Today’s release includes our new Playlist Improver!
Here’s a quick walk-through of how it works:
Our Playlist Improver earns its name by instantly remedying unavailable and duplicate tracks in your lists or upgrading songs with higher-quality selections or the primary version in your library. You can approve and save changes to playlists of all sizes with just a few clicks or review and savor each suggestion individually. Like all things Roon, the choice is yours.
When you open a playlist, Roon will scan the contents and let you know exactly how many tracks can potentially be upgraded.
Click the improve button to get more details – you can choose:
Unavailable Tracks - Fixes missing tracks in your playlist by matching across your library and streaming services
Upgrade Quality - Locates higher quality versions of tracks in your playlists by matching across your library and streaming services
Remove Duplicates - Looks for the same track added to the playlist more than once
Match To Library - Matches content in your playlist to the Primary Version in your library
When you select an option, Roon will highlight suggestions in the playlist.
While considering each improvement you can navigate to the album, play the suggested track, or enable the new Format column to understand exactly what version Roon is suggesting for your playlist.
The Playlist Improver is available in Roon on desktop and tablet platforms.
FYI to all: Playlist Improver may be great, but it doesn’t appear to work on imported playlists.
I don’t use early access and had wondered about this, but now that it’s in full release, I thought it was worth sharing.
I understand that 95% of the utility of Playlist Improver is focused on issues people have with streaming services, but I have 47 (pretty big) imported playlists and thought just maybe there were .mp3s or .m4as that could point to .AIFF or .FLAC files that I know I have. No dice on this. Or maybe I just don’t have these problems that I imagine that I have - who knows.
Not a complaint, really … just FYI for those who are wondering, who are probably in the minority.
I have a local playlist of about 60 tracks and I tried the improver today. It said that it can replace 5 songs with ones found in my library. Great! I press the button to initiate this and nothing happens. It considers that it did it, since the option is gone, but the tidal tracks are still in my playlist. I go and add them manually and remove the tidal versions. Next, it says it can improve the quality of 7 tracks in my playlist. Guess with what? With Tidal MQA!!! WTH?! Nooooo! And yes, I have set the option to treat MQA as pure garbage.
You click Upgrade quality, then Save improvements after it finishes. Next, you click Match to library, then Save improvements. I usually cycle through this routine a few times.
Then, I manually look at the remaining issues and add or change the referenced albums by clicking Update quality again then click the three dots on the right of the marked tracks and going to Roon Versions.
Thank you, it’s a great help in playlist curation!
I have a few questions tho:
I noticed that there are some tracks in my playlists that have the cover art blacked out (see screenshot below), Roon doesn’t see those tracks as unavailable, nor there is that red “unavailable” wording I see in other instances, but it still says “unavailable” when I play them. So I’d expect the Playlist Improver to detect them as unavailable tracks too, is it a correct expectation or am I missing something here?
There are tracks in my playlists that are not detected to be in my library just because the album is different. As an example in the screenshot below, there is the track “Ain’t No Sunshine” By Bill Withers, which I added some time ago from Tidal and it happens to be from the album “Just As I Am”. I have this track in my library, but it’s included in a different album, in Bill Withers “Greatest Hits” album. The Playlist Improver doesn’t detect that I have this track in my library. I have a lot of instances like this one, where I have tracks I have in my local library, which I ripped and selected because I like the master better, that I therefore would like the Improver to detect, even tho they are from a different album. The title track, length, artist data are the same, only the album differs. Is this something that can be improved maybe?
I also noticed some cases like the one below where the song Lyla by Eric Clapton from the “MTV Unplugged” album is not detected to be in my library when I do have that same album in my library and Roon does see it in the versions tab. The album is simply a different version but still, the Playlist Improver doesn’t see that I have that same song in my library. This example is therefore a track with the same album in my library not detected. Is this a bug or am I missing the reason behind it?
I’m really excited to see Roon finally giving some attention to playlist management. This update has a few things that will be rather useful, and it inspired me to spend about 6 hours improving and expanding playlists today.
The biggest issue I see is that “upgrade quality” replaces the low res files with from Tidal album versions that aren’t in your Tidal library (and may not even be visible to you) and it resets the play counts to zero. This feature may improve the playlist it is run on, but it creates even more chaos in the library and undermines the function of focus/bookmarks that use play counts and dates. This of course is an extension of the longstanding issues with the way Tidal sees tracks from Tidal playlists differently than it sees the same Tidal tracks in the library.
Another issue is that the “upgrade quality” feature doesn’t respect the setting for how MQA is viewed. (I don’t want my local 44.1/16 ALAC files replaced with 44.1/16 MQA files.) It may not matter much in a week, but on the other hand it might, depending on whether those MQA files in Tidal are still visible to Roon’s “quality upgrader”.
MQA will be gone according to this. I’m not worried about it and I still have 554 MQA albums in my Roon library. I just added 518 albums yesterday and today of which about 80 are MQA. I used the Playlist Improver to update my entire Roon library of 4053 albums.
@Dusty, you are so right here. I don’t know if it’s bad design or bad execution - but it suggests replacing a local 44/16 FLAC file with a MQA 44/16 from Tidal - when I too have MQA set to ‘garbage,’ I don’t believe this is useful.
Right, but there’s a lot of stuff I can’t access through Tidal that Roon can. Roon’s album versions tab sometimes shows half a dozen formats, but only one shows up in Tidal.
As I understand Tidal’s announcement - they have announced the date when their ‘preferred format’ will be FLAC, but it appears this does not mean MQA will go away. Rather, they will be continuing to migrate their library to non-MQA versions as their preferred format. I suspect after their announced date, MQA music will still be served by Tidal - sadly.
Hopefully the announcement I read which left this possibility on the table was just poorly written.
WILL I STILL BE ABLE TO ACCESS MUSIC IN MQA AND 360 REALITY AUDIO ON TIDAL?
No. Starting July 24, 2024, you will no longer be able to access music in the MQA or 360 Reality Audio formats via any TIDAL application or integration."
Can’t get much cleared than this. Anyway, if MQA that was not available somehow leaked through the Roon Playlist Improver, Roon would put a stop to that within a few hours.
and 
- who knows.
