeping me busy!) I reset roon…I am not sure if the history is there…
How do we get the Fav list from say tidal to Google sheet? Thanks
I think you may be labouring under a misconception: a “heart” in Roon’s Library is NOT the same as a “heart” in Tidal or Qobuz.
Anything that is “hearted” in Tidal or Qobuz gets automatically added into your Roon Library - where it does NOT automatically get a “heart” - that’s a separate and completely independent thing: a Favourite in your Roon Library.
Right! Lets call it a pony symbol…maybe thats whats needed for users to be able to select ONLY the tracks they like in their library and add in Tidal. My point is, to update Tidal Favs when you mark something as Fav in Roon, a specific symbol should allow users to distinguish between whats added there in Roon Favs and be bi-directionally linked to Tidal Favs…hope it makes sense.
Could there be something thats NOT on Roon. I dont trust their back-ups either? Someone suggested Google Sheets…Any more ideas to store a list of you Favs offline? Thanks
I haven’t done any research on it at all, but I’ve seen people chatting about Soundiiz, which appears to give you the ability to transfer playlists, so my understanding is if you have Tidal and want to drop the service and go to Qobuz, you could use Soundiiz to move it over, so this may be an option for us to save our Roon playlists.
