Official Qobuz Issues Thread

[Martin H]

David, do you know if there is any likely fix date for the windows Qobuz app, using the Upnp feature with the Linn DS ?

i love to use the Qobuz app to explore the music but really want to be able then to push that to the Linn DS at the highest res available rather than have to open another app (I.e. Kazoo etc) to do that. It seemed to work temperamentally when first released but just spins every time I try it. For info I can use Qobuz from Linn’s Kazoo app and so the issue is just with this exciting feature. Luv Qobuz  and been sublime and then + member since they started

[Martin H]

I wasn't being impatient. I was just asking a reasonable and polite question regarding a beta feature for which I have fed back logs/detail etc. Fairly normal stuff. 

 

I would still appreciate an answer from a Qobuz rep please. if possible  - Thanks. 

[Martin H]

29 minutes ago, Cebolla said:

 

Given that your UPnP supporting Linn DS streamer should already have the highest resolution available Qobuz access via its own Linn Kazoo controller app, what exactly is the problem with the Windows version of the Linn Kazoo controller app that makes you prefer using Qobuz's own Windows desktop application instead?

 

 

 

BTW, do you know if your Linn DS supports gapless playback when used in standard UPnP streaming mode, as opposed to the default OpenHome (aka UPnP with Linn extensions) streaming mode it is able to use with its own controller apps?

 

If it doesn't, no gapless supporting third party standard UPnP controller, so including the Qobuz desktop application, will be able to control the Linn DS gaplessly. Any fix for standard UPnP gapless playback would have to come from Linn themselves.

It's a good question and I hope I can answer it. I have really enjoyed using the Qobuz service. Primarily for the combination of high quality streaming and the discounted purchases but as they have upgraded the apps I have also found the Qobuz windows app a really nice way to explore and discover new music and more specifically the new releases each week. Its just a good experience and continues to improve. So each Friday I will work my way through them, read about the artists and albums as I listen to them. But the disappointment has always been to hear the music at the highest quality on my main system (which is for me the point) that I then have to go to the Linn app and find the same album again. So ideally the Qobuz app would just drop them straight into the DS playlist for me which in effect is what the Upnp seems to achieve (or it did when first released as a beta). Maybe better put as the simplest requirement is basic enough - enjoy the Qobuz experience while listening at the highest quality. I can use the Linn Kazoo app to select it but then I don't get the increasing richness of the Qobuz app. So I was over the moon when I saw the upnp feature and it worked for the first few days (I assume something changed that 'broke that').  

 

As I say I am huge Qobuz advocate and have converted many friends/acquaintances to it etc. and just keen to get an update on the feature's likely fix. not ranting or raving about anything - just asking. 

 

The second question - I am not sure but not being a classical buff I am not sure that would worry me as much as it might others. 

 

it's good to see that they are launching in the US and Canada although they are tough markets and I am not sure enough punters understand the distinction re quality anywhere these days but hopefully they can overcome that. 

 

 

[Martin H]

33 minutes ago, David Craff said:

 

Hello,

 

We do not have a new version date of the application in which reading on uPNP/DLNA compatible outputs would be functional. A new version will arrive in about ten days but this one will not fix this feature.

We have identified reading problems with uPNP/DLNA outputs and now need to implement a new approach to properly meet expectations on this feature. To go into detail, we need to transform our application so that it can serve audio file links itself. This will require more time, especially since we have to pay attention to the application's performance.

I sincerely doubt that we will have time to propose this before the end of the year, but I know the importance and need for this feature and I will do my best to respond as quickly as possible.

 

Regards

David,

 

Many thanks for the comprehensive answer. Will look forward to it being delivered, hopefully early in the new year sometime. I do think it will allow users like me to stay get the full Qobuz experience AND get the most out of the HiRes music. Awesome. Having got it to work for just an afternoon on a track by track basis proved it makes a big difference. Thanks. Great service

 

 

martin

[Martin H]

1 hour ago, David Craff said:

 

I don't know in detail what A+ is doing for the UPnP. What I do know is that we tried to send the url of the audio file directly to the UPnP player. However, the header in the request on our servers is a problem for a large majority of these readers.

 

As A+ or BubbleUPnP do (if I'm not mistaken) the objective will be to get the audio file from Qobuz and then send it to the readers. That's why I'm talking about transforming our application into a url server. At that time we will have control over the headers in the request and will be able to adapt it to the UPnP's needs. It will also be possible at this time to convert the file to another format such as WAV, which is less problematic than Flac for UPnP.

Just to check my understanding. So the solution you are describing, when in place, should preserve the hires quality (e.g. 24/192 or 96) and the customers local DS/DAC handles the decoding, not the pc. Sounds awesome. 

[Martin H]

17 hours ago, jvvita said:

This is also my experience, with Qobuz in CD quality. But my favorite way of listening is selecting the album on the Qobuz android app, and using the "share with bubbleupnp" function to stream to the renderer (PSAudio Bridge II). This way I get all the bells and whistles of the Qobuz app, have the music files cached in my SD card for further listening (the quality is a bit better), and use the upnp protocol to its fullest extent. 

Hi

 

When you say that you 'share' with bubbleupnp' from the Qobuz app  - what exactly do you mean and how do you do that? 

 

Apologies if I am being dumb but I spent some time looking in various apps earlier on my android phone and couldnt find it. 

[Martin H]

Question - I enjoy exploring new music and so Qobuz has been great for that but often you simply aren't aware of bands or albums and so I have found some of my best day's listening has been when I have stumbled across a playlist that someone else has created from their favourite albums or for whatever reason. I have often found these  in blogs, a forum like this, or even some of the mags have reasonab;y good ones. Anyone can create the playlist and make it available which is brilliant but how do you find them? At the moment I don't seem to be able to search for them even if I know they are there. I actually need the exact reference that has to be shared somewhere. Am I missing something? 

 

I just think this is an excellent piece of the service that is underused. BTW I can find the Qobuz playlists without any problems. The search doesn't seem to access the user playlists, just the Qobuz curated ones. 

 

Any ideas? 

[Martin H]

On 10/27/2018 at 8:19 PM, Cebolla said:

 

Hi Martin

 

Definitely give @jvvita's suggestion a go, as it's certainly much more user friendly to use than swapping between the Qobuz application & Linn Kazoo on a desktop computer and the entire playlist, including any hi-res tracks, should end up on your Linn DS (given that the BubbleUPnP app supports OpenHome), all actioned from the Qobuz Android app!

 

Just make sure you've start the BubbleUPnP Android app first, select the Linn DS as the renderer and log into the same Qobuz account that you'll be using on the Qobuz Android app. Keep BubbleUPnP running in the background by going into the Android's home screen and then start the Qobuz Android app.

 

Also, you may be able to do the same share function via the (OpenHome only) BubbleDS Next app, instead of the BubbleUPnP app, if that's the Bubblesoft app that you normally use on Android with your Linn DS.

 

 

 

On 10/27/2018 at 4:44 PM, jvvita said:

My pleasure. In the Qobuz app, to the right of the play button, there are 3 dots. Clicking the dots brings a menu. There you will find the "share" button. Click it, and select bubbleupnp. And voilà. 

 

Thanks to both. I have tried it on my Android phone today which has been the first opportunity I have had and I have licences already etc.. If I can get it to work there then I will either dig out an old android tablet that I had or preferably try the same thing on Windows? (would it work on windows 10 do you think? or is it just an Android feature).

 

The on problem I have at the minute is that I am only getting 16/44. So I don't get the full res (which the Qobuz feature when ready promises to deliver). Don't get me wrong  - its a step forward for simple sampling but ideally it would play the song the same way is if I went and found it in Kazoo? As it is specifically listed in the settings as 16 bit for wifi with no option to set anything higher I am assuming I am screwed  on this - right? 

 

Be good to know.

 

In the meantime - thanks to you both. 

[Martin H]

45 minutes ago, mourip said:

 

Sounds like a great idea for a dedicated thread here. We could share Qobuz playlists that we find or create or even work on them collaboratively?

 

On that topic, I wish that there was an easy way to create a playlist in one click when one finds a performer, group, or orchestra that one really likes. For example I do a search on "Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra", get 14 hits, and want to make a new playlist with all 14 albums. Currently you need to add them one by one which is laborious for a prolific search result...

We did something similar on the Linn forum for a while but there were really only 2 of us posting things  and it really needs a larger  group to keep it moving or it becomes a chore. As Linn just closed it without any warning I couldn't even copy the list which is a bit of a pain but hey ho. that's another topic. 

 

I would be up for contributing if enough are interested but as you say better to have another thread I would think? 

 

I would still appreciate advice from anyone (ideally Qobuz) if there is a way to find/search for the available user playlists without knowing the specific 'number' of it in advance by some other method. Seems like an obvious shortfall. I know there are some people out there, far more knowledgeable and productive than I , that love to put together playlists for others to listen to. Some magazines do it. What Hi Fi is one, every month. Qobuz playlists are very good but I would still say some of my favourites over the past few years have been from individuals with different and broad musical tastes focused on different periods/genres to me. 

[Martin H]

18 minutes ago, shadowlight said:

@Martin H, I was recently able to subscribe to the Linn Qobuz playlist.  If I remember correctly, all I did was logon on to the desktop client and opened the playlist in the browser.  Doing that gave me the option of subscribing to the playlist.  Some of the tracks are no longer available in some of the playlist though.

Yep - it's all simple enough once you have a link to an existing playlist but I don't know how you can search for them or just browse the 'user ones'. 

 

So here is one Clumsybaby - October and if you click on the link you should be able to see it and play it if you are a Qobuz subscriber. Some tracks may not play due to regions/licensing changes since it was created but you should see most. But if you simply searched for it under that name it won't come back in the list even though it has been made available to anyone. I just wondered if there was a way to find them or browse other than hope someone mentions it somewhere on a www site and then that I can find it that way which is pretty limiting. 

 

BTW I should really give any credit for the playlist to Clumsybaby who is a music blogger I did stumble upon a long time ago. 

 

Edit - should have added - as you say you can subscribe to it and it will remain in your Qobuz my playlists and for me it then appears in the Qobuz section of Kazoo to play on my Linn DS etc.

[Martin H]

27 minutes ago, David Craff said:

 

In fact, you cannot search for a customer's playlist. Only Qobuz playlists or Qobuz partners' playlists are available for consultation.

The next step is to search our customers' playlists.

 

This one will be available soon, but we can't give you access to all our customers' playlists because some of them are not interesting: 0 tracks, 1 complete album and nothing else, etc.....  Our job is to index, on the search engine, only the customer's playlists that can be interesting and for that we need to apply some restrictions like: playlist with 10 tracks minimum, tracks of 2 different albums minimum etc.....

David, 

 

Excellent news and of course your explanation makes complete sense. 

 

I am sure you have more than enough to do at Qobuz but I did always wonder if Qobuz should have a forum for Qobuz users to share their musical discoveries or talk about artists or even just a place where they could post their favourite/recommended playlists. Or maybe simpler just a place that everyone can create their 'super' playlist of their favourite tunes and post it in their name. The forum would handle all of that and add some sort of community but having been around a few forums over the years I realise they can too often disrupted by a mischevious poster and often become difficult to manage. Shame really and happy to wait for the user search.  

 

Qobuz really is/are excellent. Thanks

[Martin H]

21 hours ago, David Craff said:

 

We do not  have forum but a old place call User Voice available here : https://qobuz.uservoice.com/

Yes- sorry I am familiar with that help area. But I was thinking more of a place where the Qobuz community could talk and share thoughts and recommendations of the music/artists. So more focused upon the content  and helping each other explore it. The uservoice is a good place to flag issues and problems. Just a thought really. Not critical but maybe enhance the experience a little further.

[Martin H]

On 11/2/2018 at 3:52 PM, davidovada said:

Years ago I used to peruse all of the Qobuz catalog via their website. There is an enormous amount of music that never makes an appearance on their apps (desktop and ios). The apps are strictly limited to recent releases (and not every new release). I've found so much great music that, unless you search for something specific, goes unnoticed. I wonder if there are any plans to make the full catalog available through the apps. I'm a jazz dude and enjoy "flipping" through their "virtual crates."

If anyone is interested, you need to go to their website, select a genre and then drill down to find tons of hidden gems. Today I found a great new Karin Plato jazz vocal album that did not make it onto either of their apps...just a suggestion.

Do you mean they don’t appear on the new releases page?

 

You can obviously access every album through an app but I guess you mean you might not know it exists? Obviously you can search by artists and then see all of their albums. I know on the browser you can search by release date but tbh I don’t know if that’s possible in the app or not. Not noticed it I guess. 

[Martin H]

Hi, my android Qobuz has updated and as expected I had to recreate my offline library. All good and it was playing perfectly well with streaming or local albums. My problem came when someone knocked on the door and I discovered I couldn't stop it   after about 3 albums worth of playing it just locked up. I turned the volume down to deal with the visitor and then went back to it later and had to 'stop' the app. Even that took an awful long time but I was able to do so without restarting my whole phone. 

 

Has anyone else had any similar issues? I have not used it since because we are travelling and I haven't wanted to risk the phone while away from home.  I doubt it would do so but away from any sort of backup I would be in a mess. Will try it again when I get back. 

 

Sure it will soon soon be sorted.

 

cheers

 

 

martin

[Martin H]

15 minutes ago, left channel said:

@Martin H mine locked up so badly I had to restart the phone. I could not stop play, tried to exit the app but got a black screen instead, and found no way to stop it except a restart. I thought that happened because I had accidentally started downloading the White Album, but apparently there is other instability in there.

 

 

that is the same issue I had. I eventually managed to get past the black screen after some time and got a stop or wait message. I chose to stop the app. The first time this didn't appear to work but later after another try it did. Have you tried it again or since! 

 

Thx

[Martin H]

A simple question I hope.

 

I have discovered various playlists on Qobuz that I like but ideally I would add some of my own favourites to them and perhaps remove a few that are of less interest to me. So I don't want to change the original. Ideally I would like to be able to copy  and paste/rename it into my own version which I can then edit. Or is the only way to do this to recreate it one by one. The playlists I am talking about are over 200 tracks long and if there is a way to simply copy rename or any shortcut anyone knows about it would be handy. Thanks.

 

Edit  - probably should have mentioned that the ones I am referencing are mostly from other subscribers but it would be handy on any Qobuz playlist TBH

 

Martin 

[Martin H]

1 hour ago, Fridolin said:

 

In the desktop app for MacOS you can mark your desired titles in a playlist, then right click on the selection and choose "add to playlists". Then you can choose from the set of playlists you have created before and thus copy the selected titles to the end of your (new) playlist.

 

Fred

Ahhhh - now I feel a bit silly for not discovering that. I wasn't clicking on the tracks in the playlist window because I thought that would just start it playing and I was already listening to something else. I have given it a quick test and that works perfectly on the Windows app too. So cool and I suspect I will be using this quite a lot now.  

 

Thanks

 

 

[Martin H]

1 hour ago, David Craff said:

 

Thanks, that's the way. We have on the back log the ability to directly copy / clone a playlist. This feature will happen one day

Thanks for confirming David and good to hear it will be enhanced later but that is fine for me as it is. 

 

Really looking forward to the UpnP fixes so that I can push playlists directly to my Linn DS but realise that you guys have things to do right now. Please keep us posted on likely dates for this and if you ever need testers let me know. 

 

One thing on the upnp thing I noticed the other day having idly tried it again just to see if by some fluke it would work. 

 

I went to Kazoo (which is the Linn DS control app) and watched the Kazoo screen while selecting the DS in the Qobuz app. The DS changes from whatever it was and shows UPnp but sits there 'stopped'. If I click on the play button (repeatedly) it flashes up the right track album cover but immediately stops - I never hear anything. 

 

Wondered if knowing that helps your programmers or not. Perhaps you already know what the issue is. As you will know there is already Linn/Qobuz integration within Kazoo and so Qobuz works fine on the DS that way but it is the Qobuz 'app experience' that we miss out on which I really like. 

 

Anyway - thanks again. 

[Martin H]

7 minutes ago, David Craff said:

 

We have a good idea of what we need to do to make UPnP work on our applications. I hope we can focus on it soon enough. This is not an easy task but I hope we can propose some functional things at the beginning of the year.

Great news and thanks for your help.

[Martin H]

Unusually I encountered stuttering problems while streaming 24 bit albums on Saturday evening (UK - 24 Nov) and just wondered if anyone else had anything similar. I do this all the time without any issue and these were 24/44.1 files rather than something heavy like 24/192.  I had been playing Qobuz music for 3 or 4 days for the daylight hours prior to this and there was no local bandwidth issues (I checked speeds and also watched a streamed movie shortly after. The song was stuttering  to the point that I had to go to the 16 bit version which then worked. 

 

is it a known service blip or issue that others encountered? Seems fine this morning. 

 

 

[Martin H]

4 hours ago, David Craff said:

 

 

I'm curious to know why Audirvana and not the Qobuz application. If you can tell me more, we could improve the Qobuz application.

From my perspective, I would likely use the Qobuz app all the time if the upnp feature was working for the Linn DS and so looking forward to that beta feature being corrected and put live (next year, earlyish I think you intimated).

 

thx

[Martin H]

Have to say I really like the Qobuz windows (10) app. Just add the redesigned upnp and I will be a very happy chap. 

[Martin H]

18 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

Here's an article @Martin H

 

 

I dumped Tidal very early on and so need for transferring playlists from there. I would use something like Soundiz if it worked on public playlists. I often come across interesting playlists on other streaming services that I quite fancy but unless Soundiz has changed recently, you have to be subscribed to both services to make the translation. So it's fairly useless TBH. If it just translated them from the other services into Qobuz then I would almost certainly use it. 

[Martin H]

2 hours ago, David Craff said:

 

Thanks but we do not need feedback. We know that our Beta is not  fully working. And we know what we must do for that. But we are blocked by the security of our audio streams.

David,

 

Just to check on this. I understand that there are issues with the current implementation and that you know what they are. But are you saying that you also you believe that you will soon have a working solution or are you saying that the audio stream security will prevent you from providing a solution. 

 

Apologies for being pedantic with this but I would just like to be clear because this is a feature I would use every day if possible (on a windows 10 desktop and probably from an ipad too if it was possible to retain the hi res quality. 

 

 

 

Regards,

 

 

[Martin H]

6 hours ago, David Craff said:

 

Sorry, I don't know yet

OK thanks for the straight answer. sounds a little less positive than prior to Xmas but I will keep my fingers crossed and wait for an update. If you do get any positive news it would be good to hear it

 

Thanks