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’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.
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.
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! :)
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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
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
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…
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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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.
