Official TIDAL HIFI Streaming Issues Thread

[dbtom2]

Hey,

 

This is my first post to Computer Audiophile. I needed to find others who had been experiencing the same issues with Tidal so I did a Google search and found this forum.

 

I subscribed to Tidal about two months ago, use the Mac desktop app and have been pleased - until recently - with the quality of audio. There are some issues: it can be a disappointment when a desired artist or album isn't available; but there's been more than enough variety on the service to keep my speakers warm. Though it can be startling how the very first fraction of a second of music at beginning of songs get clipped sometimes. It met my expectations.

 

Like others, I have been having trouble over the last week with Tidal dropping out, pausing, and locking up on me. Prior to this, I had been able to multitask on the same computer running Tidal in HIFI mode with no problems. Even running the app or web player standalone and using a different computer to work, the pauses, interruptions and lockups continue. I know the issue isn't local to my network or ISP. I cut the cable cord and now I stream everything (in HD) and rarely have buffering pauses. (Love me my Sling, HBO Now, etc.)

 

Several weeks ago, just prior to the big sale announcement, Tidal was having issues with the desktop player app. I switched to using Chrome (can't use Safari and get HIFI quality) and the service streamed well. They had posted instructions to do this at the FAQ section of the tidal.com website. They don't have any info posted there regarding issues. I have submitted a ticket.

 

So I'm hoping these pauses, glitches, lockups are just growing pains for Tidal. I don't think $20/month is too much for access to a CD library that large. The iOS app works great and I love being able to download content for offline use. It's nice listening to rented CD quality music in the car. Just don't let your device go to sleep during the offline download. It pauses the download.

 

I will try to keep this issue updated. Thanks for sharing your wisdom and insights.

[dbtom2]

I have another kind of severe dropouts:

 

Entire albums that i compiled into my playlists have vanished. They aren't in Tidal's music catalog any more but have been a while ago when i made the playlists.

 

Very frustrating!

 

Yes. I noticed this also.

 

The stream drop-outs, pauses, interruptions don't happen as much if I lower the rate from HIFI to High quality. Hmmmm.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

Ya know, I've never tried Spotify.

 

Does it let me select the artist / album I want to hear?

[dbtom2]

I remember trying to sign up a few years back, before it was offered in the US.

 

Thanks. I will give it a try.

 

(I am unable to tell the difference - in a blind test - between a 320kbps and a 16/44.1 FLAC version of the same track.) (Yet.)

 

T.

[dbtom2]

What really puzzles me about Tidal is why they don't make their problems, server updates and what not more visible. Why is it that folks need to get this information from CA instead of Tidal. Hiding technical difficulties is plain stupid, as people simply drop the service thinking this is the norm. Once someone tries the service and quits in frustration it will be very hard to get them back. They don't seem to understand how to communicate with their customers.

 

 

Ditto here. I got the same email message reply from Tidal last night from my April 22 complaint.

 

I am listening to the Rhiannon Giddens album now with now interruptions. Funny thing: just now I checked back to Tidal to get the artists name spelled correctly and noticed this message, again:

 

"We are experiencing HiFi playback problem. This may be caused by low bandwidth. You could try to switch streaming quality in settings"

 

Then I realized I wasn't listening to Rihanna but a different artist altogether. Anyway, Rihanna is streaming now. No problems.

 

I guess Rhiannon Giddens is on the old servers.

 

And I just became a big fan of Rhiannon Giddens. Just amazing. This is what Tidal and Spotify do so well: expose me to music I might not have picked on my own. (Rihanna isn't chopped liver either. Girl's got pipes.)

 

Still no interruptions to my Tidal HIFI stream. Hopefully, the server transition will resolve this. (Why don't they simply advise us of the work they're doing? I'm a lot more loyal to a service provider that is honest about quality of service issues and allows me to adjust my expectations. It's Tidal, not iTunes. We know about growing pains.)

 

Finally, and off-topic: My current listening session is happening just after I installed some entry-level bi-wire speaker cables from Mogami that I ordered thru Amazon. Holy amazeballs! I immediately noticed a bigger mid-range and deeper bass than I had ever known from this system. And then I noticed that I forgot to turn my sub on after I connected everything. Even bigger. I am in bliss. Another reason to love Rihanna and Rhiannon Giddens: they were with me when it happened. I just know everything will sound even better when I get really good equipment. This is no commercial - I am very skeptical of most of the cabling claims I read about.

 

Still no Tidal interruptions of pauses. (I have been composing, surfing, streaming on the same MacMini as the Tidal app.)

 

Fingers crossed.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

As long as you are talking to them, could you ask them to include liner notes (as Naxos is doing for its streaming service) and generally to up their game on classical and jazz. As an early (November 2014) TIDAL HiFi adopter, I often feel like the black sheep in the TIDAL family because I am less interested in their mainstream offerings (not uninterested, just less so). At $20 a month, I feel I and all other TIDAL HiFi users deserve white-glove treatment.

 

Other improvements I would like to see:

 

A truly functional search feature (good grief, why can't it have a fuzzy logic spelling tool? Off by one letter? No music for you!)

 

Tags for classical and jazz that make sense. Ensemble, conductor, soloist(s), composer, piece, movement for classical. Leader, group name, album and song for jazz. That would be enough.

 

Tidal does occasionally report artists, albums, etc whose names closely approximately the search spelling. It takes a few more moments but it does work.

 

Thanks for the tip on Naxos. I am about to preview...

 

Are you using a Premium Naxos subscription? Are you happy with the sound quality?

 

Thanks,

T.

[dbtom2]

It is. That's a recent change for here, as I don't remember that being an option last I checked (a while ago). I still get some crackles and noise from Naxos that aren't on the same CDs that I own. I haven't made a side-by-side check with Tidal.

(BTW, one of the CDs I've compared is one I produced, and although there are 192/24 files, Naxos is working with the CD...)

 

While listening to a Naxos playlist of Rochmaninoff's chorale music called "All-Night Vigil" I distinctly heard unmistakable tape hiss as the playing started. I figured the masters were really old when they made an "HD" version of them. Since this was a playlist, there were no liner notes to explain where the recoding came from.

 

I know this is a Tidal thread so I'll add only that I really like the Naxos offering. Yet it had a tendency to pause at the beginning (or very end) of each track. I have to study my settings for it. Anybody else have this problem? I am using the web player or the app. Same issue.

 

Tidal has been consistent the last few days. Newer music plays without bandwidth warnings or pauses. Old music still has glitches. I was hopeful listening to The Who's "Who's Next" but halfway through, it began to stop while the little progress wheel next to the HIFI indicator spun away. Starts again, plays a few seconds or few minutes, then stops again.

[dbtom2]

I got my brand new MacBook Pro 2015 (8GB memory, 256 GB Flash) a few days ago and tested the Tidal Mac-App again.

 

Before, i listened through an old MacMini, so CPU power has dramatically improved now.

This is good for having activities like surfing the web etc. because i have no dropouts any more when doing so. Before that, even moving the mouse cursor could cause a dropout in Tidal.

 

Good, so far!

 

But one ting is still going very wrong:

Whenever a title reaches it's last 30 seconds (the time when the Mac-App begins to buffer the next title) there is a short glitch in the music reproducible every time.

 

So i must say, Tidal isn't working for me, even with the latest Mac hardware.

Shame on you, Tidal programmers!

 

Does anyone have suggestions for setting the cache size in the Tidal settings? I've been clearing the queue and the cache before streaming an album or playlist but I can't say that that it consistently helps. I haven't had the issue with the next title buffering, but I am certain that my MacMini performance with Tidal is better if I am using the computer and not allowing any power saving activities like screen-savers, disk-sleep, etc to activate.

 

BTW, I streamed Bruckner's Symphony #4 on Naxos last night. (Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra) Awesome. Very good resolution and no glitches or pauses in the stream. (As long as the Mini is kept from screen-saving, etc.) That recording will turn me into a classical music fan. I think I was able to make a good recording of it for later playback on my iPhone.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

We know that Tidal is in the process of adding/moving servers. I think I read somewhere that the process will go on until June. Seems logical that this would create new interruptions.

 

That said, my Tidal streaming performance is greatly improved over the last seven days. It is far from perfect but I have had fewer pauses and stops than two weeks ago.

 

I have also tried to understand what is happening on my MacMini during the streaming. I am concerned that my Mini and the way I use it could be contributing to the interruptions I experience.

 

My 2012 MacMini feeds my stereo via a DAC. The HDMI output runs to a 60" TV. I sit about ten feet away and operate the Mini via a Magic Mouse and bluetooth keyboard. When I'm not streaming video, I browse using Safari, write emails, messages, all while listening to music. My ISPs performance over the last few years has been very good. I stream all my TV viewing and a buffering pause is very rare. Amazon Prime Instant Video, iTunes, Sling, HBO Now, PBS, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu Plus. No problems. Until I subscribed to Tidal a few months ago.

 

My Tidal performance is much better if I turn the notifications to Do Not Disturb and quit Safari - no browsing. (Usually, I have a dozen or more webpages open. New York Times, Gmail, CA, Amazon, etc.) I run the Apple Activity Monitor app and select the Network tab. I can watch the way Tidal processes the queue. During the last twenty seconds of a song, Tidal downloads the next song. It appears to me that (and I"m speculating because I'm not a computer software engineer) while Tidal is running only the current song is being played from the cache until the last seconds when the next song is downloaded. (Tidal on Roon - when it isn't crashing on me - doesn't download the next song until the very end of the current song,)

 

It isn't clear to me why a song would pause in the middle if it was completely downloaded. So maybe it wasn't. Maybe during that brief period of the download some other process on my MacMini interrupted the download. And the song hangs.

 

Recently, I have been using Tidal after turning off other things that might interrupt. Notifications, for one. Apple home networking is very sophisticated and does and lot of things in the background - especially if we own iOS devices - that require constant communication.

 

My self-addressed question is this: I ask myself, does my MacMini have to be doing nothing else but running Tidal/Roon for my to enjoy an uninterrupted music bitstream? I hope not. Listening to good music on the same computer that I'm working at has been great the last few years. But I need to remember that Apple's OS X and iOS operating systems have become powerfully integrated over the last few versions. (Sometimes my iPhone rings and all this other Apple stuff comes awake and starts chiming and beeping. Can be disconcerting.) Maybe I need to understand better how Apple networking and iOS device integration works so I can tweak my system settings to safeguard the bitstream.

 

Then again, maybe I'm just getting better service because the music I'm downloading happens to be on the new servers.

 

No Tidal interruptions while I wrote this post. B.B. King played. RIP. You can leave Lucille with us.

[dbtom2]

I don't want to tempt fate but the Tidal app has been running and playing on my MacMini all day with zero glitches. Listened to BB King and The Temptations, Boz Scaggs, and plenty of older, old-guy music. Smooth sailing.

 

I have my notifications set to "Do Not Disturb" and when I'm in front of the screen, I watch the Apple Activity Monitor just to try to learn more about what's happening.

 

Evening Primetime will be the true test as heavy network use creates contention for bandwidth. Didn't have any issues last night with Tidal.

 

Question: Is the Aries being controlled by an iOS device? iPad? iPhone?

 

T.

[dbtom2]

When Tidal informed me they were in the process of moving to new servers, they advised the newest music was already on the new servers.

 

So far, it has been true, more or less, the most recent music has been playing reliably.

[dbtom2]

True. If I had known that Tidal was about to change hands, I would have waited to subscribe. The sale took me by surprise.

 

For a month after I subscribed, it was terrific. I'm hoping for those days to return.

 

After I determined that the interruptions weren't due to my local ISP or my home LAN, I submitted a ticket. It took a week to get an email reply informing me of the server relocation project. While I appreciate the information, I feel like a service provider should be more proactive about alerting customers to network difficulties. It's easier to be loyal to a service provider who is up front.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

I think you may be right.

 

What do you have the album cache size set at in the Tidal app settings?

[dbtom2]

Tidal has been playing on my main system or my desktop system 12 hours a day for the last five days. Both systems are Apple, a MacMini & an iMac. I have experienced 4 or 5 pauses lasted a few seconds and restarted on their own. I have made the effort to play as much "old" music as possible.

 

I have however, received this message 8 or 9 times:

 

"We are experiencing HiFi playback problem. This may be caused by low bandwidth. You could try to switch streaming quality in settings."

 

I never change my settings from HIFI and the HIFI indicator next to the track bar hasn't been greyed out unless the song playing was a lower than 16/44/1 resolution format. Check out the song, "A Beautiful Mine" by Rjd2 (theme from Mad Men) to see that happen.

 

Whenever I see that message, "We are experiencing HIFI playback problem...," I wonder if the message is generated by the app or if it is sent by Tidal. Is that the royal "we?" As in, "How are we doing today?" Or the Tidal "we?" As in "We at Tidal are experiencing HIFI playback problems...." When it happens, the HIFI indicator never changes from white and I can't discern whether what I'm hearing is lower resolution. Just a thought.

 

I have experienced using Tidal via the new Roon player/app and it is awesome.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

Need to dust off those speaker cones? Test the limits of your HIFI? Annoy your neighbors/cat/kids/wife?

 

Find the soundtrack to Mad Max: Fury Road on Tidal and crank that suckah up!!!

[dbtom2]

In Tidal I have discovered that the message "Album Not Available" isn't always accurate.

 

Try selecting it a second or third time or more after getting the message. Selecting the album name text below the album art rather than the album art itself seems to work best for me. I can't say if it's an Apple app thing, or my un-evolved mouse clicking skills, but for me it has paid off being persistent.

 

ClassicsOnLine HD has been terrific. Great library.

[dbtom2]

The newly improved ClassicsOnline service does look very nice! Sound quality good?

That is one service I could consider using.

 

try the free trial and see for yourself. On my

Mac, a player named Orastream operates in the background to deliver?/playback? The music. You will download that when you sign up. It confused me at first. I used both the app from classics online and a webpage to play the tracks. No discernible diffeence (to my untrained older ears) in sound quality.

 

Have no idea if Orastream integrates into home music servers like sonos or aurilac, etc.

 

Yes. I have found the quality to be very good on newer recordings.

 

However, I also heard tape hiss on an older high-res recording that was offered as 24 bit/ 96khz resolution. If you look a few pages back in this thread I gave the name of the recording.

 

Tom

[dbtom2]

Tidal has streamed very well the last few months both on the standalone app and via Roon.

 

Occasionally, I get those "We are experiencing bandwidth problems..." messages yet I can't perceive any audio quality degradation when the message appears. In addition, the HIFI indicator stays on.

 

Though it was aggravating back in the late spring/early summer, the quality of streaming on Tidal has been superb since then.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

Have you tried installing the Chrome browser (free from the app store) and running Tidal's web player?

[dbtom2]

Hey,

 

Not sure of your particular OS, etc. Make sure that the browser isn't muting the audio. The new browser releases have this as an option.

 

All I can think of.

 

T.

[dbtom2]

I feel your pain. I think the artists are getting wise to streaming and how it affects music sales. Like having their entire catalog available except for that one critically acclaimed, best selling standout album. I hate it when that hapens.

 

Tidal has proven to be a great alternative to my manic music buying. I am much more selective now that i can listen to an artist/album at least once before deciding whether to buy the album. I am buying less but better quality. In that respect the Tidal subscription pays for itself.

 

My resentment about disappearing recordings doesnt last very long. It often forces my decision whether to buy the recording and at what price. The title gets added to my wish list.

 

i am loving Tidal & Roon. Between the music reviews at Allmusic.com. Rollingstone.com, and the dailyaudiophile.com, I am becoming a vegetable.

[dbtom2]

I had this problem on my Mac OS last spring when Tidal was moving to new servers. OSX has a utility (Activity Monitor) that lets you watch the network activity. I learned that the next track gets pulled down and queued up during the last half-minute or so of the current track. (This may be different for different OS. I think Roon pulls the Tidal track down shortly after starting to play the current track.)

 

What I did was shut down everything except Tidal. It seemed like anything that might interfere with that "pull down" request at that moment could interfere with continous track after track playing. I had better results (at that time) by having the Mac do nothing else but run Tidal. No browsing, messaging, Facetime, etc. just Tidal and the Activity Monitor.

 

(Nowadays Tidal seems to work fine regardless of how much other stuff I have running.)

 

I know Windows has a utility similar to Activity Monitor. This will tell you if and when the track is downloaded.

 

You might have some security software interfering with the automatic request/download. If you can disable it for a few tracks, that would tell you.

 

It's always good practice to clear out your browsing history, cookies, etc. turn off any unnecessary programs. If you are running Tidal from a webplayer using Chrome, close any other tabs. Check your browser settings for addons that may conflict.

 

Good Luck Jim.

[dbtom2]

Which ones?

[dbtom2]

Well, I finally just deleted and reinstalled Chrome, and this time it worked! I had tried this before with no success, but it plays just fine now. Thanks db!

 

Enjoy!!!

[dbtom2]

I've just re-subscribed as a trial on the basis that I may not have Qobuz for much longer - played OK for a few hours then the terrible stutters, unusable - just like when I originally tried Tidal. I run it through an Aries.

 

If I lose access to HQ streaming I might downgrade my whole system because it is designed around that convenience and way too many £££ to be just playing Spotify via Airplay.

 

Pretty depressing really, but maybe I should take up another hobby...

 

I feel your pain. I know I felt the same way a few months ago when Tidal seemed like a tease of the worst and wondrous kind. I hope you hang in there.

 

The new Mac app updated yesterday. The GUI looks similar to what I've seen of the webplayer. So far so good. It has an iTunes-like notification banner that slides in from the upper left of the screen.

 

Tidal is great for new releases. Has enough of them covered that I'm not forlornly twiddling my thumbs when an artist doesn't appear. (Joanna Newsom). I check Allmusic.com on Fridays to see what has been released then over to Tidal to listen.

 

Today's queue is the new album by Jeff Lynne's ELO. Apparently not yet available in full resolution (gray HIFI indicator) on Tidal but enough, for now.

 

Tidal does have hiccups to its streaming from time to time but there are a lot of links in the chain so understanding where the problem lies is an acquired skill. My problems with the service last spring had to do with Tidal relocating server content and, like they promised, it soon resolved. I hope this is your case.

 

This hobby is what i do while I am pursuing all my other hobbies.

 

Best wishes,

 

Tom