nightwatch_admin@feddit.nl
on 20 Mar 21:06
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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.
d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Mar 21:38
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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.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social
on 20 Mar 21:07
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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.
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
on 20 Mar 21:30
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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.
stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
on 21 Mar 13:56
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Spotify Connect is a feature I use extensively that nobody else even comes close to doing as well (even though the Spotify implementation leaves much to be desired). Why does nobody else support controlling the player on my PC from another computer?
I mean, Spotify is a publicly traded Swedish company… but it is worth noting that Qobuz is French and that the original creators still seem to retain both control and ownership
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?
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).
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.
thatsnothowyoudoit@lemmy.ca
on 20 Mar 23:40
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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!
Android phones with access to the google play store can download Apple Music, which then has DRM free music you can buy, then you can transfer to your Linux computer.
Alternatively there is an Apple Music website I believe that has direct downloads to computers, I don’t know if it supports Linux files though.
Ah interesting, I didn’t realise Apple Music was available on Android.
For the life of me I cannot find an Apple Music website that lets you buy and download songs. I keep getting directed to download iTunes.
suicidaleggroll@lemm.ee
on 21 Mar 01:14
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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.
Madbrad200@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Mar 02:57
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Apple Music in its current form is basically a direct evolution out of iTunes. It’s a very old feature.
I feel I should mention Bandcamp, which gives 70% of a sale directly to the artist. In the music world that’s a lot. All DRM free and in most audio formats you could want. My process when buying music is usually: bandcamp > qobuz (or similar) > if all else fails… use other means. I’ll also skip step one and two depending on the artist :p
Yeah, really depends on what kind of music you listen to. I guess I’m lucky in that regard, since most artists I listen to have their music on BC ^^
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org
on 22 Mar 11:27
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Bandcamp is great. Especially the genres I like to listen too are usually on there. Only minor inconvenience is, that the mobile app doesn’t allow you to download the tracks in a way, so you can play them in another music player.
If you really need to download the music on your phone you could use the website. I just organise everything on my PC then copy the files over… But I agree that it would be nice to have DRM free downloads on the app
blunderworld@lemmy.ca
on 20 Mar 21:16
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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.
d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Mar 21:31
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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.
Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Mar 21:40
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There is Tidal Hi-Fi on linux, but I suspect that’s what you mean by ‘barely’
Mihies@programming.dev
on 20 Mar 21:50
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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.
d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Mar 21:59
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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)
d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 20 Mar 22:02
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Yep! It’s a good app overall, even has some improvements over what is shipped on macOS.
github.com/Nokse22/high-tide is new and promising for a better experience overall. I’d always prefer native over electron.
Interstellar_1@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Mar 20:59
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Oh, looks cool! The UI feels pretty clunky on desktop, but it still seems pretty nice.
Mihies@programming.dev
on 20 Mar 21:53
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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
Generally not a lot, less than Spotify I think. They do have a slightly different system though, I can’t remember the details. I think if you listen to a specific artist more than others, they will get more money from your subscription fee or something like that
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
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world
on 21 Mar 01:35
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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
d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Mar 01:47
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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.
Just anecdotal, but I transferred my fairly small library of about 500 songs from Tidal to Qobuz and nothing was missing. I even added back some songs I lost going from Spotify to Tidal. Nothing super niche though.
d0ntpan1c@lemmy.blahaj.zone
on 21 Mar 22:55
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Good to know. I only lost about 30 out of 5000 or so going from Spotify to Tidal. Seems like the catalog gaps for both Tidal and Quobuz have become less of an issue over the last few years.
The big annoyances were some playlists with orchestral and jazz albums that I had to find again via slightly different album names, but those are a mess on any platform due to re-releases and compilations being chaotic enough in that space as it is.
I’ve heard (annecdotaly) that Quobuz is much better for orchestral and instrumental music in general. Spotify wasn’t great for it. Tidal is a bit worse, but far superior than Spotify for Jazz at least.
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.
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.
Mechanite@lemmy.world
on 21 Mar 01:49
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Throwing out there that I use qobuz with Strawberry player on Linux and it works great.
I of course have a premium account, but anyway I logged into QBDLX (software for downloading from qobuz) which generates log files that contain everything you need to use Qobuz with strawberry. It’s too bad qbdlx can’t playback, and strawberry can’t download, so I use both
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.
You could try music assistant, it uses navidrome/jellyfin/spotify/tidal ecc as a source, and streams them to your speakers. Pretty neat. It also supports squeezelite clients, so that’s neat.
BTW, for navidrome I recommend Tempo, pretty nice FOSS app.
MQA was so weird, replacing a perfectly fine lossless open codec that plays on everything with a proprietary lossy codec that plays on barely anything. Also, so many people suddenly telling you that MQA sounds better than FLAC.
I once wrote a downloader for Tidal and always “downgraded” to 16-bit FLAC when I detected the “high quality” version is in MQA format.
FireWire400@lemmy.world
on 21 Mar 09:32
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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.
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…
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Mar 14:15
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The article mentions streaming, but anyone know how much of purchases go to the artist? I’m not interested in streaming, but their store looks attractive.
Also, can I redownload the music later? Or is it a one and done deal? Just thinking about backups.
I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.
Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Mar 14:55
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Awesome, thanks!
I’ll certainly put it on multiple devices (phone, desktop, NAS), but probably won’t bother with offsite backups since that gets expensive.
Not necessarily. If you can find on Bandcamp, it’s probably best to buy from there since I heard more money goes to the artists. I buy from wherever I can find the music, and thus I’ll cycle between Bandcamp or HDTracks if I can’t find it on Qobuz.
Separately I dislike how Bandcamp embeds their name in the metadata of the tracks you buy, but it’s trivial to remove it. Just rubs me the wrong way, so most of the times if songs are on Qobuz I buy it there since they don’t do that.
How is qobuz’s music recommendation? I’ve been wanting to get off of spotify, but I listen to a lot of niche music and spotify’s recommendation engine still allows me to discover new music. I also scrobble all my plays to last.fm and listenbrainz, but I don’t think either of them have the userbase to get me the recommendations I need
Hope they add a listen with friends feature so i can switch over. Use this too often
priapus@sh.itjust.works
on 21 Mar 16:11
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For anyone else who decides to give Qobuz a try, I wouldn’t recommend using TuneYourMusic to transfer playlists and favorites. A ton of songs were transfered but just say unavailable in Qobuz. They have a partnership that let’s you transfer for free using Soundiiz, so I’d try that instead.
Otherwise I’m enjoying it so far. The UI is nice, and search actually functions, so thats a big plus over Tidal. You can listen to full quality audio in the browser client, which I like since Zen Browser just added a nice media player UI in the side bar.
Edit: Retried my transfer using the free Soundiiz transfer and it worked perfectly, even found a song that TuneYourMusic completely failed to transfer. My only remaining issue is the fact that there’s no button to shuffle your favorites tracks. You have to choose one, then shuffle. Minor, but something the other options offer.
I don’t know how it used to be, but I’ve just switched to it from Tidal and am generally enjoying the UI more. Plus it has functioning search, unlike Tidal. My only issue is the lack of a shuffle button on my favorited tracks.
thats from an old unused distrokid account. i hid songtitles cuz they are noob songs. Too bad phone has no easy way to just censor the middle column so i can show the entire thing. 1 cent per stream is good. for as bad as google is, Youtube red and youtube are among the best for amount paid. A bunch of services in china, india, africa etc its like 1000 plays for a cent. spotify is also on the cheap side and takes 5 or 6 streams for a cent. There is also often huge variation within the same service. A youtube ad may be 1 cent for a song and then 0.1 cents for the same song. country may play a role.
anyway, havent done it in forever but about to get back in.
i forget what tidal is like and that artist account didnt have anything catch on tidal (nor anywhere else. was probably my least effective artist account ever).
I’m interested, but does anyone know if there’s something like a ReVanced version for it so I can use it for free without ads, like I can with YouTube Music ReVanced?
In addition to high music quality, fairer payment for artists is one of Qobuz’s main philosophies. Therefore, there will be nothing official where you can listen to the music for free and without adverts. Moreover, I have no idea of any free listening with adverts on Qobuz.
Whether there is something illegal that you can use to get the music should not be discussed here. The monthly fee for a subscription is a fair price, however, and you should be fair enough to do it legally.
OtherOtherOther@lemm.ee
on 22 Mar 07:54
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Qobuz is pretty great for music downloads. Which I think is the real value they have. I’m able to get pretty high quality flac files for new releases from them.
I love Qobuz, they seem to be the only service with a real API. Although poorly documented. I have integrated some things with my home automation and it works with very high res sounds on my connected amplifiers.
threaded - newest
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?
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.
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.
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.
Spotify Connect is a feature I use extensively that nobody else even comes close to doing as well (even though the Spotify implementation leaves much to be desired). Why does nobody else support controlling the player on my PC from another computer?
Qobuz apparently has a connect feature in beta, I’ve seen a few people say it works very well so hopefully it’ll be public soon.
I mean, Spotify is a publicly traded Swedish company… but it is worth noting that Qobuz is French and that the original creators still seem to retain both control and ownership
Huh, I always thought Spotify is European.
EDIT: Spotify is Swedish company.
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.
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.
<img alt="" src="https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/bd289374-c0cc-495f-b518-6ee8ba8342c3.png">
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?
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?
Unfortunately they’re not available everywhere.
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!
I know Apple has a music store. But if I use Android and Linux, how do I access it?
Android phones with access to the google play store can download Apple Music, which then has DRM free music you can buy, then you can transfer to your Linux computer.
Alternatively there is an Apple Music website I believe that has direct downloads to computers, I don’t know if it supports Linux files though.
Ah interesting, I didn’t realise Apple Music was available on Android.
For the life of me I cannot find an Apple Music website that lets you buy and download songs. I keep getting directed to download iTunes.
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 feel I should mention Bandcamp, which gives 70% of a sale directly to the artist. In the music world that’s a lot. All DRM free and in most audio formats you could want. My process when buying music is usually: bandcamp > qobuz (or similar) > if all else fails… use other means. I’ll also skip step one and two depending on the artist :p
Yeah Bandcamp is great. They also do Bandcamp Friday events where all the revenue goes to the artist.
The problem is it’s really hard to find any mainstream bands on there. Presumably most of them sign away those rights when they get a label.
Yeah, really depends on what kind of music you listen to. I guess I’m lucky in that regard, since most artists I listen to have their music on BC ^^
Bandcamp is great. Especially the genres I like to listen too are usually on there. Only minor inconvenience is, that the mobile app doesn’t allow you to download the tracks in a way, so you can play them in another music player.
If you really need to download the music on your phone you could use the website. I just organise everything on my PC then copy the files over… But I agree that it would be nice to have DRM free downloads on the app
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.
There is Tidal Hi-Fi on linux, but I suspect that’s what you mean by ‘barely’
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)
Yep! It’s a good app overall, even has some improvements over what is shipped on macOS.
github.com/Nokse22/high-tide is new and promising for a better experience overall. I’d always prefer native over electron.
Oh, looks cool! The UI feels pretty clunky on desktop, but it still seems pretty nice.
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
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?
Generally not a lot, less than Spotify I think. They do have a slightly different system though, I can’t remember the details. I think if you listen to a specific artist more than others, they will get more money from your subscription fee or something like that
Deezer is a very ethically poor company, unfortunately, due to their owner, Access Industries.
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
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.
Tidal won’t play lossless in a browser, Qobuz does it with no issue and I am enjoying the new Zen widget with it.
Just anecdotal, but I transferred my fairly small library of about 500 songs from Tidal to Qobuz and nothing was missing. I even added back some songs I lost going from Spotify to Tidal. Nothing super niche though.
Good to know. I only lost about 30 out of 5000 or so going from Spotify to Tidal. Seems like the catalog gaps for both Tidal and Quobuz have become less of an issue over the last few years.
The big annoyances were some playlists with orchestral and jazz albums that I had to find again via slightly different album names, but those are a mess on any platform due to re-releases and compilations being chaotic enough in that space as it is.
I’ve heard (annecdotaly) that Quobuz is much better for orchestral and instrumental music in general. Spotify wasn’t great for it. Tidal is a bit worse, but far superior than Spotify for Jazz at least.
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.
Throwing out there that I use qobuz with Strawberry player on Linux and it works great.
Wow just what I was looking for! How do you get the App ID etc.?
I of course have a premium account, but anyway I logged into QBDLX (software for downloading from qobuz) which generates log files that contain everything you need to use Qobuz with strawberry. It’s too bad qbdlx can’t playback, and strawberry can’t download, so I use both
It’s finally working, thanks a lot! :)
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.
You could try music assistant, it uses navidrome/jellyfin/spotify/tidal ecc as a source, and streams them to your speakers. Pretty neat. It also supports squeezelite clients, so that’s neat. BTW, for navidrome I recommend Tempo, pretty nice FOSS app.
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.
MQA was so weird, replacing a perfectly fine lossless open codec that plays on everything with a proprietary lossy codec that plays on barely anything. Also, so many people suddenly telling you that MQA sounds better than FLAC.
I once wrote a downloader for Tidal and always “downgraded” to 16-bit FLAC when I detected the “high quality” version is in MQA format.
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.
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…
The article mentions streaming, but anyone know how much of purchases go to the artist? I’m not interested in streaming, but their store looks attractive.
Also, can I redownload the music later? Or is it a one and done deal? Just thinking about backups.
I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.
Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
Awesome, thanks!
I’ll certainly put it on multiple devices (phone, desktop, NAS), but probably won’t bother with offsite backups since that gets expensive.
I purchase from Bandcamp, should I be looking to move over?
Not necessarily. If you can find on Bandcamp, it’s probably best to buy from there since I heard more money goes to the artists. I buy from wherever I can find the music, and thus I’ll cycle between Bandcamp or HDTracks if I can’t find it on Qobuz.
Separately I dislike how Bandcamp embeds their name in the metadata of the tracks you buy, but it’s trivial to remove it. Just rubs me the wrong way, so most of the times if songs are on Qobuz I buy it there since they don’t do that.
Everything I get usually has it’s metadata updated / overwritten by Musicbrainz anyway
But, yeah, it’s slow going if you’re in a niche…
I’ve created / updated a few albums in there and it takes a few minutes to get it all done, but there’s some satisfaction in giving back
How is qobuz’s music recommendation? I’ve been wanting to get off of spotify, but I listen to a lot of niche music and spotify’s recommendation engine still allows me to discover new music. I also scrobble all my plays to last.fm and listenbrainz, but I don’t think either of them have the userbase to get me the recommendations I need
Qobuz is sound quality and being able to buy music without DRM, not discovery. I use my friends to find music for me, instead. It’s a good service.
Hope they add a listen with friends feature so i can switch over. Use this too often
For anyone else who decides to give Qobuz a try, I wouldn’t recommend using TuneYourMusic to transfer playlists and favorites. A ton of songs were transfered but just say unavailable in Qobuz. They have a partnership that let’s you transfer for free using Soundiiz, so I’d try that instead.
Otherwise I’m enjoying it so far. The UI is nice, and search actually functions, so thats a big plus over Tidal. You can listen to full quality audio in the browser client, which I like since Zen Browser just added a nice media player UI in the side bar.
Edit: Retried my transfer using the free Soundiiz transfer and it worked perfectly, even found a song that TuneYourMusic completely failed to transfer. My only remaining issue is the fact that there’s no button to shuffle your favorites tracks. You have to choose one, then shuffle. Minor, but something the other options offer.
Last time I used qobuz it had the worst UI in history and no way to discover music or was awful, I am now on Tidal and it’s brilliant.
I don’t know how it used to be, but I’ve just switched to it from Tidal and am generally enjoying the UI more. Plus it has functioning search, unlike Tidal. My only issue is the lack of a shuffle button on my favorited tracks.
It was probably 3+ years ago since I tried it, perhaps I’ll give it another go.
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You can shuffle favorites if you first select the tag “Tracks” from the top of the page, then the shuffle button should appear
Thats what I was doing, but I don’t see any shuffle button. Does one appear for you?
Edit: This is what I see, if I’m missing it please let me know! There is the shuffle toggle at the bottom, but to use it I still have to manually choose a song, then skip it for the next one to be random. <img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/fe2fc62f-a995-4131-95b0-4e16b6037ffd.png">
I did it from the Android client, but I can’t do it anymore apparently
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e6e388be-1fbb-4124-8620-bce8b5ddc05a.png">
thats from an old unused distrokid account. i hid songtitles cuz they are noob songs. Too bad phone has no easy way to just censor the middle column so i can show the entire thing. 1 cent per stream is good. for as bad as google is, Youtube red and youtube are among the best for amount paid. A bunch of services in china, india, africa etc its like 1000 plays for a cent. spotify is also on the cheap side and takes 5 or 6 streams for a cent. There is also often huge variation within the same service. A youtube ad may be 1 cent for a song and then 0.1 cents for the same song. country may play a role.
anyway, havent done it in forever but about to get back in.
i forget what tidal is like and that artist account didnt have anything catch on tidal (nor anywhere else. was probably my least effective artist account ever).
Spotify actually stopped paying anything at all to artists that have less than a thousand streams
I’m interested, but does anyone know if there’s something like a ReVanced version for it so I can use it for free without ads, like I can with YouTube Music ReVanced?
I think there isn’t. And why would there be such a version?
Why wouldn’t there be? People like free stuff and piracy is a thing.
In addition to high music quality, fairer payment for artists is one of Qobuz’s main philosophies. Therefore, there will be nothing official where you can listen to the music for free and without adverts. Moreover, I have no idea of any free listening with adverts on Qobuz.
Whether there is something illegal that you can use to get the music should not be discussed here. The monthly fee for a subscription is a fair price, however, and you should be fair enough to do it legally.
Qobuz is pretty great for music downloads. Which I think is the real value they have. I’m able to get pretty high quality flac files for new releases from them.
I love Qobuz, they seem to be the only service with a real API. Although poorly documented. I have integrated some things with my home automation and it works with very high res sounds on my connected amplifiers.