Tidal Liked Tracks & Roon Albums View [new user]

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hello all, I’m hoping that someone can provide me some clarity on some Roon+Tidal behavior.

I’m giving Roon a trial using the Black Friday 90 days for $1 deal and using the similar Tidal promotion to try it out at the same time. I used Soundiiz to pull in my old Google Play Music data to Tidal, so it’s starting out populated with data. Great, things look pretty good on the whole, other than a few network issues with Android and the issue that this post is about…

My issue is that if I have a liked track in Tidal it makes that track’s album show up in the Roon Albums view. This is not at all what I’m after with an “album” oriented view. I want to go quickly find a whole album and play it. I listen to maybe 50/50 full albums and random genre/related type shuffled lists of varying sorts.

The problems that the current behavior give me are as follows:
(1) I get multiple versions of the same album showing up side by side in the view. As best as I can tell, this is because the Tidal album is perceived as only containing my liked tracks and so has a different number of total tracks and doesn’t match my local copy of the album. If I like the Album itself in Tidal (in addition to or instead of the tracks), then this problem disappears.

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(2) If I Right-Click > Play an album that shows up because of a liked Tidal track, then it only plays my liked track. I never ever want this. Never ever. If I’m in the Album view it’s because I’d like to play an album.

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(3) I get junk Albums that I’m not at all familiar with cluttering up my Albums view (same for Artists view, but that bothers me less). This screenshot is a little worse than average because it’s got the Various Artists albums there, but it illustrates the point as the only albums I actually want to see in Album View are the Venetian Snares albums and the HDTracks sampler)

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I’ve googled my way to a few other previous posts related to this behavior and as best as I can tell, this seems to be the desired behavior for at least some people. But it’s really killing my ability to enjoy Roon. I’m excited about the prospect of Roon + Tidal or Qobuz, but if I can’t get a decent albums view setup it is really tough to justify the cost of Roon.

So now that I’ve complained and rambled on for a while…
Are there any solutions to my album view related issues within Roon currently? I don’t want to spend hours retagging things in Tidal or adding Roon tags to create some weird sort of hack.
Is this something that has seen traction in other threads and might be getting some development attention currently/soon (but isn’t showing up my search results)?

Thanks for any tips or other helpful information!
-Jon

2

I think you have show duplicates switched on.

“When browsing your library Roon hides duplicates by default, but you can turn this off at any time from the General tab of Settings by toggling the Show Hidden Tracks And Albums option.”

Toggling this should hide the duplicates I think.

1 Like
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Welcome. I wonder if this is an artifact of importing from Soundiz. Overall, it sounds like Roon is behaving as designed. If you want to hear entire albums, Roon expects that you will “favorite” the entire album. If you went to the trouble of only “favoriting” a few tracks, Roon assumes that you don’t care for the rest.

I’d suggest going to listen.tidal.com and revisiting your favorite tracks. Click on the album for each one that you care about and “favorite” the entire album. Then go to Services in Roon Settings and have Roon re-sync your TIDAL library

4

Thank you for the suggestions.

ged:
I had the “Show Hidden Tracks and Albums” already turned off. I tried enabling it and disabling it just in case, but it did not seem to change anything.

The only things that seem able to fix the duplicate album behavior is to do one of the following:

  1. Add the album to my Roon Library
  2. Favorite the Album itself within Tidal (which may add it to my Roon Library? I’m not clear on this yet)
  3. Manually Edit > Group Alternate Versions

For options 1 and 2, this is fine enough for Albums that I want to show up the Albums View at all. What I really want is for one of these two options to be the ONLY way for Tidal albums to show up in my Roon Albums View.

There are lots of songs that I like a lot that are on Albums that I never want to listen to apart from those one or two songs. I ONLY want those songs to show up in the Tracks View. I think this desire is the one that is fundamentally different than how Roon is designed. For these songs, I don’t want them or their albums to show up in the Albums View at all. And I’m beginning to suspect that this is fundamentally different from how Roon conceptualizes the Albums View. Maybe my view is skewed here because my local library only consists of full ripped or downloaded albums. I don’t really mess around with purchasing single songs anymore.

David:
The Soundiiz import has things showing up more or less as I expect them to within Tidal. Not quite perfect, but definitely in the realm of good enough. When I look in Tidal, Artists, Albums and Trakcs in “my collection” display as I expect them to. As mentioned above, I think the problem, for me, is how Roon pulls in my information from Tidal.

Assuming I’m correct on my understanding of things here, it’s pretty disappointing and surprising. Surprising because I’m assuming there are plenty of old farts using Roon (I’m still under 40, so I’m not that old am I?) and I assume that old farts like to listen to albums and I can’t imagine anyone who listens primarily to albums likes the way the Albums View operates with Tidal at the moment. Maybe old farts don’t use Tidal? It is disappointing, because I really like most of the bones of Roon but this gets me aggravated everytime I go to listen to something. It’s especially bad on Android where (unless I’m still missing something) there is no way to quickly scroll through the Albums View list or to filter it beyond the bookmarks previously created on the desktop. All the extra “junk albums” make it twice or thrice as slow to find what I’m looking for.

The other thing that I’m running into here, that makes me feel more justified in whining about this is that I don’t know what is going to play if I select an album and hit Play. Will it play the entire album or just the tracks that I liked on Tidal? As best as I can tell I either need to know the inner workings of Roon and where I am within the application or to click into the album to be able to answer this question.

I’d definitely love to hear that I’ve got something fundamentally wrong here and that there is some way to get what I’m after. I thought maybe I could find something under the Focus filters to only see albums that are complete or something else that might get me what I’m after, but I didn’t see anything that looked viable there.

I’m hoping that maybe I have some misunderstanding about how the Roon Library operates with my Tidal Collections (artists/albums/tracks) or something along those lines. I’ve been reading through some of the help documentation, but nothing has jumped out at me a solution yet.

Again, thanks for the tips and hopefully somebody can provide some additional insight for me here.
-Jon

5

I’ve dug and learned a bit more on my own. I’ve discovered a hacky solution that sort of works, but requires a fair amount of manual effort to keep up to date.

Since I’ve only got full albums imported for my local files, I can easily “select all” and apply a tag. So I filtered out all Tidal music, selected all and setup a “complete album” tag.

Then I went to the Tidal view, Favorite Albums, view all and added all albums to a new playlist (because you can’t apply tags from within the Tidal view for some reason, even if the selected music has been added to the Roon Library). From the playlist I can then again select all and add to the “complete album” tag.

This gives me the setup I’m looking for, but has two obvious and similar drawbacks:

  1. It requires that I update this tag every time I add an album to either the Tidal library or to my local library. If I go with this system, then this realistically means that I need to add yet another weekly reminder to my to do list.
  2. It requires that I always filter by “complete album” tag within my Albums View. I setup a bookmark, so this part may not be too annoying. Time will tell.

I’m still hoping that there is a more elegant way to get what I’m after here.

6

Yeah the Roon behavior of showing the album in the album view, when a track has been favorited is very annoying. I worked around the solution by creating a focus on all albums having more than 3 tracks, and adding that focus to a bookmark called “Complete Albums”

It’s not perfect, but is 95% close, and it’s automatic- requires no upkeep. Someday, I’ll go in to fix the false positives and negatives, by adding the outliers to tag’s that can be added to the bookmark.

Tidal’s implementation of the album view is much better. Favorited tracks do not pollute the album view, and favorites albums do not pollute the track view. Simple and elegant! Wish Roon would do the same.

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Old farts like me simply “favorite” entire albums in TIDAL instead of individual tracks.

Perhaps what you are seeing is a problem, but I’ve been using Roon with TIDAL for five years and have never encountered it. I don’t understand why anyone would go to the trouble of adding specific TIDAL tracks to the library. It’s much easier to add entire albums and “favorite” specific tracks (if you want) in Roon.

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@Jonathan_Barton your adding tracks from different release versions of the same album in Tidal. That’s why they show up multiple times. The Bjork one for example you have mqa and the 5.1 version so you must have added tracks from each of them. This is normal behaviour, they are all different releases and Roon will treat them as so, this allows users to choose the version they want to have. You can group them together like you have discovered using group alternative versions.

9

I “favorite” entire albums too. Taken by itself, that part does work exactly as I would expect within Roon.

Maybe I’m really somewhere in between old fart and young fart. Middle-aged-fart is probably most appropriate, I suppose, but it really doesn’t sound as glamorous as old fart.
Anyway…I do sometimes listen to shuffled genres and auto-playlists and all of the other queue generating things that are available when listening to platform based digital music. So when I then “favorite” some tracks as well, to try to incorporate into these types of lists (shuffle all my favorite tracks, etc) or to influence music suggestions, it appears that this breaks what I’d like to see from Tidal.

1 Like
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You know that favoriting a track or album in Tidal does not make it a favorite in Roon? It just adds it to your library, and then you have to ‘heart’ it again to make it a favorite. So it sort of defeats the purpose to just favorite a track in Qobuz for the sake of making it a favorite in Roon. If you favorite the whole album in Qobuz, it then becomes part of your library. Then you can ‘heart’ the track in Roon to make it a favorite. Then you can select all your Roon Favorite tracks and use them in playlists.
edit: I think this is sort of stupid myself (not adding the album and favoriting the track in one fell swoop), but that’s the way it is at the moment…

11

Interesting. Maybe I misunderstood how this piece was supposed to work. I thought it should automatically group them and show different versions under the main album heading. It does seem to work this way for some albums at least.

In the Bjork example, I had assumed that I had some tagging cleanup work to deal with. (I definitely have some cases of albums needing to be tagged in a slightly more Roon friendly fashion)

The other thing that gets me on this one, is that if I click through from the Tidal-favorited tracks to the Tidal album and then favorite the album (and take no other action), then the duplicates disappear. Meaning that Roon understands that the two albums are the same one (my local one and the Tidal version), but that it only groups them if I’ve favorited the album (or added to my Roon library), not if it’s included because I have favorited tracks in Tidal.

There appears to be a fair amount of subtlety here and different ways of understanding how Roon (and released music in general I suppose) operates.

12

It will do that if you have two versions of the same release such as your own rip and one from Tidal. But say you have one that’s a deluxe version of the album or a hires remaster it would be a seperate one. I don’t add tracks myself only albums so never really experienced this only see duplicates if they are a completely different release and I then group them so they show under one album.

13

The problem with this approach is that I really don’t want the album in my library in many of these cases. Particularly when looking in the Albums View, these extra albums are then just noise that I have to mentally sift through.

The main way that I favorite tracks is while listening to them in some sort of auto-generated play queue. The main reason I start/favorite/whatever them is so that I can find them again. Within the context of a music streaming service, I hope to also improve my recommendations for new music, though I don’t actually know which services this is true of (and I’d guess this is not the case with Roon). This is to say that I’d rather not go through the effort of clicking through from the queue to the song’s album, favoriting that and then later favoriting songs within the Roon library.

14

Also it does look like Roon sees a lot of those as different releases. It maybe if your metadata is off it might not have matched them to the same album or failed to match them at all. You can check in album view and focus to see which albums are unidentified this may show up some of the ones with issues. Just an idea that might be worth looking at. You can try and then match it.