Tidal and poorer quality mp3 downgrading

Why are so many tidal LP’s now appearing as mp3 or being reverted to mp3 from previous FLAAC standard?

for example I see the latest two Rokia Traore albums are only mp3 and of such obvious lower quality that they are not worth the playing

At the same time several US3 albums have disappeared from Tidal through Roon where before they were only available through Roon and not directly on Tidal; e.g. “An ordinary day in an unusual place”

I’m getting a bit fed up with this arbitrary curating of albums that I have in my CD collection but are so much better streamed through High End Linn kit which is a reason for joining Roon and Tidal.

Who is making these poor quality decisons?

cheers
Mike
PS I have a hifi subscription

We do not make decisions about content quality. This is up to the record labels. TIDAL curates their library, we are just a conduit that provides access to it. We always request content from TIDAL’s servers at the highest quality level possible given your account status, region, and what they have license to stream.

Roon receives data dumps from TIDAL daily, so there is a ~24-36hr lag in processing updates into our world. So it’s possible for something to first be available on both “sides”, then disappear from TIDAL first (because they lost their license to the content), then disappear from Roon a day or two later.

Hi

if you look direct in Tidal without going through a Roon account and have a hifi subscription not only can you get the Né So album as FLAAC but also as Master.

Why can I not see these quality levels through my Roon service? After all that is why I went for Roon quality curation and informative service?

Cheers
Mike

The US3 album that I used as an example is regarded as on of their best and would be seminal in many collections.

Also it was available for at least 3 months through Roon when not available on Tidal so the 24/36 thing was not the case here.

Tidal is in danger of turning into a rap driven desert whilst not acknowledging some of the key early gurus

Cheers
Mike

Aside from the lag, there should be no difference in content accessibility.

If you are seeing differences, the best time to investigate is when they are happening–there is no way for us to go back a month and see what state TIDAL servers were in at that time for comparison.

If you have specific examples where TIDAL and Roon are giving you different quality levels for the same album, let @support know and they will follow up. The best way to confirm this is to add the album from the TIDAL app, then sync your library in Roon and look at what happens when you play it there. To our knowledge there should be no differences, but as I said before, TIDAL makes the final determination of what to stream at the time of playback.

TIDAL does not provide us with that information up front, so we do not have it to display to you.

Let’s stay with Rokia Traore Né So album

right now on Roon it is shown avialable as two albums both mp3

If I click to play it AND THEN click the three dots and go to the Tidal version it then comes up as FLAAC - what a journey, why? However I’m only given the FLAAC version and no choice in your interface for the M master version which I can get on Tidal direct as I have a hifi subscription.

But that is not all. If I forget about Roon and only use my Tidal app, it does not come up as mp3 at all but shows as a choice between FLAAC and M for master.

Why does the Roon app not read that I have a hifi subscription to Tidal and pass through both the quality choices?

I’m sorry to be a pain but why am I using Roon at all?

I do not want to have to know the vagaries of the lack of a transparent interface by having to remember to go to a Tidal version then even then not getting my Tidal subscription choices. (why are you even showing other versions as I’m connected as a Tidal subscriber when I log onto Roon?)

Until these idiosyncratic anomalies started to surface I’ve been a huge fan of the Roon curation capability with friends etc.

Are these disjoints there with Qobuz also?

I really expect you to provide a one click to the quality that I’ve subscribed to whether Tidal or Qobuz with no added fiddle factors built in.

If you cannot fix that for the required transparency for Tidal or Qobuz then perhaps I should wait until you’ve fixed them before considering continuing my subscription with you. Was going to go lifetime until this cropped up.

many thanks
Mike
PS am not playing through headphones but high end Linn streaming kit which is why straight up streamed reproduction quality without five button presses is important.

Ok, I think I’m getting what you’re saying. You’re assuming that we have a feature that we call “scan + match”–which would automatically upgrade your content based on content available at TIDAL, but that is not something that our product does today. These are not “anomalies”. You’re making a feature request/giving product feedback. That’s welcome, too, of course. At the beginning of this thread I was assuming that you were reporting a bug.

As for what’s possible today–

We’re showing other versions because Roon is all about your library, meaning the content that you have chosen to collect. While Scan+Match is a useful feature, it would also offend a lot of our user base if we did it automatically, as many of them are very particular about which mastering or edition they are looking at and would not appreciate having well known content transparently replaced by something “better” to our algorithms but worse to them.

The key to getting the experience you want is to add the TIDAL content you care about to your library. Roon will automatically collapse duplicate albums into each other and choose the highest quality, once they are already there.

Scan+Match is the missing link that would automatically populate them for you. This is something we’ve talked about doing before, but does not currently exist.

We can’t know about the Master quality stuff up front without TIDAL’s help. That one is squarely with them. We have discussed solving this with them, but the ball is in their court at the moment.

Not something I would ever use as I do care about which version in Roon is the primary version. However, one thing that would be critical is the ability to “roll back” the Scan+Match. Also, it would be usefulness if Scan+Match could be applied to a Focus instead of the whole library, e.g., focus on a format type like MP3 and then tell Roon to add the better version from Tidal.