There are several open topics in Feedback > Feature Suggestions about this
Tidal-wise we have a couple of examples.
Satyricon - Volcano is still there (in both Roon and Tidal) but all tracks are unavailable. They are tracked and can be focused as “-available” in Roon and are greyed out on Tidal.
Babymetal - Metal Galaxy, a couple of weeks ago has vanished from both Qobuz and Tidal, and is NOT indexed in the Tidal app nor can it be added in Tidal or Roon. The track links can be found in a community playlist but the app fails to find the album if you click through to it (i.e. it is different to Volcano, which is there but all greyed out). The playlist’s links still have the info though so there is some trace of it in Tidal.
I suspect in the latter kind of instance you would have to keep an eye on your album count and investigate your regular exported album lists’ “External ID” field to determine what was missing. I don’t have an example of this happening on Tidal while the album is favourited and the album either being removed from Roon or sticking around, but after a while I might do, and I do already keep an eye on my album count and keep exported album lists with IDs.
It doesn’t look to me like regularly having to replace relicenced content is a thing on Tidal, but that keeping an eye on the albums (via album list Excel exports, at least) would be, for the occasional album that is actually removed.
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Tidal news regarding this experiment: this week, Be’lakor - The Frail Tide (melodeath) was relicenced on Tidal [I had the Tidal version linked as it was not on Qobuz]. It vanished from my library completely and the album count went down by 1. I compared with my album list from last week and this was what was missing.
So, I was able to re-add it (as it’s not only been replaced with a new version on Tidal but also added to Qobuz), but it wasn’t a Qobuz situation where the tracks become “unavailable” and you can track the list of unavailable stuff. In this case it just vanished and left no trace in my library.
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In light of the above and wanting to stop using Tidal I’ve looked again on Qobuz for releases that I’ve marked as missing. The following appear to have been added to Qobuz since January:
All Violet Cold albums (though some are not in the discog they can all be found by following ‘more by this artist’ from an album in the app)
Tchornobog/Abyssal split
Spectral Lore - Eterofotos
Ben Folds Five - Complete Sessions at West 54th
All TWRP albums
Wolf - Evil Star
Till Lindemann - Zunge 2025
Peter Rock/Ini - Center of Attention
Big Big Train - English Electric: Full Power
Not a bad haul and it looks like Qobuz are actively hunting down some black spots (e.g. Violet Cold and TWRP), or they are opting into Qobuz. Either way better than I expected
Thanks again for your inspection and information. It shows, that Tidal does the same like Qobuz, removing and readding albums so that the former get lost in Roon, but as others already told, with complete removal from Roon so that you can’t search for it using “unavailable tracks” which is pretty worse. I still wonder, if with Tidal it is as much as with Qobuz…?
There is still nothing like an ISBN number for audio, replacing those odd label catalog numbers.
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I wonder how long it will take, that you have to readd them.
It’s also worth noting that I have almost 9,000 Qobuz albums (none of which are duplicates of my 4,500 actual CDs), ranging from massive pop to very obscure, and of the 200 albums I noted as having failed to find on Qobuz, I now have 95 on Tidal filling those gaps. Tidal only having 95 albums that are not on Qobuz, out of 9,000 targeted albums, is only a 1% difference in content (and who knows, there may be more albums than that, out of same Qobuz albums, missing from Tidal). It’s not actually as big a difference in library content as I had expected.
The number of available albums on Qobuz or Tidal is not my concern here. I have also a Spotify subscription. If I can’t find an album on Qobuz I can hear it on Spotify in most cases, and it is delivered lossless now, so I am satisfied with the quality too.
My concern is to curate albums from Qobuz in Roon, which is what Roon is made for I think, and then loosing all that work and information cause Qobuz just changes a catalog number. If this is a minor problem with Tidal I will change to Tidal, if there is this same problem with Qobuz and Tidal in Roon, I consider to use Roon for my local library only and stay with Spotify for streaming. I have never seen an liked album or track unavailable cause just a change of the catalog number.
The problem is probably worse in Tidal as you would have to manually keep track of whether each album still exists or not, and then still have the same issue with metadata even if you catch what drops off.
For what it’s worth I noticed almost everything in my massive playlists is still fine years later in Spotify, but some stuff did disappear just because a new version appeared (Pink Floyd mostly). It remained, but was greyed out.
Ok, I give up on it now. Could have done that earlier.
Tidal is sure worse, with not knowing which albums has been readded as different version.
If this happens e.g. 10 times less like in Qobuz which would be a plus is unknown.
Even with Spotify there are same (rare) cases when this happens.
Comparing (right now again) the actual features of Roon and Spotify to organize a streaming library shows, that Roon is far beyond Spotify and even more to native Qobuz and Tidal.
Now just hoping, that this problem with changed albums will be fixed in the future. Was right now looking, since my last work on readding changed Qobuz albums several weeks ago there is no single changed album since then.
Thanks for all the input, especially from David at last.
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