You can also buy, download, and keep forever the albums that you love on all tiers, and indeed if you have no subscription tiers at all. The bonus of the top tier is that you get reduced prices on hi-res downloads that you purchase.
One of the reasons for NOT subscribing to streaming services. Another being that one re-listens, sometimes many times, to tracks we like, contrary to films which we rarely view more than twice - unless one wants to work in the film industry.
Fundamentally I think the current business model of streaming is NOT made for guys that have a cherished collection of carefully selected records. Besides not being akin to alter their library (which you describe well), we are (sometimes very) critical of recent releases or new music because we compare them to references. Which we can do because:
- we know the references
- we know where to find those.
And of course we don’t like anyone to mess around with our library.
But let’s have an open attitude towards this. Perhaps someone will recognize there is a market there, with a different business model. A more respectful one, by the way. Actually one should have a default option which is to FORBID locally stored titles to be replaced or removed - same for the associated info. Simple, right ?
Which is how Roon is setup. Indeed Roon does not alter any of your media files; it will only delete an album if you explicitly want to do so.
Yes, I had noticed this and it is indeed a good one. But it should be the case also for streaming services, whether coupled to Roon or not. Including iTunes !
Just for clarity, it’s not Roon that deletes an album or track from your library. Presumably it is licensing issues or just catalog management that causes Tidal to remove Version 1 of an album from Tidal and then replace it with Version 2, which may just be a different UPC number or release from another country, but otherwise identical. The problem is that this process takes the album out of your library and there’s no way to know until you try to go to the album specifically, and you might not even know if a playlist or shuffle is not playing what you intended.
I don’t know nearly enough about the Tidal integration to understand how difficult it would be to build a tool that validates the Tidal portion of the library periodically. I have to believe that Tidal doesn’t want a huge number of Roon installs pinging their servers for 1 second of audio continuously in order to test for availability. But I also have to believe that Tidal must track their changes in some way, and that tracking might be flowed down to users based on their library.
This could be a huge challenge. Or it could be pretty easy. That’s why I asked it as a question rather than just saying “Roon MUST fix this.” However, if anyone is going to claim use of streaming service is the equivalent of owning the CD, or thereabouts, then this issue ultimately needs to be addressed. If 5% per year of a collection is affected (just a guess) then in 5 years you’d have fairly significant chaos on the Tidal side of your collection.
This does seem the crux of it - about 75% of the time for me when albums are ‘removed’ they still exist on Tidal, just presumably under a different id. It really doesn’t seem like an impossible task for Tidal to track these id changes and pass requests for an album/track via this mapping ‘table’ to return the appropriate item. I guess, though, they need a reason to bother and perhaps there isn’t a commercial incentive for doing so?
I’d imagine you don’t need to ping Tidal at all.
The way I would see it working is that when you add a Tidal album to your library, Roon creates a local metadata entry and one of the field flags is that it’s a Tidal album.
Then at a pre-determined time in the future, say weekly, Roon compares its current metadata against the version from a week earlier. A condition where a Tidal album existed a week ago, versus it no longer existing adds it to a report generated for the user.
This would mean that albums manually removed by the user would also show up, but that would be a minor issue and would give us a way to parse the Tidal album changes quite easily without any additional overhead on Tidal.
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If an artist/owner cancels an agreement with the streamer, the albums will go. If you don’t know what’s missing, then you probably don’t know or need it as much as the idea of “the complete” collection.
I don’t think Tidal or Roon should spend a lot of effort on that frankly. The idea of having everything forever is probably not a healthy one anyway. I love Miles Davis and tried to collect everything of his but I can’t say that improved my enjoyment of his music, probably did the inverse as it became my obsession.
But I would like a search for «Tidal-albums in my collection Tidal removed that I rated four stars or more» so I can deicide to buy it or forget it. And keep my custom metadata/tags until I later add it.
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I appreciate your concern for our mental health. I think our concerns here are a little more practical than becoming obsessed with owning Everything Ever Recorded.
As above, if Roon arbitrarily deleted FLAC files on your hard drive and didn’t tell you what they were, there would be a huge uproar and no one would use Roon. Why is it different with albums onTidal?
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Umm. Because with Tidal one doesn’t actually own anything as one does with their own local files (even if ripped illegally)? So unless one accidentally deletes them (an impossibility with all of the pia Fort Knox checks to delete anyhting on Roon) then it’s a false analogy. Not so sure why this is so hard for people to get their heads around. Tidal or Roon or you the consumer do not control the license for any of the music offered by Tidal or any other streaming services. It’s one of the reasons why shows come and go from Netflix, etc. I’m sure Tidal et al would love to offer everything ever made - it’s just a bit of extra bandwidth and accounting already set up, but often labels and artists have different goals in licensing.
You can’t have everything in life, esp when paying what amounts to about a cd and a half per month to have access to several million cd quality titles. If there’s some album you absolutely can’t breathe without, then by all means do the artist/label a big favor and buy the damn thing.
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You don’t own the files. You are just given access to them. According to your terms of service with Tidal, they are not required to notify you when such things occur. If Tidal drops/re-adds an album, it should carry over your favorite information, but it doesn’t. Roon should not build a crutch for something Tidal should be doing.
And before Roon implements something as data/processer heavy as showing us past deleted Tidal albums (whether by you or Tidal), first how about an easier way to actually delete those unwanted albums vs a three part ‘Are you sure you’re an adult?’ maximum security process to go through? Local files, ok, but for Tidal titles totally unnneccesary as it can be easily and quickly replaced if deleted by mistake.
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I think everyone realises this but for me the point is that a “library” combining local and Tidal albums is at the heart of Roon’s skeuomorphic design proposition. Most people would expect a library to be a consistent and stable point of reference (though I appreciate libraries too are changing). Perhaps the proposition is flawed - this of course has potential to be a USP for Qobuz when integrated if they were so inclined.
I do agree with this and suggested as much further up the thread.
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This is about library management, not ownership. No one is claiming that if they subscribe to Tidal that they “own” the CD. It’s a totally irrelevant point, albeit it is fair to say that if you really love a CD, buy it. Still doesn’t change anything about this as a feature consideration.
Part of Roon’s value proposition is that it increases the value of a Tidal subscription. Yes, it’s Tidal that decreases that value itself by removing albums without any tracking mechanism. But it’s perfectly consistent with Roon’s mission to build a tracking tool that increases the value of Tidal vis a vis Roon. Indeed, Roon’s stance against a shallow integration with Spotify is that it would not represent sufficient similarity to owning a local collection…so logically Roon would build a product with streaming integration that as closely as possible resembles a local collection.
Pretty preachy stuff. We’re talking about a tool to help manage a library; no one is claiming ownership of anything here. If you think that Roon should be spending resources on other priorities first, everyone is entitled to that opinion. But I don’t think it’s fair to diminish anyone’s legitimate concerns.
Fine, but if Roon claimed to be a Netflix interface, I’d consider asking the same thing. However it is somewhat different, in that I am not aware that generally people watch narrative video content by shuffling a collection of it or creating a playlist of it in a way that would be analogous to loss of music content that one thinks is still going to be mixed into a listening session. At least for me, choosing to watch a TV series or movie is a different mental process and I usually don’t watch such things more than a few times, whereas with music of course there is a lot of repeat listening.
This is a reasonable position, however given that Qobuz is supposed to integrate at some point and others would like other streaming services, if Roon built the tool, that might solve the issue for all integrated services rather than having each streamer provide their own solution (or not at all, which then leaves the problem where it is).
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I think there’s 2 different problems here and my view would be that the solutions should come from different places.
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Albums that change identifiers on Tidal but still exist - IMO this is a Tidal problem and should be fixed by them.
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Albums that are removed from Tidal completely and then automatically removed by Roon (though only greyed out on Tidal). I think these should be treated as any other unavailable content on Roon, remaining in the “library” but marked as unavailable. It should then be possible to use the focus tool to identify these.
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Good point.
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Here’s a great example I discovered today.
I added Mono - Requiem for Hell to my library when it was released in October 2016. Here’s a couple of tracks in my History.
Today, I noticed Mono have a new album out, it’s in Tidal so I add it to the library.
Then, ummm, where has their previous album gone? When I click the link to the album in my history…
It’s no longer in my library. I go back to the artist page to look through the list of Tidal albums - lo and behold it’s back in the list of Tidal albums. I’ve lost my play counts (m’eh not the end of the world), but luckily because it’s still in Tidal so I can re-add it.
So what’s happened here is for some reason Tidal have removed/re-added or just changed the UID of this album for fun. I can’t see any reason why - there’s no MQA, there were no licensing issues I am aware of.
This is just one case - there will be others where content is removed from Tidal and not re-added. In either case shouldn’t we have a mechanism for Roon to report that an album’s gone AWOL? I think so.
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All of the streaming services do this. There are threads in the forum around the subject.
We KNOW all the streaming services do it.
Roon is the only library management system that actively integrates local and streamed content with a common, local metadata database.
It should be able to report when a title in someone’s library is removed from a remote platform.
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