Planning on ditching Spotify & I’m wondering what y’all thing of qobuz vs. tidal. Seems like neither have podcasts so I’ll have to get a separate app for that. What are your thoughts?
Yes, Tidal if you need reccomendation and personalized algorithms, Qobuz if not
Well I don’t super need recommendations. I just ask people what they’ve listened to.
I had tidal for about a year and was happy with it. Sound quality is nice, app is clean, tidal connect is nice. Recommendations were not great and discovering new music I liked was a bit of a chore.
I have qobuz now (had it in the past too, for a while). App is more to my taste, very little clutter. Qobuz connect is now here and it works, so I can stream music over wifi to my stereo system. Finding new music is a lot better than spotify or tidal (imho) Recommendations are better, the magazine and editorial stuff is super nice and they have one simple feature that makes a world of difference to me: you can click on the record label of albums and see what else is on that label. So simple, but it’s by far my favourite way of finding new stuff.
I didn’t know the last point. Thanks for telling.
Qobuz has come a long way in the last year or so, it’s fantastic now.
I’m just here to agree with youThat sounds legit.
Both have free trials, I think. You can try them both for a month and decide after that.
I’ve bounced around. Liked Tidal but can’t support an American company these days. I’m currently on Qobuz and enjoy it. The UI isn’t amazing but it’s not bad. I really enjoy the playlists/essential listening features, I’ve fallen down a lot of interesting wormholes that way. They’re also curated by people not algorithms, so your personal recommendations might not be as on point as you’re used to but the general playlists have a wide enough selection that I’ve had a great time.
There’s a service called Soundiiz that helps you move favourites/playlists etc from one service to another relatively painfree, so honestly, maybe give each one of them a couple months and see what works best for you?
your personal recommendations might not be as on point as you’re used to
I see this as an absolute win! The algorithmically personalized playlists always end up just playing the same set of tracks over and over. I want new music that I like, not the same stale playlists.
Use the free trials with both and see what you prefer!
For podcasts, if you’re on android, check out AntennaPod
If you listen on multiple devices, you can also use gpodder (self-hostable if it’s a concern) to sync your listens. I use Kasts on desktop, AntennaPod on mobile. Kasts is on mobile too, but the UI on mobile is… Infuriating at best
I had to check, I’m using Antenna Pod having moved from pocketcast due to its American ownership.
Fantastic app, I’m loving it and being open source is a massive win
Just downloaded it. It has all the ones I listen to! It just makes it that much easier now to ditch Spotify. Now to decide to go with Qobuz or Tidal.
Edit: Rude. Forgot to say thank you!
No problem :)
One more vote for Tidal. High quality and large catalog, I’ve been using it for years.
I tried Qobuz almost a year ago because I was ditching Spotify and wanted to stay with a European service, but it had awful recommendations. There was no algorithm involved, it would recommend completely random tracks that had nothing to do with my music. It made finding new music extremely difficult. Too bad because I liked everything else about Qobuz.
I use Tidal now and love it. The recommendations are different from Spotify’s but just as good. No podcasts is actually a plus IMO and I haven’t noticed the AI slop that’s all over Spotify (although I’m sure there’s still some of it).
Good stuff to know.
Qobuz because its not American
I’m moving from Tidal asap. Because the CEO seems to be pro-genocide, at the very least.
Claims I’ve seen here and some other shit elsewhere:
Tidal seemed like a good alternative but it’s problematic as well, as the CEO retweeted on X a few days after Oct 7th that said ‘we stand with Isr’. I think he may have shared other pro-Isr posts since but perhaps deleted them. Deezer CEO also under fire for being part of a WhatsApp group with senior politicians etc about supporting Isr…
The one decent alternative I have found is Qobuz, which I’m looking into – it seems to have a lot of variety in terms of music catalogue and I can’t find anything ‘problematic’ about them (they don’t operate in Isr). Also allegedly offers higher payout to artists than many others.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BoycottIsrael/comments/1bi8cnq/music_apps_that_are_not_on_the_boycott_list/
Lol. Signed up for Qobuz (super annoying they block all of Proton’s email mask domains), and within 10 minutes I get an email from Spotify that my monthly price is increasing.
I forgot about the proton thing. I had to sign up with a different email. Then I kept having app issues and it took forever to figure out how to contact them. They only got back to me after my free trial expired. Ugh I’m still on Spotify but at least I’m not the one paying for Spotify.
Try them both for sure. I tried quobuz after tidal and overall preferred the experience except for new artist discovery - Tidal was much better in that regards. Since that was such an important part of my enjoyment, I switched back to Tidal. Both worked great with the WiiM. Good luck.
I tried Deezer and tidal for a month each. They were both alright, however their offline download for bigger playlists straight up sucked, so that took some sanity out of me and I had to switch back to Spotify ultimately.
Please keep this in mind if you ever consider switching.
Download + offline listening is also something I look for in a music app. I just went through the free trials for deezer and qobuz. Deezer’s download was straight up stupid - I couldn’t find a way to force it to immediately download updates after modifying a playlist. With qobuz you could force the download immediately, but it makes you select “download only” before you start the music, or it defaults to streaming. Every single time. Sometimes the playlist got corrupted too if a song was removed. I’m almost ready to start buying music again…
there are downloader tools available for both qobuz and tidal, so you can have your music library mirrored locally too
Offline mode is a must. 🙌
I’ve been testing out Qobuz recently since I’m in a similar ditching-Spotify place in my life. Honestly I think it’s a great alternative. Sound quality is great and it has the multi device sync/status like Spotify.
I don’t know what that feature is actually called but the feature where you can have a song playing in the app on your phone, open the app on a different device like your tablet, and it will show the “now playing” in the minimized player along with the name of your phone that it’s playing (and you can swap it to play immediately on the tablet now instead). That feature in Spotify was a big one for me. Love that Qobuz has it.
I’m still building my listening history so I can’t comment on how good the recommendations will be. But the suggestions I’ve gotten in the last few weeks were spot on.
Not sure what people are talking about with the app ui. It’s a good app. Maybe it was bad in the past and they have made improvements? But coming from Spotify I think you’d have no issues using it.
Give the free trial a shot.
I think I will.
Is there anything wrong with Pandora?
I haven’t thought about it. 🤷♂️
What is Pandora? I haven’t heard of it.
An early music streaming service which for some reason, is only available in a few chosen countries. US and Canada, I think
I recently switched to Tidal, before realizing is was US american. However I am pretty happy so far, I especially like their algorithms. While Spotify always went to the same shitty pop songs, Tidal started to get a grasp of my taste after about 2-3 weeks. What I really don’t like: I have to search a song with every letter spelled correctly or I won’t find the song. Also I can’t search via lyrics, a feature I really liked about Spotify. Is Quboz able to do those two things?
