Tidal songs are still unavailable in Roon

[Arash]

Core Machine

Windows 10 Home version 20H2 (OS build 19042.985)
Roon version 1.8 (build 790) stable (64bit)

Audio Devices

NAD C 658 BluOS Streaming DAC
Audioquest DragonFly Cobalt

Description of Issue

I still keep seeing quite a few songs marked as “unavailable” while it’s available on Tidal and other appls luke BluOS and USB Audio Player Pro. Here’s a new example from Jorja Smith’s new album: “Be Right Back”, as seen here:

Some songs have been marked unavailable for a year or more, like Marvin Gaye’s album “Live At The Palladium” in MQA 192Khz, as seen here:

I mentioned the missing songs in Marvin Gaye’s album last year, and it still hasn’t been resolved. Could you please resolve these kinds of issues ASAP so this won’t happen again? Not being able to play available songs on Roon is definitely a deal breaker, especially if issues like this keep persisting.

Thank you in advance for your support.

Kind regards,

Arash

[Geoff_Coupe]

I suspect that the root cause of this issue lies not with Tidal or Roon, but the Label supplying the files to Tidal.

The Labels can change the rights for streaming a track or album at any time, and make it unavailable for streaming. They can also restrict the availability of an album or track to certain geographical regions of the world.

In the case of Jorja Smith’s new album, because this is a new release (today), it may well be that the track becomes available later. I’ve seen Labels restrict the availability of tracks on some new albums until a the album has been out for a few weeks.

For the Marvin Gaye album, the Label (Motown) may well have issued a replacement release for the Palladium album to Tidal with those tracks now made available. It will be worth searching to see if this is the case and replace the original version in your library with a newer version.

I don’t use Tidal, but Qobuz, and in this service I see clearly that the Motown has released different versions. One version has the two tracks marked as “Unavailable” - but they are available in another version of the album. What adds to the confusion is that both albums have the same Release Date.

Let me illustrate this:

Here’s what I see in the Qobuz desktop app, two HiRes and one CD version of the Palladium album:

The second HiRes version has tracks 9 and 13 ghosted out in the Qobuz app, indicating that they are only 30-second sample tracks:

And so Roon marks these tracks as “Unavailable”:

You can try going to this album in your Library and click on the “Versions” tab to show other versions of the album. I see here (for Qobuz) that Roon shows the CD version, but has ignored the alternate HiRes version. As it happens, the CD version has all tracks with the rights set to “Available”, so I could add this version to my library, and delete the original version.

Alternatively, I could “Favourite” the HiRes version with all tracks in the Qobuz app to add it to my Roon library - that way I get the correct HiRes version.

Once you have the version of the album with all the tracks in your Roon library, you definitely need to delete the original version for Roon to recognise that all the tracks are now available in the new version.

[Arash]

As I’ve mentioned in the original post, only Roon has this issue with these Tidal songs. Both BluOS and USB Audio Player Pro have no issues regarding this. So, it’s obvious it’s a bug that can and should be resolved.

I’ve named two albums with these “unavailable” tracks, but I’ve come across plenty of these examples on other albums (I personally care less about). And these kinds of issues have been going on for more than a year now (ever since I’ve been using Roon).

As a former senior software engineer and scrum master, I have a huge respect for Roon’s development team. I just don’t think it’s unacceptable to have these kinds of issues, especially if they never seems to resolve. And honestly, the same can be said about a lot of bug reports on this community. I’ve posted a similar topic like this and other unrelated bugs, and those topics have been closed because of 365 days of lack of feedback, despite being unresolved.

I just hope Roon’s bug fixing takes a higher priority than it seems to be having now (as if it’s on no one’s radar).

Thanks

[Arash]

Jorja Smith’s song is available now. The 2 Marvin Gaye songs aren’t though.

[Geoff_Coupe]

And they won’t ever be - on that particular version of the Marvin Gaye album. Best to substitute it in your library with another version.