Music Streaming Services

Google's dropping the "don't be evil" line has been rather representative of how they've conducted themselves at several points in recent years, but I gotta say that at the least their music algorithms have been grand.

I have YouTube on a bunch as white noise or when I need to turn my brain down so subbed to Premium years ago (it's much more affordable in my country, just under $2.90 at current exchange rates for one person), and because Premium came with a YT Music sub I figured why not, I don't need lossless for general use and I just buy CDs or stuff off Presto/Boomkat/Bandcamp whenever I want something to really sink into. That was a good call because yeah I've found some great music through it. The UX is also pretty nice.

It sounds to me like YTM has a sort of... vividification going on? Whatever they do to their audio files, it just sounds richer and more vibrant than the same releases on Spotify when comparing the both at max quality. I have no clue if it's "accurate", but I rather like the sound of it.

Recent complaint: I noticed yesterday that they did this weird thing where, instead of keeping the seekbar the same red it's been for ages now, the tail end of the bar turns a sort of weird magenta. Caught it at the end of a song yesterday and I thought my PC screen corner was damaged somehow.



It's even more jarring when you hover over the bar and the red button pops up, makes the magenta stand out even more now. I hate it. It looks off.

 

Yeah the interface sucked and they always seemed to lose out on sq/technical comparisons, but the music selection and price best matched what I wanted at the time. Maybe one day a goldilocks streaming service will appear.

 

You probably couldn't re-up Tidal at the previous rate, because the plan no longer exists. The current Tidal plans are all high res for the same as the 'regular' price was before. I'm on the new high res family, and it's an incredible deal.

 

At the beginning of the current style of streaming services, but before Apple Music, I subscribed to Google Play Music for a long time. It definitely had the best discovery and algorithms at that time. Way better than Spotify. Apple’s really is still not that great in that regard.

 

I was doing some sort of deal for a few years where you signed up for a free best buy account and then bought a year's Tidal 16bit lossless subscription for $90 and they gave you a code to activate on Tidal. That is now gone, but I'm happy enough on yt music for now and it's free with my wireless plan, maybe they'll add flac at some point.

 

Spotify: "Oh, ya'll wanted a Hi-Fi tier? That's cute. We're a video company now."

 

I also liked the upload feature for my library.

 

I liked that too.

 

I am thinking of ditching Tidal. The audio quality is not always consistent. Unfortunately their library is getting worse nowadays.

Is Qobuz consistent with FLAC and/or CD quality in your experience? If I have to I will go back to a dedicated DAP or use a burner phone for my music.

 

What do you mean consistent with FLAC? Qobuz is FLAC.
I bought a number of albums from Qobuz and the way they appear in my Roon library is as two versions: one on my HD the other one Qobuz. I can listen to any of them and, unless I have some problems with network latency I have no way to say which one it is. Roon will display it in a signal path and it is how the decoder see the file

 

Qobuz is great but check if your favorite albums/artist is on their service. Some do say that Qobuz library is smaller than the other services.

I do like you can buy most albums digitally from Qobuz with no DRM BS.

 

Deezer has FLAC and a library almost as big as Spotify.

 

Tidal offers Hi-Rez, fancy codecs and CD-quality but sometimes you have to go to specific versions of singles and albums. In the worst case you do not know the audio quality until you hit play and you have the quality/codec on the screen.

Yesterday I found an awesome remix of a Faithless track in CD-quality. Well I add it to my daily playlist and it turns into aac 96kbps. On the go aac 96kbps sounds good but that is not what I pay for.

I miss my old Sandisk DAP when I notice this.

 

I wish songlink included Qobuz links.

https://odesli.co/

The cool thing about the platform is if you create an account you can completely customize a link page and you can add a Qobuz link, but it just takes time and Songwhip autiomaticalliy included Qobuz and didn't include all the other random streaming sites that no one uses (at last in the US).

I sent them an email asking if they could add Qobuz to it, and I also suggested that since we can create accounts that they add a feature where we can create a profile for our links, so we don't have to re do them every time. Like we could include Qobuz and have a custom order automatically for every link. But they said they werent' developing it anymore. They liked this idea though. Of course because I'm a genius.

Does anyone know more about why Sony apparently bought Songlink only to shut it down? Sony doesn't even operate in the streaming business.

 

Why does BubbleUPNP take so long to load Tidal, then Tidal albums, then the album, whereas the Tidal app loads all of those instantly? Seems like the BubbleUPNP app would just have access and load it just the same. Same with Qobuz...

 

Based on my limited experience, Qobuz is very responsive to requests to add music that is missing from their service. I noticed that they were missing Judas Priest's third album, Sin After Sin, but they had all their other albums. I put in a request for them to add the album via their dedicated music request portal, and it was up on the site within two days. (It might have actually been faster--I didn't log into Qobuz for two days after making the request, and there it was when I did open the app again.)

 

Tidal and Qobuz rock!

Spotify: pays artists less than anyone else (that alone should be enough to stop using it), and is streaming the lossy Ogg Vorbis format (just improved mp3).



Tidal currently has at least 20 mln of HiRes (24/96) tracks. Even if you don't believe in HiRes vs CD superiority (I do), to avoid flame wars just consider that HiRes goes to your DAC without any need to upsample in Windows. And if you want to use Equalizer APO as I do, EAPO must operate with already upsampled data otherwise it injects some distortion.

Also, I was able to bypass Windows upsampler with Tidal, and use Sox with realtime stream: https://www.superbestaudiofriends.o...treaming-tidal-sox-equalizer-apo-works.15062/

 

I would immediately sign up for a service with Amazon pricing and catalog all in redbook.

 

Anyone else suddenly unable to access Tidal through UPNP? Jplay and BubbleUPNP are having all kinds of error messages, making me log in over and over as well as expired token errors. I've tried logging in with both 10 times and it just asks me to login again. I need my music!

edit: working again. I was afraid Tidal had changed access to their service or something but it must have just been a temporary thing.