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I currently use tidal and I'm thinking of switching. The most important feature of an audio streaming service for me is, audio radio. Meaning, I have a base playlist and I want it to auto generate it with more similar songs so it doesn't stop. New discoveries are important too.
Does it offer this recommendation feature? The last time I briefly checked it I didn't find information about that. I'd like some confirmation before I begin merging my 1k+ liked songs...
I’ve preferred Qobuz to Tidal since they were hocking MQA snake oil and lying about being lossless. Tidal eventually stopped using MQA, but I can’t help feel leftover ick at their dishonesty.
I'm pretty happy with Tidal so far; I tried Qobuz back when I was looking for an alternative to Spotify and I remember the Android app being borderline unusable. I might be misremembering things though.
Throwing out there that I use qobuz with Strawberry player on Linux and it works great.
My favourite thing about Qobuz is they have a store where you pay money and they give you audio files, like in the old days. So you can pay for your music then keep it without an ongoing subscription.
While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.
I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.
Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!
While true, and I have a lot of DRM-free music that I’ve bought from Apple, the difference is that getting music purchased from Apple onto your computer in a usable format is a bit of a pain, and it’s all lossy. Music from Qobuz can be downloaded directly from their site after purchasing, in lossless FLAC format, and many of their albums are available in high-res 24-bit and/or 96 kHz format as well.
Apple Music in its current form is basically a direct evolution out of iTunes. It's a very old feature.
I know Apple has a music store. But if I use Android and Linux, how do I access it?
I run Qobuz through a roon server on my Linux pc and it works great. I also have qobuz set up through strawberry, but it's nice to be able to switch the output on the fly between different audio setups in my house (between my office setup and my bluesound streamer in the living room). The interface for roon is nice, but I get that it's kinda expensive and there are cheaper ways to achieve the same thing. I like to stream while I'm biking on my indoor trainer and sometimes it's nice to spin up a few songs and let roon take the wheel to keep the vibe going. I can also stream qobuz through roon to my Google home devices, but it doesn't stream bit perfect.
All that to say, I like qobuz and roon is pretty solid as well, albeit an extravagance and totally not necessary. The writeups qobuz has are also solid.
I do think the qobuz app interface leaves something to be desired.
Oh boy, I have wanted to purchase Roon server for probably 10 years now but haven't pulled the trigger. I haven't really looked at it in a while either. I now wonder how much it's changed since. Wow, it's $829 for a lifetime now! I wanna say it was like $400 when I first wanted it. I knew i should have!
I used to use Subsonic, then it was abandoned and felt like I needed something better. I ended up on a fork of it called Navidrome which is pretty impressive and are doing some great work improving things lately like adding in more tags to the original subsonic API to do more. The best app Symfonium also came out only a few years ago and is incredible now. It offers soooo much it's kind of crazy. It also opted to make use of the new API, which allows more as well. One day I'll move to Roon.
Yeah, I wasn't sure initially if I'd like it enough to pull the trigger on lifetime. I should have. Been paying for the annual subscription for the past ~2 years, but the price of lifetime has steadily been increasing. Will probably pull the trigger later this year as a little celebration gift to myself for wrapping up other financial obligations.
I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it's a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.
Which features does it miss compared to Spotify?
Qobuz's audio quality is a game changer. I had some technical issues with it with glitches short pauses in playback awhile back when I tried it; hopefully those are worked out now. It's great if you know exactly what you want to listen too. It's well known for lacking good algorithms for music discovery. I use Tidal and really like the daily discovery feature, automated Playlists, and the "track radio" that will give you a large list of songs similar to the exact song you are listening to. I've heard similar laments from people looking to switch from Spotify to Qobuz.
The only deal-breaker for me was that the android app doesn't persist its play state, so if I pause and do other stuff on my phone, it usually loses its place.
The number one thing I've been missing are Spotify jams. Spotify also has a wider selection of music, but tbh it's rare for Spotify to have something that Qobuz doesn't. Spotify also has lyrics, playlist folders, and audiobooks; though tbh I haven't checked to see if Qobuz has the latter.
One example is podcasts. I would miss the single interface for both podcasts and music, although Spotify is enshittifying rapidly; the turning point may be closer than I thought.
Tbh, podcasts through a "storefront" is a poor way to experience them. It's meant to be decentralized via RSS feeds. Tho having some cross-device metadata about what you've listened to is definitely helpful.
I've been using Pocket Casts for a long time for that more refined experience and ease of use between listening devices. Their new owners are ethically complicated nowadays (Automattic), and the cost for their pro features is a bit high unless you are a podcast fiend (I was grandfathered in from their old mid-2010s pricing scheme that was pay once/own forever), but it's a good app (for now).
100% with you, plus, with spotify premium you still get shitty ads on podcasts (that also do ad reads like hello fresh...) so there's no advantage at all at listening to podcasts on spotify. I also find their media library management to be clunky at best so a dedicated podcast app is a far better option IMHO.
I chose this service to replace my yt music subscription, and I have nothing but praise for their service, the quality of the music or their ethics.
Been using Qobuz for several months now. Pretty happy with it overall so far. You can get full audio quality via browser, which is great since lots of services have poor Linux support.
Same here
I loved last FM when it came out, best recommendation engine in its days. Then they kinda died and reborn into you tube powered.
Moved to Spotify, then the paid bit rate was down graded.
Then moved to Deezer, but the buffering and errors after a few hours play are really annoying.
This week my qobuz trial was over, so I cancelled Deezer and I'm paying for qobuz.
Streaming services are kinda a commodity now, the catalogs are basically the same, except Pandora that had a better coverage for Nina Pastori than others. But this also changed from time to time.
I've been using Qobuz for a couple of years and I love it. Great audio quality, has 90% of any music I'm looking for, and seems to be far less morally bankrupt than many alternatives.
This is great to see. I ended up moving to Tidal from Spotify, and even though there are some nice to have features missing from Tidal (an equivilant to spotify's sync between devices/speakers as well as a better Android Auto experience), it's a far superior experience.
Quobuz is also on my radar, but they've traditionally lacked in the music catalog space. I need to give them a try again now that it's been a few years.
That said, Tidal barely has Linux clients and I don't think I've seen much movement for Quobuz on Linux, unless I've just missed it.
i love tidal so much <3 it's lacking a bit in japanese artists compared to spotify but that's not a dealbreaker for me
I moved from Spotify to tidal as well. Tidal is fine except for their catalogue mess. They tend to group different artists with same name to a single artist. Here and there I feedback them, they correct it in a week or so but the first next album is wrong again. But I'm glad that at least it pays music owners better and doesn't throw money at shit podcasts and such
What's wrong with just using tidal in a browser? Zen just added a media player widget too so it's almost like having a native app that's always controllable on screen
I'd rather have it in my desktop workspace than nested in a web browser, plus it can integrate better with native media API's for media buttons, notifications, and other items being aware of the audio, which the tidal web app doesn't do out of the box.
I've moved to Deezer, love the HiFi audio! Also works well under Linux using Mellowplayer
I'm on th e verge of doing the same. Do we know how much Deezer pays artists?
There is Tidal Hi-Fi on linux, but I suspect that's what you mean by 'barely'
Yep! It's a good app overall, even has some improvements over what is shipped on macOS.
https://github.com/Nokse22/high-tide is new and promising for a better experience overall. I'd always prefer native over electron.
It works well, what do you want more? Sure, it's not official but the most of the important bits are official since at it's core it's a web app.
Absolutely! It works fairy well. A little clunky since the Linux support is bolted on after, but it's not noticeably worse than the macOS experience. The extra options it offers over what tidal ships to macOS are also nice.
These non-native electron apps are all kinda junky for native music listening anyway. (This is a problem with Spotify's desktop app as well)
Too bad they block VPNs
I use proton for VPN and qobuz works for me! I've had a couple of other bugs but streaming and downloading both work!
I use Proton as well but it won't even let me sign up and explicitly says it's because of the VPN.
I use Surfshark and don't have problems with it 99% of the time. I think you probably just have to have the VPN off for signing up and logging in (I've noticed zero issues when I'm already logged in).
Still a pain :( they’re too afraid we’ll use regional pricing?
That's so strange. I've been using qobuz for at least a couple years now and I've always got a VPN on. Sometimes it takes me a second to load a new song if it's not downloaded already but other than I've had no issues. Are you on PC?
Unfortunately they're not available everywhere.
