Tidal albums get lost

I’ve done some more digging around in my History this morning. Lo and behold:

But then weirdly, this is the play from the album’s release date:


What is strange about this one is that multiple versions of the album (e.g. MQA etc) don’t exist on Tidal.

I also noticed another album that’s been ninja-removed from my library. Notice that this one had favourited tracks, so bye-bye curation, I suppose?

I have to say, this behaviour is really troubling and Roon should seriously think about leaving placeholders for albums that may have changed ID in Tidal for whatever reason.

If you click on versions, you can still get a Redbook version of albums that Tidal has released in MQA.

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This is troubling to Roon also and getting actively investigated. Reports like the one you provided above are very helpful. Like you, I wondered if I was imagining things, so it’s great to see that I’m not just going crazy (at least in this respect). I’m not sure what an eventual solution is going to look like. I know Roon will want it to be seamless for users; add an album once and it’s always there.

Hello All,

I wanted to update you regarding the status of the missing tracks investigation.

A few days ago we launched a forensic investigation and have been reviewing the diagnostics info from those affected by this issue. From what we can tell, everything on Roon’s end is working as designed, since Roon simply gets a list of track IDs from TIDAL that are part of your library, and only removes a track from your library when the user specifically tells us to.

It’s possible that that tracks are getting new IDs, but the new IDs are not being added back into your library. If you have specific examples of tracks being removed from your library, we encourage you to report this to TIDAL – they may be able to give you more insight into why these tracks were removed. From Roon’s perspective these IDs were simply removed from your TIDAL library, and there’s no way for us to know whether you “un-starred” the track in TIDAL or not.

In the past, we have discussed changes that would allow Roon to take a more direct role in managing the contents of your library (distinct from your TIDAL favorites) but we don’t have any timeline for when (or if) that might happen, so for now we encourage everyone to report these issues back to TIDAL, and let us know what you’re hearing.

Thanks,
Noris

I have a similar occurrence just noticed this evening. I had Late Night Tales albums in a playlist and they have dissapeared from roon but are still available in Tidal.
I will report to Tidal and see what they say.
As they no longer show in roon is there anyway of finding out what their previous IDs were?

Hi Noris.

This seems worrying mainly because I expect our reports will be lost in the general noise of support requests that go into tidal and my experience of 1st line support is that they don’t have the knowledge of third party integrations such as the Roon relationship.

Can you advise us what the correct Tidal support channel is to report this behaviour?

From TIDAL’s perspective–you added release X to your library, and release X is no longer licensed to you, therefore it is gone. In their world, this is working as designed. They do not make the licensing decisions, and our investigations have concluded that everything is working how it was designed to work on their end and on ours–I don’t think anyone here has the power to make the labels stop changing licenses over time.

I agree that the resulting behavior isn’t ideal, but there is a big difference between “working as designed but not ideal” and a legitimate bug/defect that demands immediate resolution. The root cause is licensing changes–something outside of everyone’s control. If there is a defect to fix, that it is–and there’s really no-one at Roon or TIDAL who can change how that world works.

A solution that we could employ in Roon is to re-think the definition of what it means for content to be in your library. A new approach where we track logical ownership of content instead of physical ownership. Right now Roon tracks media–files on your hard drive, or specific tracks in TIDAL’s library. To solve this properly, we would have to instead track logical items–something like the ISRC identifiers or release identifiers. Then when you go to play something, or when we go to determine if it is visible, we would look for any route to the content instead of the specific content that you chose to add explicitly.

This is, to be clear, a total restructuring of Roon’s library management. I think it is a worthwhile direction…and we’ve been thinking about this direction for years as part of the mobile/on-the-go project–since that project demands a more flexible approach to content routing. For example, if I own release X of Kind Of Blue, the best way to access it might be different at home (high-res FLAC) or in the car in a low-bandwidth situation (same release, streamed from TIDAL in AAC). It doesn’t take too big a leap to see how if TIDAL had multiple equivalent releases of Kind Of Blue the same kind of routing infrastructure could facilitate transparent replacement as streaming licenses change.

I’m fairly confident that we will obsolete this problem when that version of Roon is ready. I don’t think we are doing anything about this between now and then. If you’d like to complain to TIDAL, feel free, but I doubt that they will see this as urgent or even as their responsibility, since the root cause is upstream of them too, and because this is how TIDAL, Roon, and Roon+TIDAL have worked since the very beginning.

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@brian, thanks for the comprehensive feedback on this and a possible solution for the future.

For my part, at the moment I’m not so much worried that the content disappears - it’s annoying but I accept that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and that’s the cost to me of paying only £20/month for an incredible range of music. However, I am concerned that I don’t know it has disappeared and therefore can’t replace it. Since this information is available (albeit indirectly) through the Tidal UI it would be really helpful to surface it, e.g as mentioned a while back being able to focus on these unavailable albums.

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I always know when it’s disappeared as I can’t play it. Then I just re add on the few occasions I have noticed this. If I’m not playing it, it doesn’t matter it’s not there. A quick search finds anything wether or not it’s in the library.
Just my take on it…

Maybe we have different issues? For me the album isn’t there to know that I can’t play it (and I can’t remember everything that I add to my library).

I’d be more sanguine about it if it was simply that the record label had fallen out with Tidal and the content was no longer available. As it is, the root cause is version changes by Tidal - and transparent ones at that. They’ve changed one 16/44 release for another (probably the exact same one), and given it a new db identifier.

The other benefit you’d get from this is if you expand your list of streaming partners in the future, subscribers who “surf” between them wouldn’t necessarily have to manually re-add their content from the other streaming provider.

No Chris, you’ve completely missed what’s going on.

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I know what’s going on and if something is that important, I buy it for real. This seems to be a minor issue with streaming via Tidal at this time. It will all come out in the wash.

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I don’t consider it to be a minor issue.

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Then I hope that would be optional, just like authorizing substitutions with online food shopping. Personally, I never authorize substitutions when using a food shopping application because I want exactly what I want.

Now, to be fair, there are items which I care more about substitutions than others. ie. I could care less what version of Abba I get played (as long as it is lossless), but, I care emotionally what version/mastering of Kind of Blue I’m listening too. But, I don’t expect a per album level of substitution authorization.

Whole Foods aka PrimeNow gets around this by sending me a specific email to authorize each potential substitution. Harris Teeter, Wegmans and others are just a global “No Substitutions” checkbox.

That was just an example of a useful capability–not going to litigate possible future product in this venue :slight_smile:

It was quoted further up the thread but just noting this earlier thread where Joel talks about the same issue.

I readded three albums today that had disappeared from Tidal favourites. Noting them in case others liked them also:

Adding albums from Tidal within Roon itself. Certain albums I keep having to re add, even though I have synced my library settings for tidal. This appears to be quite random as to which albums need to re added back into my library again?

This happened to me too a couple of days ago. An album I had just added was deleted as I was looking at the overview page.

I added it again and looked at it on its own album page… a message popped up to say “this album has been deleted”.

Added it again and managed to start playing track 1; ten seconds later the same message popped up and play stopped. Resynced tidal, repeated exercise, same result.

Rebooted Roon server on Rock and problem went away.
I put it down to “just one of those things” but interesting that you have experienced similar effects.

As far as I know, only the one album exhibited the behaviour.

Weird. I suppose we should flag @support for info although I don’t have a problem any more.

Merged some posts into this thread. As you will see from Brian’s post above it’s a licensing issue as recording companies and Tidal change IDs they fall out of Tidal favourites and hence Roon. Not library like behaviour.

There is one album in my collection which has continually exhibited this add/re add behaviour since I first added it to my library within Roon when it first came out and that is the MQA version of The Carters “Everything Is Love”. At least once per month I notice that it needs re adding when I am browsing on Tidal. The album plays fine start to finish though.

This isn’t entirely accurate. Tidal maintains that the formerly licensed album is “no longer available”. At least that is what I see in the Album view.

For me, this is much more helpful than having the album entirely disappear, which is what Roon does. If I could use the inspector in Roon to collect albums in my library that are “no longer available” (from Tidal or elsewhere), I could at least decide whether to purchase or pursue them elsewhere.

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