What happens if music disappears from Tidal?

While using GPM, I’ve frequently experienced this two annoying things due to the licensing issues/changes:

  • album is removed from GPM and added again from a different source
  • album is removed from GPM

In both cases, if that happened for a favourite album, a favourite track or a track that was added to a playlist, it would just be removed without any trace.

Now I’m wondering how would that work for Tidal/Roon combination? What will happen to a favourite album (marked with heart) or my playlist contents if an album is removed from Tidal, or replaced with another instance from a different source?

P.S. I understand I couldn’t listen to it if it isn’t there any more, but disappearing without trace would make me lose my data I care about.

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This happened to me a few years ago. Tidal albums that I had added disappeared from my library. It hasn’t, however, happened recently sfaik.

It turns out that occasionally for arcane licensing reasons Tidal changes the versions of an Album that are available in different copyright regions.

There is no mechanism in Roon that monitors this. The most I can suggest is noting your Album count and using Export to create a list of Albums in your Library. If the Album count changes unexpectedly, Export a second list and have a program compare the two.

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Well, sure there could be a mechanism for that:

  • albums could remain in the library, but just as a placeholder, without songs
  • playlists could still have tracks, but appearing “ghosted” and unplayable until they reappear (either in Tidal or locally)

Deezer does the latter; not sure about the first one.

So, the questions still stand - what will Roon do?

This is the streaming world we have and hopefully it will improve. I don’t worry about it at all unless a piece of music is not there when I needed (if you ever really need it) it.

This has never happened as I have access to more music that I can possibly play with the time available to me, in my lifetime.

I have had this happen a lot with Tidal. The way I tend to keep a check on this is by going to the tidal website logging in and scrolling through all my albums, as it shows the album’s that have been removed still in my collection but without any artwork and obviously there is no play icon on the album. I do this once a week and takes about 10 mins for me to do for just short of 5000 albums, but means I can replace a missing album in my collection then.

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Currently, the streaming album and all associated edits and play information is gone. There are feature requests suggesting things from Reports to auto choosing a replacement and moving any meta-information.

I run an excel dump and load it into a database to track Tidal and Qobuz albums.

While a person who has many local files and just uses Tidal/Qobuz to fill in the blanks, may find it a bit annoying. I expect that users who only have streaming will find it a lot more problematic.

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Sigh, that is really disappointing.

What exactly do you export to Excel (and how)?

I go to albums, click Focus, on the bottom right I choose Format, choose Tidal, this give me all the tidal albums in my library. Select all, three button menu, choose Export, then export to excel. Save the file on the desktop.

Cool, tnx. I’ll use it as a workaround as well…

I then import the excel files into a database, where I can run it through some stored procedures to compare it to previous exports and produce a “Deprecation Report”.

Well, as I’m quite successful in avoiding databases (I’m a programmer), I was thinking doing a text export and then comparing in Araxis Merge. :wink:

Hopefully Roon will do something proper…

The big problem is if you try to get the full potential out of Roon and curate your albums with tags, favorites and all the great stuff Roon offers us music lovers. And some times later all your work is thown in the bin, only because the streaming provider change the album id our what ever.
That is very frustrating and I ask me if I am willing to do the work again, only to see it eventually thrown away again in the future. I think a lot of people will answer this question with NO. And the result is, the potentials of Roon are wasted, because the user is to frustrated to use them.
This makes Roon a smaller product as it could be.

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That is why I never suggest anyone edit streamed library content.
Albums fall off and get re-added everyday. As it is, most users, I think and could be wrong, don’t realize that things… change… with streaming services.