I hope somebody have experience with both and can tell.
With Qobuz all the time added albums to the Roon library are vanishing. About 2/3 of them are still available but with „another same version“ which must be added again. This requires to add all tags, likes, liked and banned tracks again. And after deleting the unavailable version all play counts are gone.
1/3 of those vanished albums are gone forever.
After doing the work with the „other same versions“ now
more than a hundred times, and latest another 20 albums vanished forever I have finally enough with that.
Qobuz are notorious for doing this. I replaced a batch of albums with the new versions last month and yesterday I searched again for unavailable tracks/albums and found a further 68 albums that needed replacing. Mostly Chandos albums, and what is really irritating is that some were albums that had already been replaced last month.
I use the Track browser to track down the missing albums:
Thank you for your answer. But not only the unavailable albums must be replaced, a lot of albums just vanish without any possible replacement. I just don‘t know, if this happens in Tidal too all the time.
If not, I will change to Tidal and quit Qobuz. But I had to know this before I do the big work of changing all my albums to Tidal versions.
It happens in every music streaming serivce. Its all down to rights management which changes all the time. Nothing you can do about it as you dont own the files. They come they go and sometimes just replaced. This is the nature of streaming. With Tidal they will just disappear without you knowing.
I have found that of my 4,500 Qobuz albums, only some odd unlicenced tracks and very few full albums have been made “unavailable” [based on the tracks focus] in 3 months. Most of what was unavailable came back on its own (some Porcupine Tree disappeared from Qobuz and came back without needing to be replaced). So maybe it’s a good idea not to write them off and replace them right away but to keep an eye on the odd unavailable ones that matter to you.
The only album that has permanently left was Jimmy Page and Black Crowes - Live at the Greek last month, and that’s because the new 3CD version was coming out last Friday. Not saying that they should have deleted the old version, but that’s what they did.
Personally I am just glad to be able to keep track of them in Roon. I was previously on Apple music and you could sort of do it… if you made it almost a part-time job comparing iTunes database outputs on a weekly basis. But really it would just vanish stuff all the time and even replace it with totally different recordings (and it just wouldn’t allow certain things to exist at all in your library, even if you uploaded from your own CD such as Wind It Up by The Prodigy, which has some kind of licencing problem at the moment but that should only affect the streaming version, not the version I own!)
This is also what I noticed sometimes ago. Several albums I had put under favourites had disappeared.
Out of curiosity, thinking that some labels could have withdrawn their agreements with qobuz, I searched further and it turned out all the “disappeared” albums were still available when doing a search. They had been reissued under a different reference number by the labels. This may happen for recently issued albums. The most recent case I remember was the Alela Diane album It’s Always Christmas Somewhere released in december 2023.
Just a minor annoyance for the end user unless you had them in some playlists in which case you need to add them back.
More annoying is when the labels re-issue an album like the Jimmy Page and Black Crowes you mentionned, and the remaster or reissued version is not as good as the original one. But that is another story.
Would be great if Roon would recognise albums being replaced and automatically add the version to the library. The available/unavailable selection in Focus helps but I’ve just spent quite a while updating my library and I’m only up to ‘G’.
I have already voted for the feature suggestion: “Automate Qobuz library album replacement” long ago. But it is only a Qobuz related suggestion, so I am wondering, if this is not needed for Tidal, as there are no such troubles?
And the other part of my question was about completely vanishing albums. For example, here are the Qobuz albums I have added in the last months which vanished, I have made a “Vanished” tag for showing them:
I have enough to replace albums to another version, and to curate albums and tracks with likes and bans and add to playlists when they just vanish after that. Maybe there is anybody who uses both streaming services and can tell, if with Tidal it’s just the same, or any better.
Tidal albums just disappear without warning. Qobuz has a different mechanism which leaves the old records still in place that Roon doesn’t clean up which is why it says unavailable. Tidal loses same amount of material you just won’t know it’s gone until you can’t find it in your library. As mentioned a million times this happens in all streaming services, albums/artists are replaced all the time due to rights management changing.
Exactly what I was experiencing when being subscribed to Tidal. Albums which are not existing anymore disappear without a trace, same to unavailable tracks in playlists, which is particularly annoying.
Does anyone know if this method of identifying unavailable albums is really reliable? Or how does a different one work?
I had albums sourced from Qobuz added to my library which seem to be intact including a channel layout and file format given, but the tracks are all marked as unavailable. Same situation to what is happening when an album is announced but not yet released. Would this be recognized by any focus filter?
Cannot show any example of an album which had previously existed, eventually became unavailable and reappeared again, though. But I remember it was some Stockfisch Record releases, like older Sara K albums. This one track seemingly has survived in a playlist marked as unavailable with no album ´What matters´ existing anymore:
Yes, those tracks will show up if you use Focus in the Tracks view. That includes announced albums (that can be added on Qobuz/Roon but with no playable tracks).
Also you don’t have to use the old ‘channel layout’ hack, which may or may not work. They updated it so you can use ‘available’ and switch it to a ‘-’.
Thank you all again for your answers! Now I understand the difference of albums vanishing in Tidal, thus without a trace. I conclude, as the amount of those albums is the same, Qobuz is therefore the better service.
I am among those having switched from Tidal to Qobuz for various reasons and can absolutely confirm this: Qobuz is the far better choice if you combine a streaming service with roon. Albums disappearing without a trace was not the most common thing with my collection, but questionable sound quality (see threads about unidentified MQA albums), a lot of metagarbage particularly with classical recordings and some other factors really brought me to turn my back on Tidal.
That said, Qobuz does deliver best quality possible in my understanding as they do sell the files musicians/record labels are uploading as downloads. My guess is this leads to a certain level of QC on the label side as they would not dare to upload some crosscoded MP3 or FLACs with wrong metadata, if they know people will pay the 96/24 price for the files.
On the other hand, without roon, Qobuz quality comes at the price of pretty simplistic app and questionable suggestion/radio/global playlist features. Feels like they are 10 years behind Spotify and Tidal AI-wise, but with roon it gives outright perfect user experience!
I checked the unavailable tracks in my library (use Tracks - Focus - Available - Click on Available for NOT Available) and I found about 150 for about ten albums; the problem I encountered is that if I chose a playlist and clicked on ‘Improve’ it told me that there were no NOT AVAILABLE tracks, while I had about ten. When will this check be updated?**
I believe the ‘improve’ on playlists only numbers unavailable tracks if it has been able to match them to available tracks. It does not list them under ‘improve’ if there is no available track to improve to.
Agreed, yes. Perhaps there could be focus filters on playlists in future, which would then allow it to be filtered for unavailable tracks like any other view.
In the meantime one could give all the tracks in a playlist a temporary tag. Then focus/filter the library tracks view for that tag and -available.
Thanks for this tip Geoff, I used it last night and sure enough, many deletes. I guess I have to perform a weekly maintenance going forward to avoid it becoming an overwhelming task. Pain in the arse.
