More than 3 years since I started this thread and nothing has changed.
January was a really bad month. I had to re-add more than 30 Tidal albums because they disappeared since 01/01.
Why should I bother to curate albums when everything can be gone in a short time anyway. Favorites, corrections, tags, playlists, play-count, …
I’m about to leave Roon, since many of the benefits aren’t really usable anyway until this situation changes.
@support
What are the plans to solve this problem in a sustainable way?
I can think of different ways, like only mark this albums as deleted and give an option to re-associate an album with the saved metadata.
Without a solution half of the great features of Roon are useless.
The ask is for Roon to give a detailed list of albums / tracks that have been removed / are no longer accesible, including when a streaming service removed the content.
Imho not enough. Where should be a way to rescue your edits and data (favorites, corrections, tags, playlists, play-count, …) if an album is deleted and re-added under a new id in the streaming service.
I don’t understand why there is no option to see what’s gone from your database compare and say hey look these have been removed. Then at least you can look for them. But no we just get X files have been deleted in library maintenance with no idea as to what they are.
We totally get your frustration with albums being removed from your TIDAL account due to licensing changes. We’re music lovers as well, it’s happened to all of us for as long as there’s been streaming music. My most memorable case of this was with the Super Deluxe Edition of Fresh Cream. The mono mixes of that early Cream stuff is where it’s at! No donut hole in mix there, what a muscular sound! Nope, gone. And not just gone from my streaming either, gone everywhere. It took me months to find a sealed physical copy that didn’t cost as much as a Devialet Phantom.
Music streaming platforms, in general, aren’t very transparent about these licensing changes because they’re also on the receiving end of the whims of the music industry and publishing firms when it comes to this stuff. Sometimes titles are available again after a brief delay, sometimes not. How many streaming services are going to say ‘Subscribe to our service, your favorite music - here one day, maybe gone the next.’ That’s a terrible slogan!
As Brian mentioned earlier in this thread, figuring out a mechanism to flag these licensing fluctuations would take quite some effort, implementing system wide changes requires a lot of work. In most cases it would be moot, because, licensing rights are frequently restored on releases quickly and without anyone having to lift a finger.
This just isn’t feasible from a metadata approach. The work that has gone into disambiguation and recognizing unique identifiers for different versions of albums is Herculean. We can’t also tell the index that any new ID is also equivalent to any other ID of the same album, but only in cases where licensing has expired on ID A but remains in place on ID B, C, D, If/then restore play counts, tags, and edits on ID B contingent upon…
There’s plenty of customers who wouldn’t want us to do that.
Also, in fairness, the intervening three years have been plenty busy with development work. You, and anyone else reading this has been beneficiary to that work. We have to make choices and prioritize our vision for the product against customer feature requests. Just because something doesn’t happen within a desired timeline doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea or coming at a later time.
Development decisions are always in flux. There are a lot of things moving through the R&D pipeline, things that you have requested for a while, things you’re going to really like.
Thanks for chiming in on this thread @jamie . Reading through your response, I can see there’s a lot involved in developing a good solution to this. However, even a small step in the right direction would be helpful. For example, surely it’s straightforward to identify when albums in the library no longer exist on Tidal? Yes, they may have moved to another id/licensing arrangement etc. but the effect on the library is the same - they vanish.
At least reporting on this (e.g. a filter on unavailable that actually works for missing albums) would be a step forwards. The user can then do as they wish with that information. At the moment, the only alternative is to go through the Tidal app and try to identify those that are greyed out (phone app) or have no play symbol (desktop app). This really is a fantastic waste of users’ time.
I understand that Roon is massively pushing the streaming paradigm (in fairness, the whole industry is), but it would be good if there was a quid pro quo for those of us that are concerned by the transient nature of streaming music.
And before anyone helpfully tells me to buy the albums I value, I do, but not if I don’t realise they’ve vanished in the first place!
Thank you @dhusky for your reply. As I said, a way to flag these library changes is something that is being/has been looked at. It very well could be a feature we add in the future. We have to look closely at feature requests and determine which among them offer the greatest benefit to the largest cross section of our customers. It’s a balance, and no matter what we decide it won’t please everyone.
Remember the old days of Roon when native/and lock screen controls weren’t available? That’s an example of a feature request that had to be prioritized, took considerable work to get right, and offered greater benefit to a larger segment of our customers. While we worked on that in the background there were people who complained that nothing was be done on that front.
All we ask is that you understand this, just because you don’t see the progress that is being made on outstanding feature requests doesn’t mean that no progress is being made on outstanding feature requests. We thank you in advance.
Fair enough, thanks @jamie, I do of course understand that all of us will have different priorities and that feature requests need to be prioritised in some way. Glad to hear it is still being actively considered.
@jamie Thanks for your response.
I totally understand that it will not be easy to automate such a thing.
Maybe a more simple handwork approach could reach the same goal.
For example: if the system can report a missing album the metadata is still in the database and with a mechanism similar to the manual album identification the user could re-link the metadata to the new album-id. So the hard decision which album is the right one is at the user.
Only an idea.
@jamie@AE67@ged_hickman1 Is there a specific Feature Request for this that we can vote on? Since this is in TIDAL area there is voting.
One idea would be a report or function I could run as a user that just goes through MY library of streaming albums and tracks and shows me in a panel anything “missing” from the streaming service and the ability to export said list to Excel. Another variation would be to loop through my Roon playlists and find missing songs. TIDAL does this on their end, a missing song is shown as greyed out.
By making this a user initiated feature the workload is on the users workstation (could kick it off at night).
Not solving for all of Roon, but a step for individual users.
Same issue with Qobuz discussed here, and I would just like a manual way to copy my metadata edits from the unavailable album to the new one, like I described there.
I intended to write a feature request for that but didn’t yet get around to it because I wanted it to be good and detailed one. I did manage a suggestion in response to a Roon staff member here:
But that’s probably not good enough. If you write a feature request, it would be great if you could tag me
Tidal just deleted three of my albums, but I don’t know which one’s. Bummer.
EDIT: I think I figured out how to do this:
Export your Tidal albums using Focus to an Excel spreadsheet. At a later date, export to another Excel spreadsheet with a different name. Then, open both spreadsheets in Excel and view side-by-side. Click on simultaneous scrolling and go down the list and compare.
Now, if someone can tell me how to subtract one spreadsheet from the other, we will have left the differences.
I had a difference of 3 albums between my PC server and Nucleus and just did this by comparing 1600 lines and quickly found the 3 missing albums. Does anyone know how to automate this in Excel?
EDIT2: I’m trying to figure out the =countif() method. I’m not an Excel expert.
On the Review tab of Excel, there should be a Compare option, I think this should do it. But Microsoft keeps changing what’s available in different versions and now in different subscriptions of Office 365, so YMMV. Maybe like this:
Thanks, but that’s not going to work for me. I’m using free WPS Office and it doesn’t have that feature. I’ll explore the =countif() method.
EDIT: There is also the =countifs() method that works if you don’t have a unique identifier. This method allows you to use multiple columns to find the missing rows in the spreadsheet. I think this would be easier if I had Microsoft Office with Access.
EDIT2: This is a somewhat cumbersome method, but I was able to use the =countifs() method to find difference between my Nucleus and Dell Tidal libraries.
I don’t know anything about free WPS Office, but in Excel I’d use a vlookup against the newer table. Missing records will give an error. You can pretty that up, but even just the error should highlight what you’re looking for.
