Tidal

For the social side of things, I really think Tidal should have someone in the company posting playlists on ILM on a regular basis, so that is in fact a major mistake. I think minimum wage at McDonalds is about to go up to $15, so it gets better.

this thread sure is salty

Hi Ulysses. Are you the ILM poster who keeps the Spotify playlists updated. I sometimes have trouble keeping people's names straight.

xpost
This says 9.99: http://tidal.com/us/try-now

And I'm not saying Spotify is perfect, I get weird offline messages on my phone too, and the notifications only work at times, but the simple ways you can access other users' playlists to keep up to date, easily recommend stuff to others and also the very useful new releases things that glenn and others are doing make it a must have for me.

So just to keep things honest, $9.99 isn't for the hi-fi version. It's $19.99 for that.

xp I am the ILX poster who keeps the Spotify playlists updated. It's an immensely dumb enterprise but it's helpful for me to hear more music.

We're lucky to have people like you and glenn keeping our Spotify playlists updated!

Yes the hifi option is more expensive but I'm saying that unless you actually NEED the hifi version the premium version is the same price as the competitors and has better sound than them. Is that hard to understand or are you just trying to pick a fight?

I think you should probably reread this thread from where I came in. Shorter answer=no.

xp you're welcome dlp9001, though glenn doesn't have anything to do with that project.

I'm also unconvinced that it's a good idea to move everything over to a service that's quite likely to fold when its celebrity backers decide they've burned quite enough cash on it.

It's not gonna fold, I think. If anything it'll get bought and swallowed up by a bigger company who are interested in retaining the hifi subscribers with $20 a month to spend.

Depends on how many there are.

I think there's definitely a market for hifi streaming - the world is full of people with high end stereos and streaming isn't going to go away. The big question has always been how you market it and Tidal hasn't quite cracked that one yet?

re the press: look at the way business is covered by the american media, from npr to the new york post. just the simple act of saying 'the dow is up' as a good thing shows a subjective slant toward one view of capitalism. the tech press is more explicitly anti-artist (you don't have to look far to find pieces in which they kick and scream about wanting music for free while being wholly unquestioning of idiotic assertions by founders and engineers) but american culture has a strong anti-artist streak in it.

Does tidal have decent classical and film score library?

I couldn't tell you but if there's anything in particular you're looking for I'll be happy to check. What I will say though i that classical music is one are where you actually need hi-fi, the 320 versions just don't cut it. Tidal also has credits/liner notes for a lot of their tracks - that's definitely a plus too.

*are = area, lol

You can search albums & artists on Tidal to see if they want you want:

http://listen.tidal.com/

*have

my trouble is that i don't have a setup where i can stream music to my stereo... the only "venue" i have for streaming is my laptop and its shitty little speakers. so there's not a lot of value in a "hi-fi" streaming experience, for the moment.

that said, if i buy FLAC files (or even 320 MP3s) from Bandcamp or whatever, I will sometimes burn them to a CD (I know, so 20th century) and play them through my stereo. does tidal offer that option, or is it exclusively a streaming service??

I'm also unconvinced that it's a good idea to move everything over to a service that's quite likely to fold when its celebrity backers decide they've burned quite enough cash on it.

this is precisely why i'm still in favor of buying music on iTunes (or more often, CD/vinyl); I don't trust that these sites will really be around, or be around in their present form, for all that long. or that the music i most want to listen to will still be available from them in a year or two years.

I'm pretty sure Tidal has no way to burn unless there's some weird complicated workaround, though if you have a smartphone it's easy enough to hook it up to your stereo and stream that way. Or hook up laptop to stereo, unless your stereo has no way to input from a laptop, which would be kind of weird. I tend to agree: there are a (very) few albums that I'm worried won't be on streaming services at some point, and I sometimes buy those if they're important to me. But that's a vanishingly small number of records. I'm pretty sure that at this point buying music in case streaming services end is along the same lines as buying survival rations in case civilization ends, but I could be wrong.

i'm pretty sure that's what happened to the etruscans but bear in mind i'm a product of the american public school system

That's why I convert all my albums to linear b.

also just to state the even more obvious: everything that is available on streaming and plenty that's not is readily accessible on darkweb and has been since well before streaming started so that's always gonna serve as the emergency kitchen in my house. But I'm happy to pay a service charge if you can get it to me in neat containers!

i use torrent sites to download stuff like japanese cassette-only releases from 1982. but i avoid using them to DL anything i can reasonably buy.

also, i have a kind of old-fashioned sense that if i'm going to pay for something, i want it in tangible form. i don't like the idea of spending thousands of dollars assembling a music "collection" that could be wiped out if i spill orange juice on my hard drive. (yes, i know, backups, but i never feel too secure even with those.)

On some level I sympathize with survivalists, but at the end of the day I trust that I'll wake up tomorrow and still be able to go to a store and buy matches.

i've lost at least one big digital music collection and one that was comprised of physical media; it happens. i'll lose my mind when i inevitably lose the next one but hey everything goes away in time

Yes. I lost a huge collection of vinyl due to a flood, but somehow I still manage to live day by day. I'm a huge music fan, but realistically the number of albums that I've lost that I can't replace is less than 10, probably much less. I'm sure there are people with extremely niche interests where that's not the case, but they know who they are and know what to do.

xpost

yeah in general i'm torn between being terrified that i'll lose all the stuff i've amassed and wishing i would lose all the stuff i've amassed. but that seems like another thread topic entirely. :)

FWIW i have a lot of vinyl -- african albums, mostly -- that would be extremely difficult and even more expensive to replace. in most cases they're things i lucked out finding for cheap -- one-in-a-million finds. so i'd be upset to lose them. but in a more existential sense i'm sure i'd be fine w/o them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwEbYCN0dKc

as the son of a record dealer, i know from that which is truly irreplaceable and i feel you especially on the african LPs where you certainly aren't going to find the original again.
the curatorial or collector approach is something i am desperate to get away from and never will.

but streaming is a nice sort of methadone.

that said, if i buy FLAC files (or even 320 MP3s) from Bandcamp or whatever, I will sometimes burn them to a CD (I know, so 20th century) and play them through my stereo. does tidal offer that option, or is it exclusively a streaming service??

grampateurist

idg the anxiety re 'what if the streaming service i shackle myself to folds' streaming subscrips are renewed on a monthly basis and all the music is searchable?

Well, in part it's a rejection of the idea that the record industry wants you to 'rent' music from them, never own it.

Personally, I try to buy a physical copy of everything I feel is worth having long-term and use streaming for try-before-I-buy or for accessing things that are nice to hear but won't get repeat listens.

Burning files to CDRs is silly, though, as those things will die on you sooner than you think.

It's probably an overblown fear of streaming suddenly disappearing entirely, though. Too much money is already being generated by it.

You can still own music though. What I'm paying for is the easy access to just about everything everywhere - and that's worth the price. Keeping up with a large amount of music used to cost an enormous amount of money,and a bit of frustration when you ended up buying a lot of stuff you didn't really listen to or even like, just to keep up. Then when pirating began it took a humongous amount of time just to find the right links, worry about internet stuff and, last but not least, managing all the digital files, mostly through itunes and i don't know how many external drives. Tidal/Spotify/Apple basically remove a lot of the negative energy that came with being into music.

Another thing that is making me reconsider Tidal is that it seems as if they've loosened the screws a bit on playing from several different devices at once. Family plans are fine to an extent, but since there's an age cap on who can actually join them they've not been helpful. I have two kids below the age limit and they've both got their ipads and they both sometimes listen to music on them. With the Spotify set up, and Tidal until recently I think, you could only play on one device at a time, understandably from a business perspective, but infuriating when you have two kids who want to listen to different music in their rooms at once. Google Play had this one correct - one account should give you the possibility to stream where you liken and how you like, at least until you stream so much that your monthly fee isn't covering the royalties anymore, and I get the impression that you need to do a lot of streaming for that to happen. But it seems like Tidal is moving in that direction too now, even if they're not advertising it, and that makes me very happy.

Overall, does Spotify still have more music than Tidal?

Well, a bit but not much. Maybe 5% more - down from about 20 just a year ago? When I transferred my huge playlist Sugarboy's Hola Hola was the only song it missed that I'd consider unmissable, most of the others were from really obscure compilations. Plus, I got to add a few Beyoncé tracks.

the premium version is the same price as the competitors and has better sound than them.

Spotify and Tidal high quality are both 320kbps so how do you suppose Tidal conjures up this better quality?

Spotify uses 3 quality ratings for streaming, all in the Ogg Vorbis format.

Hmm maybe it's all in the Ogg Vorbis (or lack of). I very much doubt I would be able to hear any difference though, no comment on anyone else's fine discernment.

I'm usually terrible at discerning stuff like this but there's a notable difference in both the desktop and iphone versions. The spotify versions sound muddier. I couldn't tell you the reason though.

well none of these services have Aaliyah S/T

tidal hi fi sounds much clearer than spotify to me

Well the hi fi should sound clearer. The mystery is why the Premium sounds clearer too.

Is it Pono-quality?

I have no idea, lol.

v much enjoying beyonce, prince, and new radiohead. but already had to uninstall/install android app again to get a track to work.

I perceive a difference in sound when A/Bing Tidal and Spotify, but it seems like it may just be a difference in volume, which would be a very scammy thing for Tidal to do. That is some Circuit City speaker salesman level bullshit.