Qobuz track refuses to play - until it suddenly does

Support
1

I noticed something very interesting today, which suggested a possible cause for the problem where certain tracks in Qobuz refuse to play and are skipped in the queue when using Mosaic.

I was doing some tests today playing a Qobuz playlist via Mosaic and the Qobuz app. I noticed that when playing in Mosaic a certain track (it was this one but I don’t think it matters) wasn’t playing and was being skipped. I assumed it had maybe been removed from the catalogue.

Later I played the same playlist via the Qobuz app and after a couple of attempts the track played. The interesting thing was that thereafter it also played in Mosaic.

So I am wondering if the problem that many users have reported both on the forum and to dCS support with tracks being skipped in Mosaic might be caused by the track in question not being present in the particular regional CDM cache that user is hitting. It could just be that trying to play it in Mosaic somehow fails to pull it into the cache, whereas playing it in the Qobuz app does.

This is purely speculation, I really don’t know how these CDM caches work and how caching might differ between direct access and access via Airable. But I will see if I can prove or disprove it.

Does anybody have any similar observations?

2

Andrew, I haven’t encountered this particular issue you’ve outlined, but in my past experience, failure to play Qobuz tracks have been related to 2 issues;

(1) tracks in a playlist (or Qobuz “favourites”) that are no longer there, or their CDN cache pointers are for whatever reasons out-of-date. Where they are out-of-date, I just have to delete the favourite, relocate the album, and tag it again and everything’s back to working

(2) Pre-release new albums with released singles which play fine, but other tracks that are skipped because they’re not available or otherwise have issues with licensing

By the way, Qobuz only has a single distributed CDN cache globally. However, I believe occasionally, Airable’s CDN pointers are not updated for whatever reasons, and that’s when the experience of playing via Mosaic versus native Qobuz appears different.

3

For what is worth I’ve had this exact problem with Qobuz tracks played from Roon. It is random and often goes away a few days later. Very odd.

4

@Anupc I’ve experienced your point 2, notably with USB by Fred Again. Over a 2 week period the availability of tracks on the album changed.