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.
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 love tidal so much <3 it’s lacking a bit in japanese artists compared to spotify but that’s not a dealbreaker for me
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.
Oh, looks cool! The UI feels pretty clunky on desktop, but it still seems pretty nice.
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)
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 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’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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Unfortunately they’re not available everywhere.
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?
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 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.
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.
Hope they add a listen with friends feature so i can switch over. Use this too often
