Friendly reminder that Tidal costs the same, has a bigger catalog, does not pester you with podcasts, has lossless quality audio and it includes lyrics
Is there a Tidal linux player? Or a Tidal for Roku? Those are the two things I couldn’t find that made me choose Spotify.
Edit: just checked again and it’s 3 times more expensive than Spotify in my region.
Edit 2nd: they list Linux as a non supported web browser. They don’t support Max quality on Firefox or Safari. But have a dedicated free 90 day plan with the Humane AI pin. Lol, tf is this company?
I’m just as confused as you are. No idea why they decided to list Linux specifically on the list of web browsers and only to mention it is not supported (in an otherwise list of supported things).
On Linux: it’s only a third party electron wrapper. No different than Spotify but at least Spotify officially provides support to their app. Everything else is janky or hacky third party CLI utilities.
That app is pretty pointless IMO. I’ve been a budget audiophile for a little while now, and one of the features a music player needs is to be able to output the music at the correct bit/format @ the correct sample rate. Ex: 24 bit @ 96000, which is the highest quality a song can be from Tidal.
Pipewire has the ability to adjust and match the sample rate on the fly, so that no resampling happens and you get “bit perfect” playback.
Since that tidal-hifi uses chromium for its DRM to allow the max quality, it is permanently set at 48000. Basically no music on Tidal is 48k, basically every song is at least HiFi quality at 16@44100, and then a lot of recent music is HiRez capable of “up to 24@96000.”
So you’re basically resampling every single song somewhere along the audio pipeline, before it reaches your external music hardware, like a DAC/AMP stack.
God I hate spotify, I have just been with them for so long as a family too but it gets worse and worse. Injust wanted to disable clean versions of albums, everytime I drive and voice search a song I get a clean album.
Friendly reminder that Bandcamp puts money directly in the pockets of artists, and on the first Friday of every month (which for May is today), they waive their fees and 100% goes to the artist.
Bandcamp has been great but I fear the enshittification coming. Half the staff was fired by Epic Games last year and then it was sold to a music conglomerate.
Epic Games bought Bandcamp in March 2022 for $273 million
[Bandcamp co-founder Ethan] Diamond was not aware of Epic’s plan to sell Bandcamp to Songtradr until as soon as the night before the deal was announced.
During the weeks that followed, Bandcamp’s union, which represented about half of the company at the time, called on Songtradr to voluntarily recognize the union while it also negotiated with Epic over how the layoffs to union members would be handled. For example, the game publisher said that no employee who received an offer from Songtradr would remain eligible for Epic’s severance package.
The two companies agreed to an “asset sale” of Bandcamp rather than a “stock sale.” This meant that Songtradr was only acquiring the technology and platform, rather than the company as a whole, including its staff.
“Of those laid off, 40 were in the union bargaining unit out of a total 67 members,” it wrote. “None of the eight (8) democratically elected bargaining team members received a job offer…"
Even their middle tier quality CD level HiFi 16bits@44100Hz sounds sooo much better than max quality Spotify. Which is also included in their now 1 single price plan. Spotify maxes as 320 kbps, and an average lossless CD quality is around 1000 kbps.
I personally hate having 96kbps “live” recordings from someone’s cell phone suddenly injectef into my stream. But i havent used youtube music since shortly after they became youtube music
It also depends. I am listening to a very specific niche that will post on spotify but not youtube (Freeform trance)
The biggest catalog for that style is Soundcloud go. But definetly not tidal
Well think about if everybody did do that at the same time. Canceled Netflix, stopped going to Starbucks, stop shopping a certain places.
It’s impossible to organize… More importantly, the government would bail them out because they are too big to fall
Maybe just for one week. What if everybody had enough gas in the world they could skip a day or two of getting gas.
Again, impossible to organize and completely useless… By the end of the week the oil companies would be whole anyway. What do they care if they have a revenue dip for 3 days followed by a revenue bump as everybody ran out of gas and had to fill up again ?
All the songs I have copied to iTunes get uploaded, but if you have the lossless versions they get converted to normal quality on other devices, or if you remove the local original copy.
Music doesn’t support flac, though, you have to convert them to alac first.
I also use a Mac, I don’t know if it’s different on windows
I do this on Windows, it works fine. Never had an issue with mass uploads / initial library sync. I have a large library of 30k tracks, mostly lossless ALAC.
I switched to Plex / PlexAmp though, it’s better and I don’t have to pay a subscription.
I wonder if you can get around that by altering the metadata on the local files to make it a slightly different version of the same song. The deluxe album version vs the regular, etc.
Oh interesting. I was actually about to verify that myself, opened the app to find apparently Apple has started blocking Apple Music on rooted Androids.
Just in case that’s a consideration for anyone else.
I’ve spent the last 3 days deleting old google play music uploads from YouTube music, one song at a time. Would not recommend uploading anything to their interface even if it is possible.
True, though I will say that deezer is a lot more consistent with it, downloading from deemix a lot of the the audio bitrate is atleast 900 kbps vbr up to 1411.
Of course, the best for that is going to be quboz, but quboz also has a very limited selection of music
Red book is perfectly fine for all listening applications as it already exceeds human listening ability. Higher bit depths are useful to the people actually making the music while higher sample rates are just useless data.
Friendly reminder that Tidal costs the same, has a bigger catalog, does not pester you with podcasts, has lossless quality audio and it includes lyrics
Is there a Tidal linux player? Or a Tidal for Roku? Those are the two things I couldn’t find that made me choose Spotify.
Edit: just checked again and it’s 3 times more expensive than Spotify in my region.
Edit 2nd: they list Linux as a non supported web browser. They don’t support Max quality on Firefox or Safari. But have a dedicated free 90 day plan with the Humane AI pin. Lol, tf is this company?
Re: tidal on Linux, if you use Arch there are a couple of options in the AUR. I don’t know about other distros.
I’m confused about this one, lol. I did not know that Linux was a browser rofl
I’m just as confused as you are. No idea why they decided to list Linux specifically on the list of web browsers and only to mention it is not supported (in an otherwise list of supported things).
On Linux: it’s only a third party electron wrapper. No different than Spotify but at least Spotify officially provides support to their app. Everything else is janky or hacky third party CLI utilities.
Is it https://github.com/Mastermindzh/tidal-hifi? That gives you get lossless audio on Linux through electron if you support widevine, among other features
That app is pretty pointless IMO. I’ve been a budget audiophile for a little while now, and one of the features a music player needs is to be able to output the music at the correct bit/format @ the correct sample rate. Ex: 24 bit @ 96000, which is the highest quality a song can be from Tidal.
Pipewire has the ability to adjust and match the sample rate on the fly, so that no resampling happens and you get “bit perfect” playback.
Since that tidal-hifi uses chromium for its DRM to allow the max quality, it is permanently set at 48000. Basically no music on Tidal is 48k, basically every song is at least HiFi quality at 16@44100, and then a lot of recent music is HiRez capable of “up to 24@96000.”
So you’re basically resampling every single song somewhere along the audio pipeline, before it reaches your external music hardware, like a DAC/AMP stack.
Good god
Good to know, thanks for explaining
“Support” is a strong word for Spotify … They support extends to other clients offering help and assisting each other in forums
The only time I seemingly got to a Spotify support person was just because I was cancelling and they wanted to convince me otherwise
God I hate spotify, I have just been with them for so long as a family too but it gets worse and worse. Injust wanted to disable clean versions of albums, everytime I drive and voice search a song I get a clean album.
Fucking shit, that sucks
neither the folks at Tidal, ot seems
Friendly reminder that Bandcamp puts money directly in the pockets of artists, and on the first Friday of every month (which for May is today), they waive their fees and 100% goes to the artist.
Bandcamp has been great but I fear the enshittification coming. Half the staff was fired by Epic Games last year and then it was sold to a music conglomerate.
Small sidenote, tidal lossless is double the price
They have recently changed that. Lossless is now part of the basic plan
Oh wait what! I own a few headphones which actually benefit from it (ever so slightly, I know). Might be worth the switch
Yeah, on my good headphones the difference is quite noticeable
Even their middle tier quality CD level HiFi 16bits@44100Hz sounds sooo much better than max quality Spotify. Which is also included in their now 1 single price plan. Spotify maxes as 320 kbps, and an average lossless CD quality is around 1000 kbps.
I can definitely tell the difference.
They have a bigger catalog? I kinda assumed that Spotify had the biggest catalog by far because they’re the most popular one.
YouTube Music has the biggest music catalogue since you can mix and match official and unofficial releases in your playlists.
Some people think this is a desireable feature
I personally hate having 96kbps “live” recordings from someone’s cell phone suddenly injectef into my stream. But i havent used youtube music since shortly after they became youtube music
RIP google play music
Well ideally nothing gets injected and you control your playlists yourself so you can choose high quality releases
Indeed, rip GPM
The only way I can conceive this is useful is for OSTs and such.
It also depends. I am listening to a very specific niche that will post on spotify but not youtube (Freeform trance) The biggest catalog for that style is Soundcloud go. But definetly not tidal
True. Either wah I personally download all my music in flac/mp3s so I can have exactly what I want regardless of which service its on or not.
For now… Do you really think they’re immune to enshitification if they become more popular?
I’ll bash them if and when they’ll start to do shitty stuff. For now they are great
Exactly. I mean come on ‘I can’t consider using another service other than my current shitty service. That other might become shit!’
It is just a shame that none of the alternative services have a solution for Spotify connect or I would have moved long ago.
Shit services like Spotify is a reminder to vote with you wallet and do your research. It’s ok to switch up your subs.
Being a subscriber since day 1 does nothing for the consumer.
I wish the “vote with your wallet” were real… It’s as effective a “recycle your plastics”
It’s only effective in deflecting responsibility to a party that is truly powerless to address the issues
Well think about if everybody did do that at the same time. Canceled Netflix, stopped going to Starbucks, stop shopping a certain places.
Maybe just for one week. What if everybody had enough gas in the world they could skip a day or two of getting gas.
It’s impossible to organize… More importantly, the government would bail them out because they are too big to fall
Again, impossible to organize and completely useless… By the end of the week the oil companies would be whole anyway. What do they care if they have a revenue dip for 3 days followed by a revenue bump as everybody ran out of gas and had to fill up again ?
The app also doesn’t let you add your own music, though… Very annoying, cause some songs aren’t on streaming services
Cool. Where can I read up on the catalog of Tidal?
Can I upload my own music like I could with Google music?
No, Tidal never had that. Deezer might still allow it, they’re the last I know that did.
Technically you can still do it with iTunes on a desktop, but I don’t think those files will play on the Apple Music app.
Yes they do play in the Apple Music app, but if you upload in bulk only 50% will actually be uploaded
All the songs I have copied to iTunes get uploaded, but if you have the lossless versions they get converted to normal quality on other devices, or if you remove the local original copy.
Music doesn’t support flac, though, you have to convert them to alac first.
I also use a Mac, I don’t know if it’s different on windows
I do this on Windows, it works fine. Never had an issue with mass uploads / initial library sync. I have a large library of 30k tracks, mostly lossless ALAC.
I switched to Plex / PlexAmp though, it’s better and I don’t have to pay a subscription.
I wonder if you can get around that by altering the metadata on the local files to make it a slightly different version of the same song. The deluxe album version vs the regular, etc.
Oh interesting. I was actually about to verify that myself, opened the app to find apparently Apple has started blocking Apple Music on rooted Androids.
Just in case that’s a consideration for anyone else.
for anyone curious, YouTube Music definitely has this, I’ve recently used it. looks like a holdover from the Play Music days.
YouTube Music allows you to do this fyi
Yeah but I hate yt music for different reasons haha
I’ve spent the last 3 days deleting old google play music uploads from YouTube music, one song at a time. Would not recommend uploading anything to their interface even if it is possible.
*Has bigger catalog if you were fans of mostly Western and European music.
I believe someone debunked the claim of lossless audio. But otherwise I think that’s all accurate.
What has been debunked was the whole story regarding MQA audio, which now they have abandoned. Now it is truly lossless
Spotify also includes lyrics. It’s just not in free tier anymore.
If you actually looked at the article this post is about, it says that it’s still there just with a monthly limit.
Too bad (for me) it doesnt have most of my library.
Isn’t Tidal owned by Kanye West though?
According to Wikipedia he left in 2017. Majority owner is a Jack Dorsey company called Block, Inc.
Daniel Ek, Kanye West, Jack Dorsey, Epic Games… What a great list. We need to start from scratch yall.
And the Tidal app has an amoled dark mode, which I don’t think Spotify has. Sometimes the little quality of life things make a big difference.
Also works with Rekordbox
Tidal does not always have lossless quality audio, I personally recommend deezer
I did also get some suspicious audio from Deezer. It depends on what the publisher provides.
Tidal also goes above CD quality, if you’re into that. Some songs go up to 192kHz at 24 bits.
True, though I will say that deezer is a lot more consistent with it, downloading from deemix a lot of the the audio bitrate is atleast 900 kbps vbr up to 1411.
Of course, the best for that is going to be quboz, but quboz also has a very limited selection of music
Red book is perfectly fine for all listening applications as it already exceeds human listening ability. Higher bit depths are useful to the people actually making the music while higher sample rates are just useless data.