Tidal

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.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/5f/34/2b/5f342b4222a1660715259397de5a237b.jpg

some appear to detect tidal using a built in EQ. Which also seems pretty scammy. If I were an artist, I wouldn't want a default EQ to be applied to my music. Then again, maybe it is done by the publishing company on purpose to make music sound better on laptop speakers or something.

"tidal? ENHANCE"

is there a graphic equalizer like there is on Spotify? as in.. can the TIDAL 'EQ'ing be turned off/altered? if not then yeah that's a scandal! surely can't be right can it?

I tried to find an EQ in the android app, but I don't see one.

On that same app, I've listened to fewer than 10 albums and I've had to reinstall the app because Beyonce's "Hold Up" and Radiohead's "Tinker Tailor Tidal Sucks" won't play until I delete and reinstall the app. These songs were supposed to be downloaded to my phone. Thanks, Thom, Prince, and Bey!

xxp I've also been searching for a Tidal/Apple/Spotify comparison that includes measurements, but I can't find one. It's all CNET-level hand wavy codec sum-it-ups. But I think that many people agree that there's an audible difference, and that difference, which Tidal would have you believe is Lossy/lossless/bitrate/codec/etc-based, does not fit with previous experience of A/Bing bitrates and codecs. Then again, I think Pono was doing something similarly scammy, no?

Free trial is almost up and so far the lack of gapless playback between tracks is the dealbreaker.

I've been told that when playing vinyl records you have to physically turn them over after playing side a. That's insane. I'm switching to 8-track.

Also, I cannot find an article that scientifically proves that Tidal sounds better than Spotify. I'm extremely worried about being tricked into thinking that I like the way Tidal sounds, when in fact I actually like Spotify better but just don't realize this. I have a month to compare the two services, but what I really need is a peer-approved scientific journal article to tell me which one actually sounds better. There's a lot at stake here. With a $10/month difference between the two services, we're talking about my ability to retire at 65 vs. having to work in a coal mine for the rest of my life.

Please help, ILM.

There's no difference in cost for me since I pay $10/month for spotify as well. Using EQ or loudness to scam people into hearing a difference in your music streaming service would indeed involve some ethical stakes. And in the case of EQ, there's the question of whether you're hearing the music as the artist intended.

Here, this can help:
http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality

Thanks, Eazy. That is a good test. But the point is that I typically would fail bitrate A/B tests, whereas the difference between Tidal and other services seems to be more pronounced. So one wonders if Tidal is doing something more to make the difference between their audio and other services' more obvious.

I'm extremely worried about being tricked into thinking that I like the way Tidal sounds, when in fact I actually like Spotify better but just don't realize this

also, if it was just EQ and you could find out the frequency response curve of the EQ, you could potentially get Spotify to sound like Tidal if you do indeed like Tidal's sound but also prefer Spotify's software.

I've been told that when playing vinyl records you have to physically turn them over after playing side a. That's insane. I'm switching to 8-track.

I do agree that it's a bit much to complain about flipping vinyl records, though! For the record, I never did, and that was happening over in the moon shaped pool thread.

I'm talking about their hi-fi version, where the difference is insanely apparent.

Also, if service A sounds much better than service B, I'm not sure why one would spend a lot of time wondering about possible evil or deceptive reasons for this. Either find a way to tweak service B so it sounds as good as service A, decide that you don't care, or subscribe to service B at the life-changing extra cost of $120/year. I don't really see that this requires a doctoral thesis on the human sound-pereception system. Surely 30 days is enough time to figure it all out?

I've already explained why. I've also noted your particularly incurious position, cowboy, but I'll add that $120/year could mean more to some than it does to others. Pretty sure this has also already been said to you by others, though, so it may be hopeless.

Arguments like this strike me as so bizarre. You have two music services, both offering a free trial. You know what they cost, and you can spend 30 days deciding which one you like better. The difference in cost is equal to about 16 hours of work at minimum wage annually. And yet we somehow need to have other people (Science!) confirm which one is better, because we might be being tricked. No reasonable person talks like this when the subject is toilet paper.

board ain't called "I Love Toilet Paper"

Let's Anticipate The Charmin 3-Ply

lol

I definitely tend to overthink these things, but I definitely feel like I'm always being tricked when it comes to audio quality. I basically don't trust myself when doing A/B tests because a simple think like A being louder than B will fool me into thinking A is better. At the same time I do want the best audio quality, because while the differences can be subtle, they are there and definitely affect your enjoyment.

It's like when you upgrade to slightly better headphones. You don't immediately notice much of a difference necessarily, but at some point you listen to some random song you've listened to many times before and you notice some element in the music that you never noticed before and all of a sudden this song is a lot better than it used to be.

Anyway, this is why I wish there was some kind of scientific research that proves that A is better than B rather than relying on a bunch of random internet people or even worse my own senses.

I don't really trust myself to reliably evaluate the quality of anything that is perceived by my senses.

so if A was provably better but you didn't enjoy it as much as B, you would still choose A?

if you go to a party at Todd Glass' house, you might think that a live drummer playing along to recorded music with a bunch of reverb added sounds good to you at first. It'd be reasonable to worry that you aren't like Todd Glass, and you won't enjoy this particular sound all of the time and for all types of music.

so if A was provably better but you didn't enjoy it as much as B, you would still choose A?

I guess it's a matter of how much more I enjoy B, but there's no good way to measure enjoyment. So I don't know.

if enjoyment is all you want out of it, you should choose B

But you might like some other aspect of A better and wonder if some cheap trick is being applied in B that's preventing you from having what you like about both A and B using A.

or you might wonder if B is the kind of company that sells snake oil and is therefore taking $ without adding value. if company A has proven to add value, you might wonder if A could add even more value if it had B's $.

exactly

also just because I like B more now doesn't mean B is better, maybe there are some less evident aspects that make A better that only become more noticeable after repeated listens

and even if the above weren't true, you might ask for measurements about A and B because you don't treat all aspects of your consuming life (especially art, not toilet paper!) as a string of Pepsi challenges.