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Tidal sucks


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No - not all of it sucks, but part of it.

 

The problematic part of Tidal are those albums that aren't playing HIFI, even if you have a HIFI subscription. And there are countless albums that aren't coded for HIFI.

 

Since a couple of months, these albums don't play in 320 kbps any more as they did before.
Instead they play in even worse 96 kbps what is inacceptable because i pay for HIFI quality.

 

I even tried to downgrade my subscription to Tidal Premium with the hope that these albums would play in 320 kbps, but to no avail. All HIFI-albums then play in 320 kbps, and those LOFI-albums stay at 96 kbps.

 

That really sucks!

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I listen on a MacBook Pro with the Tidal app (Settings "HIFI") and an Auralic Aries Mini - no phone or tablet.

 

I have made at least 50 playlists full of  "LoFi" albums (often older ones) that i would like to hear at least in 320 kbps quality. But that isn't possible any more since Tidal dropped the quality of those albums to 96 kbps. They didn't drop the subscription fees, however.

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Yes, i can :-)

 

Only a few of several hundreds of albums that don't play right:

 

Artist|Album

Bruce Hornsby|Red Hook Summer: Music From The Original Motion Picture
Brooks Williams|Back To Mercy
Greg C. Brown|Distant Places
Innocence Mission|Small Planes
Inti-Illimani|Andadas
Jacqui Dankworth|Detour Ahead
James 'Bla' Pahinui|Mana
Jann Arden|Uncover Me
Jeff Lorber|Now Is The Time
Jimmy Ponder|Jimmy Ponder
Jimmy Ponder|Steel City Blues
Joan Armatrading|Live: All the Way from America
Joana Amendoeira|Aquela Rua
Joanne Shaw Taylor|Almost Always Never
Joanne Shaw Taylor|Diamonds In The Dirt
Joanne Shaw Taylor|White Sugar
Joe Bonamassa|A New Day Yesterday
Joe Bonamassa|Had To Cry Today
Joe Bonamassa|Sloe Gin
Joe Bonamassa|So It's Like That

 

and so on ...
 

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53 minutes ago, Cebolla said:

There's a further problem in that the majority of audio devices that can stream directly from TIDAL's online servers with a TIDAL HiFi account connection, for some reason cannot stream the original MP3 file tracks and are are supplied the lowest quality 96 kbps AAC streams instead - such as your Auralic Aries Mini.

 

That's only the case since a few moths. Before that, my Aries Mini was indeed able to stream these albums (files) in AAC 320 kbps and displayed the right information in the app. Which was, by the way, not "HIFI", too.

 

But now you can recognise the bad bitrates even with the native macOS Tidal app.

You can observe the downloaded (=streamed) amount of data for a single title and calculate the bitrate out of the amount of data (if you know the length of the title).

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3 minutes ago, Cebolla said:

I suppose it gives you some rough idea of the bitrate, though not exactly an accurate nor obvious/easy way for the average user to obtain it, compared to it actually being displayed by the player - assuming you can trust the player's display that is!

 

You're right. The calculated bitrate isn't surely exact. But you can roughly estimate that it is about 96 kbps - not 128 kbps, nor any higher. 

 

A  DAC with a display should show the bitrates, too. Or am i wrong?

 

The problem is, however, that even Tidal's own app doesn't deliver the higher (320 kbps) quality any more. And they don't inform their customers.

 

I don't know if it is only me who cares about this, but there must thousands of albums be affected. In my "LoFi" playlists i alone have sampled hundreds of albums (originally to consume the 320 kbps titles) that are now worthless for me. Unfortunately i have to scan all my other playlists for bad albums before i play them. That's a shame.

 

I have subscribed since the beginnings when the service was called WIMP.

But i now consider to change to another one. The problem here are my many playlist, that don't convert well to other services. QOBUZ for example misses many of my preferred Tidal albums that were thoroughly selected and collected in appropriate playlists.

 

 

The "Logical Media Server and the ickStream LMS" route seems promising. I will try that. 

The Aries works in standard UPnP mode, too.

 

But the standard Tidal customer is really left alone.

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1 hour ago, jhwalker said:

 

I just checked - Audirvana streams AAC 320 on the ones I checked from the list above.

 

So it's not necessarily that "Tidal sucks", as the title of this thread states - if they have the lossless version, that's what you get.  If they have a lossy version, they're not going to "upgrade" it to lossless, they'll stream what they have (in some cases, I suspect there is no lossless version available).

 

If Tidal needs outside help to play its files correctly, i would say, it sucks :-).

Nonetheless HiFi isn't always HiFi on Tidal.

 

But i saw on the Audirvana site that it costs as much as it gives you in form of vouchers for Tidal and QUOBUZ. So effectively it would pay for itself, provided you stay subscribed on Tidal anyway. A good deal i would think.  

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@wklie Thanks for checking the albums. My Tidal service is a German one.

 

Maybe there are differences.

But wouldn't that mean that the music lies on different servers that aren't synchronized?

Nevertheless, there are albums that only play with 96 kbps for you, too.

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8 hours ago, Cebolla said:

Good to know the Aries still works in standard UPnP mode. Let me know if you require any help setting up LMS for TIDAL & connection to standard UPnP streamer.

 

@Cebolla Thank you for the offer!

I certainly would like to come back to you when i have informed myself a little bit and have problems.

 

One question ahead. Is it possible to play the music with LMS directly on a Mac without first streaming it  to an Aries Mini, for example?

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53 minutes ago, Cebolla said:

Is there any chance you could test your German TIDAL HiFi account with the BubbleUPnP Android app (free version will do), using @wklie's music list?

 

Sorry, but this is an Apple only household. So i can't test with Android hardware.

But i will do it again with my Aries Mini when i come home.

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I tested the list of albums again with my Aries Mini and got the same results as @wklie.

 

320kbps AAC:
Joanne Shaw Taylor|Almost Always Never
Joanne Shaw Taylor|Diamonds In The Dirt
Joe Bonamassa|A New Day Yesterday
Joe Bonamassa|Sloe Gin
 
96kbps AAC:
Núcleo - José Luis Gutiérrez Trio
Jimmy Ponder|Jimmy Ponder

Jimmy Ponder|Steel City Blues
Joanne Shaw Taylor|White Sugar
Joe Bonamassa|Had To Cry Today
Joe Bonamassa|So It's Like That

 

All files were AAC, no Mp3.

 

That means i have to scan all my "LoFi" playlist again to separate "LoFi" albums from "SuperLoFi" albums. Sigh. 

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I have the Audirvana app installed now and have to say: WOW!

 

But the Tidal-affair gets even worse.
Not only have the bad quality albums only a bitrate of 96 kbps but also the sample rate is at 22.0 kHz! All that 96 kbps BadFi tracks show this behavior.

 

I think that's an absolute No-Go for a service that calls itself TIDAL HiFi.
Even 256 kbps mp3 would not satisfy me.
If you subscribe to the Premium service (the worse one), you get 320 kbps and 96 kbps @ 22.0 kHz. That's a shame!

So i have to rework literally all of my numerous playlist with the help of Audirvana.


Audirvana at the other hand is THE app for me to play Tidal. That alone would be worth the money. The user interface in light colors pleases my eyes (don't like black interfaces) and reacts very fast. A lot to learn about Audirvana now.

 

I have been a JRiver subscriber for longer than a decade. But they stubbornly refuse to integrate Tidal into their app. So now in turn i will refuse to subscribe to their app.

Anyway, there is no movement in audio development at JRiver any more. They prefer to develop for video and "smart home stuff" now - good luck! 
 

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Only those 96 kbps AAC titles have the 22.0 kHz sample rate.

Those in the list above and hundreds of others that i have in my playlists.

 

The other "LoFis" are at AAC 320 kbps, 44.1 kHz.

The "HiFis" are Flac in higher bit- and sample rates - that's ok.

 

I did just install the Audirvana app without changing any settings.

So i think the settings are ok - at least i would not know yet what to alter.

 

Does anyone else use Tidal via Audirvana?

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I did a further research on my playlists:

 

From 160 "LoFi" albums, i considered consumable before, there are

 

- 155 in AAC 96 kbps 16/22.0 kHz

- 5 in AAC 320 kbps 16/44.1 kHz

 

So far i scanned only a few of my "LoFi" playlists.

If Audirvana is right with its display, i can only say:

 

TIDAL, are you kidding us?

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I tested a typical AAC, 96 kbps, 16/22.0 khz example (Ottmar Liebert|La Semana|#3|Caballada) with the MusicScope app, that i normally use for testing HiRes files.

 

I played the title in Audirvana (that showed it as AAC, 96 kBit/s, 16/22.0 Stereo) let MusicScope run in Audio Input Mode (Default Audio Device, 44100, 16) and made a screenshot (see below).

 

In the picture you can see that there is no activity beyond 10-11kHz (22 kHz /2).

This is typical for this kind of titles. 

 

AAC, 320, 16/44.1 titles show some activity at least to 16 kHz, Flac files even more.

 

MusicScope.jpg

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I'm not versed in the different formats that are described here.

For me it is a real mess.

 

Tried to get order to my playlist chaos and sorted out all the AAC 96kbps 22.0 kHz albums with the help of Audirvana. I put them in separate playlists in order to investigate further.

 

The small rest of albums that play with AAC 320 kbps 44.1 kHz in Audirvana stay in another playlist.

 

But to complete the confusion, my Auralic Aries Mini doesn't play them all in AAC 320 kbps 44.1 kHz. A bunch of them are displayed as AAC 96kbps 22.0 kHz again. In Audirvana the same albums all are displayed as AAC 320 kbps 44.1 kHz.

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Here is an example of the different behaviors (44 kHz vs. 22 kHz) of Audirvana and Aries Mini with the same title when playing "LoFi" streams.

 

By the way, the first title of the album plays with 320 kbps, the rest with 96 kbps only. Strange.

 

 

Bruce Cockburn Aries Mini.PNG

Bruce Cockburn Audirvana.png

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Here in Germany the FLAC version is missing. The LoFi version is the only one.

 

While cleaning up my playlists i found a number of FLAC albums, too, where there were only LoFi versions before.

It will take a while until i have cleaned up all my many playlists.

And i think, this will be a never ending game.

 

But the transition of the LoFi albums from 320 kbps to 96 kbps has happened only recently.

I don't know what they did to these albums. Never saw these 96 kbps before.

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19 hours ago, Cebolla said:

Have you tried Musicscope on the TIDAL Desktop app streaming the AAC+ 96kbps 44.1kHz albums, as @wklie suggested in his last post? You should see activity beyond 10-11kHz (22 kHz /2), unlike with Audirvana.

 

You are right.

With the TIDAL desktop app, the frequency response goes up to about 20 kHz.

So Audirvana seems to be the bottleneck here. But that doesn't matter because 96 kbps is not an option anyway.

 

 

Lily Of The Midnight Sky.png

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But TIDAL is responsible for not telling their customers that they don't have the right to stream all of the files they are offering in HiFi quality. In fact they are cheating  HiFi subscribers with their low quality stream when they can't offer a HiFi stream. Nowhere in their advertisement or their website they tell us the truth. 

 

It is bad enough that you often got the greyed out HiFi symbol before, meaning that the quality is 320 kbps. But now even that low quality isn't guaranteed any more. Quite the contrary is the case. 96 kbps is normal now, when they can't supply FLAC streams. And that is the case very, very often, at least for me. Your milage may vary (or you don't pay attention to this behavior so much). 

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4 hours ago, Cebolla said:

According to the OP it has only started happening recently, via the HIFI quality connection setting.

 

Not only the HIFI quality connection is concerned.

 

I purposely changed my subscription to "TIDAl Premium" just to see if i could get better quality for these LoFi albums. But the effect only was that i got 320 kbps (for all HiFi FLAC files) and 96 kbps for the rest (as is the case with a HiFi subscription). I then immediately changed back to the HiFi subscription.

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