I noticed a few quirks in its operation when using it to download albums for use in Roon.
For even an album that would be issued on a single disc, it always creates a nested set of folders of the form Artist/Album Title/1 where the sub-folder named 1 holds the album tracks.
For box sets, it will create a series of folders simply named 1, 2, 3, ⌠n for each disc in the box set.
If you elect to download album content such as booklets, videos, etc., it will create an extra sub-folder in the Album Title folder named goodies.
This is all very well, but the resulting structure cannot simply be copied across to your local Roon Watched Folder - you need to do some additional manual work
If you simply copy the Qobuz structure across, two things will happen:
PDF booklets wonât be found, because Roon expects to find them in the Album Title folder, and will ignore any content in the goodies folder - you need to move PDF files into the Album Title folder manually.
Because Qobuz uses a simple number naming convention, Roon will create an album for each disc in a boxset, and you will either need to Merge the albums after import, or rename to folders before import to CD1, CD2, CD3, ⌠CDnn - this is what Roon expects for boxsets
Itâs a pain. On Mac I run all my downloads through Yate to do a quick check on metadata and ensure that I have a standardised folder structure and naming convention.
Iâm seeing frequent updates of the downloader app so hopefully things will smoothen out.
Btw, I also noticed that my selected downloads folder did not stick between updates, so you may want do double check that before launching a download.
They will fix it. I made a complaint to the Qobuz support staff over the weekend. Theyâre very nicely responded and said that the old downloader was returning, and theyâre going to keep the new downloader at the same time.
Last night I started a download of 17 albums. This morning I noticed that all but one were âReadyâ. One album was supposedly still âIn Progressâ. When checking the individual tracks, all but one track were âReadyâ and one track was âDownloadedâ.
I checked the download path to see what was going on. I then noticed that the problematic track had a backslash in the name. This had resulted in the creation of subfolder with the first part of the track name, and a file with the second part of the track name.
I also noticed that all this was in a subfolder âoriginalsâ. This was on the same level as the â1â, â2â etc subfolders for individual discs. It was a multi disc album. And the tracks, with the exception of the problematic track, were present in both the âdiscâ subfolders as well as the âoriginalsâ subfolder. This likely corresponds to the local transcoding reported by GregD. But in my case, I downloading flac. Even then it appears there is at least a copy operation going on.
So I thought: Iâll just copy the problematic track from the originals to the disc subfolder, delete the remaining âoriginalsâ, and fire-up Yate to perform my rename. Imaging my surprise to see that the problematic track did not have any metadata
So I think that the Qobuz Downloader:
downloads a flac file without metadata
performs a local transcode / file copy to whatever format you requested
in this process downloads and adds the metadata to the "âReadyâ version of the file
I ended up downloading the single track directly from the website.
Needless to say that I reported the issue with the backslash to Qobuz.
Same problems with this here.
I use the normal qobuz app on my macbook. Using the Menu âPurchasesâ and âImportâ results in a file structure which is usefull in roon without changing anything. Just upload and it works.
The qobuz downloader is not usefull till now for me.
Donât have an issue with it. I always download to a holding area on pc first before moving to my core. This is no different. Itâs also a lot better with lots of albums had so many issues with the larger tar files timing out after a set size. Now it just works and is speedy to boot.
I just recently started dowloading music from Qobuz in FLAC format (new to this service). I then open up the music in XLD (on Mac) to modify the metadata and transcode to FLAC again (maybe this is really stupid and unnecessary?), and then move into my Roon music folder. Since FLAC is lossless, Iâm assuming re-transcoding again to FLAC doesnât lose anything from an audio standpoint and it sets the metadata I want. Is there a better way to do this that I might be missing out on? Appreciate any advice. Thanks.
Iâve been using Yate for a couple of weeks now. Somewhat of a learning curve, but quite powerful once you get the hang of it. Although Iâm sure Iâve only scratched the surface.
I typically run it on all my downloads now. Offers the ability to search for metadata on Discogs and MusicBrainz, or do manual corrections.
Based on the metadata, it then renames my files exactly the way I want and moves them into a correct artist/album folder structure in a âstagingâ folder on my NAS from where I then do a manual copy to the Roon folders. The last step ensures that the album appears as a whole to Roon and helps to ensure the album is correctly identified by Roon.
Thanks - Iâll have to check that out (I have to do quite a few manual lookups to Musicbrainz for some CDs as XLD (on mac) fails to recognize them. Additionally, XLD normally doesnât handle Discogs either for a majority of my discs that runs into this problem.
The files from Qobuz arenât named how I like (to be consistent with my library), and I also insert additional metadata in XLD (on mac) the same for all my music no matter where I source them (CDs, HDTracks, Qobuz, 7Digital, etc.). I just find XLD easy to use for this task because itâs setup exactly how I like to name my music files (the biggest reason), and then just re-transcode to FLAC again. Since FLAC is lossless, I believe going from FLAC to FLAC again doesnât do any harm (should still be lossless) - but of course, I may be wrong on this point.
In thinking about this more, I could just download .wav files from qobuz and do my usual XLD step to FLAC ⌠but if itâs not really necessary, Iâll just stick to FLAC downloads unless I hear otherwise on why that might not be the best.
I donât just use Roon, but also Plex and my NAS music library application (for why I update the files and metadata the way I do so the non-Roon services can properly categorize, etc. the music files)
You donât need to change naming for that. I have Plex and Asset and works just fine without messing about. But to each their own. I donât want to curate manually itâs the whole point of Roon and Plex.
I purchased a number of albums on Qobuz including âThe Complete Studio Albumsâ of The Doors. This contains a total of 8 albums. The metadata labeled each of the albums as being part of an 8-disc set which is ok. Unfortunately, all my other downloads are also labeled as being part of an 8 disc set.
Easily corrected of course and reported to Qobuz.
On the bright side: I was able to add all purchase to the download queue with a single click
