Ask Lemmy

I’m planning to stop using Tidal. I get too many errors when playing.

Yes, Tidal if you need reccomendation and personalized algorithms, Qobuz if not

I like SomaFM and RadioParadise. They're free/listener supported, and both have a multiple channels and a wide selection to choose from.

Lot of people are talking about Qobuz's music recs, so figured I'd drop this here:

If it becomes a problem, ListenBrainz gives good recommendations. I use PanoScrobbler on mobile to sync listens. Only issue I can see is that it is owned by MetaBrainz (not affiliated with Facebook), which is an American company.

I know you can ((download)) music from tidal, not sure about qobuz (I remember doing it long ago, not sure about now)

I am locked into a family plan with Spotify that I justify by thinking that we're not actually family so we're cheating them.

I see Quobuz also has a family plan but with the same proviso that you're supposed to live at the same address. How strict do they check?

We have never had any problems on Spotify.

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?

Qobuz

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'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.

Qobuz because its not American

Qobuz wouldn't allow me to sign up with a proton alias. I also tried deezer but they wouldn't stop sending spam. Out of the two I'd recommend deezer.

Use the free trials with both and see what you prefer!

For podcasts, if you're on android, check out AntennaPod

edit: Adding some more information

• The podcast format was designed to be decentralized and open. Most creators still do direct distribution, so you can follow your favourite podcasts without needing a centralized entity like Spotify to collect it for you
• The exception is the platform exclusive paywalled stuff that Spotify produces themselves. Joe Rogan is one of those iirc, but I don't think that affects the majority of people here
• If you listen on multiple devices and want to synchronize your listening history, see here: https://antennapod.org/documentation/general/synchronization

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?

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.

there are downloader tools available for both qobuz and tidal, so you can have your music library mirrored locally too

EDIT: Take this post with a big grain of salt. I couldn't verify the claim, because I couldn't find the twitter profile of the CEO (then and now) Richard Sanders. However, the company is ultimately controlled and owned by Block, Inc. (formerly Square inc.), where Jack Dorsey has a 79% ownership (2025). He's a billionaire, the twitter co-founder, Bluesky founder, and so on.

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/

they all look and feel the same. all comes down to the content. do they have all your favourite artist? are there any cool playlists?

i wouldnt be worried about the podcasts, if you only listen to them on one device. its just an app.

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.

Is there anything wrong with Pandora?

But in all seriousness, I've been using Tidal through USB Audio Player with an Audioquest DAC on an Android phone for the past five years and listening to music with this setup feels like an effing privilege. Would I have chosen today, I might have gone with Qobuz because it's a European product, but at this point, as long as I don't find out that the people at Tidal are monsters, I don't think I will switch to anything else.

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.

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).

One more vote for Tidal. High quality and large catalog, I've been using it for years.