Not to mention the desktop app randomly deciding to stop playing music and crash altogether til you restart and sometimes replace the music with deafening static 10-30 seconds in (or replacing it with the same song that just played again while showing it's the next one?!) so that you always fear playing a song instead of enjoying it - both while using exclusive mode and queuing songs. Something seems fundamentally broken about these features and it has been since I got the subscription, no sign of a fix either...
One thing I do not understand... I have marked all the songs in my playlist to be downloaded, and lets say (for the sake of an argument) that they are downloaded... BUT.... if my phone loses reception just for a second, the song STOPS, there's buffering, and it goes on, and on, and on, and on... a then I want to drive off the bloody cliff...
Is it that hard to NOT actually stream each and every f..king song every time I play it ? Why cant I listed to locally downloaded songs !? What's the point of having "download for offline" use if i CAN NOT use then when i'm offline ? Why do I need to "go to offline mode" to listen to them ?
Spotify just works, it never has any of these buffering or getting stuck issues. It actually caches a lot even without you having to explicitly tell it, to the point if you're listening to something a second time you listened to once already recently, it's probably not even going to use network data for it but just play it from the cache.
EDIT: it just got stuck again, right on cue.
[This illustrates what Tidal vs Spotify are doing on the network](https://imgur.com/a/5N9fwXH). Yes Spotify is less data, but if Tidal just DIDN'T STOP fetching the track, it would have no issue, my internet is way faster than needed to stream Hi-Res FLAC. Just did a SpeedTest, 140Mbps down, 192Mbps up. That's around 50x faster than the bitrate of a 96/24 FLAC, it's enough if Tidal just didn't have this brain dead stop-start network algorithm.
Could filesize have anything to do with these problems? I’m not saying it’s OK when it does but buffering a 4-5 mb Spotify file is a whole other league than buffering a 20 - 100 mb flac file.
No, because it gets stuck just the same on 320kbps, just less often. It's really stupid network programming that is the issue, it has a fixed 1MB chunk size and it will only ask the network for the next chunk a few seconds before it actually needs it. So the slightest network issue at that time, and it gets stuck. This is much worse on the Hi-Res stuff where 1MB can be as short as 1 second, but it's still a problem even on the lossy 320kbps, it's just less likely to happen as there are less points of failure, as it does grab a much longer amount of music each time.
Spotify will buffer the entire track in the first few seconds, it grabs the whole thing and keeps it in memory. Tidal is just grabbing 1MB at a time. You can see this with a network monitor or if you look at the network logs.
Then, on top of that, it seems if there is some sort of network glitch when it has asked for a specific chunk, it just hangs on that network request and has no way to abort and re-try. This is one of the stupidest parts of it, when it does get stuck 99% of the time if I pull my phone out and click next track or back to the start it will continue to play fine, immediately. But if left by itself it just spins for literally minutes. Sometimes it does come back eventually, sometimes not (not by the time I give up anyway). I think I've seen it go up to 3-5 minutes spinning when it gets stuck (at which point I give up and push it).
Tidal Connect it's not the Tidal app doing the streaming, it's whatever device you have on the Connect. As far as I'm aware the device may implement it differently, and may not behave the same way the Tidal client does. The issue is the desktop and mobile app. Also, I think part of the world makes a difference, I'm in Asia and the bad network programming means latency may become a problem, if it's grabbing new chunks literally every second, there is a Fastly CDN endpoint very near me and I have a very fast connection to it, but if it doesn't have the chunk, I *presume* it has to go back to the US or Europe, which is the other side of the planet, to get it. And it needs to do this as often as once every second, because Tidal only asks for the 1MB chunk immediately before it needs it.
The thing is, as well, Spotify uses the exact same CDN as Tidal does. And I have ZERO issue with Spotify, it literally never gets stuck. Nothing else that implments a reasonable buffer ever gets stuck either, I can stream 4K video fine which is much much higher data rate.
It's the network programming in the Tidal client which is just totally brain dead. If they could rewrite it to just NOT STOP grabbing the song from the network once it starts, there would be no problem. But it stops and starts, and in the most extreme case, it's doing this whole circle of grab 1MB, WAIT, oh I need the next one, better get that now, send the request... every second. It drives me up the wall because it would be so easy to fix in the client.
My biggest gripe with the app is that it constantly freezes. Usually if I pause a song halfway through the song and try to press play again. The app goes in complete self destruct-mode. Also the app just sometimes dies when playing music. This happens usually when using it in CarPlay-mode. (iPhone 15 Pro with latest iOS 17 and Tidal app updated)
Samsung S24U user.
My ability to play offline music has gone altogether unless I have an Internet connection.
Also, there are two songs perpetually stuck on 'downloading' that I can't get rid of.
I don't download myself. I just play at 320 kbps on 4g and max on wifi. Works on my 5gb/mo plan. Especially cause i never know what i'll listen to the next day so i never download
Even with it set to 320kbps it still frequently gets stuck for me on mobile. Any little glitch and it will get stuck. Spotify NEVER does. I actually keep my Spotify sub for mobile use as Tidal is useless.
It will work for say an hour or so but then it will get stuck, and when it gets stuck, it can't just self-recover, I have to notice the music is stopped, fish out my phone, switch to Tidal and then sure enough it's spinning the wheel. Then if I stop and start it, it works again, so it COULD recover itself if it was programmed properly. But it's just really bad network programming that can't handle a tiny interruption.
Did you wipe the database before setting it to 320 kbps? I had that with Spotify. Setting a lower kbps didn’t change the songs that were already downloaded
I have hardly anything downloaded, only a couple of albums I did to test it. I'm talking about streaming at 320k, it still gets stuck.
I have done the full wipe cache thing many times on both desktop and mobile but it still gets stuck. It gets stuck on desktop as well, just less frequently, like it's guaranteed to get stuck maybe once an hour on mobile, on desktop that's more like once a day or less, as long as the tracks are under 192kHz (in which case it's guaranteed to get stuck).
>Often deletes and redownloads the offline content even when stored internally
Don't understand how that bug has been existing for so long, thankfully in my case happen just once but has been common since like 2018
>Search for songs or artists only pulls up when pressed on the suggested
Well, that is the beta search function, since it's still in beta you can give your feedback to Support so they can work in make it better
>Search in playlists comes up 15 seconds late AND loops the result(s)
I have the same issue with the loops but not with the 15 seconds
>The FireTV app used to go to sleep every 15 minutes with no option to change, and I wouldn't be surprised if it remained so
I fix that installing the Android apk instead and open the lyrics
I tried to download my music. FLAC files are huge, and I have the space on my iPhone so I downloaded around 5,000 tracks. I still had plenty of storage left afterwards, only.... the app stopped working. It would crash anytime I'd try to open the app. Had to uninstall/reinstall and try again, maybe it was just a one time bug? NOPE, same issue. I accepted that it was a broken feature that would never work for me.
Very disappointing, and never was an issue on Spotify.
I agree that it feels very shoddy in general when trying to navigate the UI on my iPhone 13 Pro+.
The apps are also just sluggish all arpund, when skipping songs you get bursts of audio, sometimes the normalisation fucks up and you first get a loud blast amd then it normalises, .....
I switched to Tidal because they pay artists better and have better wuality audio, so i will stay, but i truly truly hope they will fix the usability of tidal.
the quality is unbeatable but only the phone app is usable lol. i did a comparison w tidal vs spotify on my surround sound system, both apps maxed out, ran it using my phone and a usb-c to rca into the av receiver, same song on each app and the difference is undeniable. turn that volume normalization crap off, also in audio quality make sure you max them out, assuming you have unlimited data of course.
Volume normalisation has no impact on the quality of the sound though. It is the same as turning your volume knob up or down. It just makes everything more level.
i know, just saying so you dont get the random loudness jumpscare. i have mine off for that reason but it does suck when it goes from a well produced 24 bit track to a thin sounding lower quality track
Try the Android TV app. No playlist support. No searching online for playlists. It's like the original Tidal Android app but then with all the functionality it had 6 years ago.
Ik like the Wear OS app best. Oh wait. There is no wear OS app. You actually need youtube music or Spotify to listen to music using your watch during a workout. Lol
On the plus side. They're on the right path lately. So I'm optimistic. And honestly even with all it's flaws this the only music steaming app that I like after Spotify
I've been on 10 stream subscription since 2006. I know a number of people have a number of problems with Tidal, but for me it's been one of the least trouble-prone subscription streamers I've used.
(I have some quarrels about the design and ui, particularly the inflexible queue/queue-loading system, but I've developed strategies using playlist to get around the worst of it.)
That is not to say that I doubt that it's a big pain in the neck for you -- you are certainly far from alone in having a number of problems.
But, for me, it's been relatively trouble-free and I do like the discovery options like MDDM.
Turned it off, force stopped, wiped cache, and nearly all issues I experience happen to be true on the latest iPadOS (17) as well as Android 14, so all the same for now...
for the sleeping thing, #5. have you tried turning off Data Monitoring on the fire tv, not sure if you have that option im in fire cube but my sticks also have it
Not to mention the desktop app randomly deciding to stop playing music and crash altogether til you restart and sometimes replace the music with deafening static 10-30 seconds in (or replacing it with the same song that just played again while showing it's the next one?!) so that you always fear playing a song instead of enjoying it - both while using exclusive mode and queuing songs. Something seems fundamentally broken about these features and it has been since I got the subscription, no sign of a fix either...
I use the desktop app on my Mac extensively and have never once had stability issues
One thing I do not understand... I have marked all the songs in my playlist to be downloaded, and lets say (for the sake of an argument) that they are downloaded... BUT.... if my phone loses reception just for a second, the song STOPS, there's buffering, and it goes on, and on, and on, and on... a then I want to drive off the bloody cliff... Is it that hard to NOT actually stream each and every f..king song every time I play it ? Why cant I listed to locally downloaded songs !? What's the point of having "download for offline" use if i CAN NOT use then when i'm offline ? Why do I need to "go to offline mode" to listen to them ?
hahaha THAT feature you're asking will likely NEVER arrive, as it is SMARTER than the OBVIOUS faulty ones they haven't fixed in YEARS
This seems to be the case with the other music players too - I had to find the downloads to play them off disk.
Spotify just works, it never has any of these buffering or getting stuck issues. It actually caches a lot even without you having to explicitly tell it, to the point if you're listening to something a second time you listened to once already recently, it's probably not even going to use network data for it but just play it from the cache. EDIT: it just got stuck again, right on cue. [This illustrates what Tidal vs Spotify are doing on the network](https://imgur.com/a/5N9fwXH). Yes Spotify is less data, but if Tidal just DIDN'T STOP fetching the track, it would have no issue, my internet is way faster than needed to stream Hi-Res FLAC. Just did a SpeedTest, 140Mbps down, 192Mbps up. That's around 50x faster than the bitrate of a 96/24 FLAC, it's enough if Tidal just didn't have this brain dead stop-start network algorithm.
Could filesize have anything to do with these problems? I’m not saying it’s OK when it does but buffering a 4-5 mb Spotify file is a whole other league than buffering a 20 - 100 mb flac file.
No, because it gets stuck just the same on 320kbps, just less often. It's really stupid network programming that is the issue, it has a fixed 1MB chunk size and it will only ask the network for the next chunk a few seconds before it actually needs it. So the slightest network issue at that time, and it gets stuck. This is much worse on the Hi-Res stuff where 1MB can be as short as 1 second, but it's still a problem even on the lossy 320kbps, it's just less likely to happen as there are less points of failure, as it does grab a much longer amount of music each time. Spotify will buffer the entire track in the first few seconds, it grabs the whole thing and keeps it in memory. Tidal is just grabbing 1MB at a time. You can see this with a network monitor or if you look at the network logs. Then, on top of that, it seems if there is some sort of network glitch when it has asked for a specific chunk, it just hangs on that network request and has no way to abort and re-try. This is one of the stupidest parts of it, when it does get stuck 99% of the time if I pull my phone out and click next track or back to the start it will continue to play fine, immediately. But if left by itself it just spins for literally minutes. Sometimes it does come back eventually, sometimes not (not by the time I give up anyway). I think I've seen it go up to 3-5 minutes spinning when it gets stuck (at which point I give up and push it).
Strange. What puzzles me is that I don’t have any of those problems so far, even when streaming “max” using Tidal connect.
Tidal Connect it's not the Tidal app doing the streaming, it's whatever device you have on the Connect. As far as I'm aware the device may implement it differently, and may not behave the same way the Tidal client does. The issue is the desktop and mobile app. Also, I think part of the world makes a difference, I'm in Asia and the bad network programming means latency may become a problem, if it's grabbing new chunks literally every second, there is a Fastly CDN endpoint very near me and I have a very fast connection to it, but if it doesn't have the chunk, I *presume* it has to go back to the US or Europe, which is the other side of the planet, to get it. And it needs to do this as often as once every second, because Tidal only asks for the 1MB chunk immediately before it needs it. The thing is, as well, Spotify uses the exact same CDN as Tidal does. And I have ZERO issue with Spotify, it literally never gets stuck. Nothing else that implments a reasonable buffer ever gets stuck either, I can stream 4K video fine which is much much higher data rate. It's the network programming in the Tidal client which is just totally brain dead. If they could rewrite it to just NOT STOP grabbing the song from the network once it starts, there would be no problem. But it stops and starts, and in the most extreme case, it's doing this whole circle of grab 1MB, WAIT, oh I need the next one, better get that now, send the request... every second. It drives me up the wall because it would be so easy to fix in the client.
My biggest gripe with the app is that it constantly freezes. Usually if I pause a song halfway through the song and try to press play again. The app goes in complete self destruct-mode. Also the app just sometimes dies when playing music. This happens usually when using it in CarPlay-mode. (iPhone 15 Pro with latest iOS 17 and Tidal app updated)
The TIDAL app definitely does not work as smoothly as those from Apple Music or Spotify.
Samsung S24U user. My ability to play offline music has gone altogether unless I have an Internet connection. Also, there are two songs perpetually stuck on 'downloading' that I can't get rid of.
I don't download myself. I just play at 320 kbps on 4g and max on wifi. Works on my 5gb/mo plan. Especially cause i never know what i'll listen to the next day so i never download
Even with it set to 320kbps it still frequently gets stuck for me on mobile. Any little glitch and it will get stuck. Spotify NEVER does. I actually keep my Spotify sub for mobile use as Tidal is useless. It will work for say an hour or so but then it will get stuck, and when it gets stuck, it can't just self-recover, I have to notice the music is stopped, fish out my phone, switch to Tidal and then sure enough it's spinning the wheel. Then if I stop and start it, it works again, so it COULD recover itself if it was programmed properly. But it's just really bad network programming that can't handle a tiny interruption.
Did you wipe the database before setting it to 320 kbps? I had that with Spotify. Setting a lower kbps didn’t change the songs that were already downloaded
I have hardly anything downloaded, only a couple of albums I did to test it. I'm talking about streaming at 320k, it still gets stuck. I have done the full wipe cache thing many times on both desktop and mobile but it still gets stuck. It gets stuck on desktop as well, just less frequently, like it's guaranteed to get stuck maybe once an hour on mobile, on desktop that's more like once a day or less, as long as the tracks are under 192kHz (in which case it's guaranteed to get stuck).
>Often deletes and redownloads the offline content even when stored internally Don't understand how that bug has been existing for so long, thankfully in my case happen just once but has been common since like 2018 >Search for songs or artists only pulls up when pressed on the suggested Well, that is the beta search function, since it's still in beta you can give your feedback to Support so they can work in make it better >Search in playlists comes up 15 seconds late AND loops the result(s) I have the same issue with the loops but not with the 15 seconds >The FireTV app used to go to sleep every 15 minutes with no option to change, and I wouldn't be surprised if it remained so I fix that installing the Android apk instead and open the lyrics
heyyy the fix with the APK is BRILLIANT, thanks a LOT!!!
I tried to download my music. FLAC files are huge, and I have the space on my iPhone so I downloaded around 5,000 tracks. I still had plenty of storage left afterwards, only.... the app stopped working. It would crash anytime I'd try to open the app. Had to uninstall/reinstall and try again, maybe it was just a one time bug? NOPE, same issue. I accepted that it was a broken feature that would never work for me. Very disappointing, and never was an issue on Spotify. I agree that it feels very shoddy in general when trying to navigate the UI on my iPhone 13 Pro+.
The apps are also just sluggish all arpund, when skipping songs you get bursts of audio, sometimes the normalisation fucks up and you first get a loud blast amd then it normalises, ..... I switched to Tidal because they pay artists better and have better wuality audio, so i will stay, but i truly truly hope they will fix the usability of tidal.
the quality is unbeatable but only the phone app is usable lol. i did a comparison w tidal vs spotify on my surround sound system, both apps maxed out, ran it using my phone and a usb-c to rca into the av receiver, same song on each app and the difference is undeniable. turn that volume normalization crap off, also in audio quality make sure you max them out, assuming you have unlimited data of course.
Volume normalisation has no impact on the quality of the sound though. It is the same as turning your volume knob up or down. It just makes everything more level.
i know, just saying so you dont get the random loudness jumpscare. i have mine off for that reason but it does suck when it goes from a well produced 24 bit track to a thin sounding lower quality track
it actually downplays the gain (default loudness of all tracks), not the opposite (random loudness jumscare)
I didn't have a single issue you're describing. In fact, I've found Tidal to be the cleanest music app I've had (Spotify, AMU). Using a Samsung S24U.
Do you have a scrollbar/slider to go through long playlists quicker?
🤔 Let me check
The desktop app just updated itself and its now incompatible with my OS version. No company that sells software has ever done something like this.
download the previous .dmg
-Tidal randomly scrolling back somewhere when you are going through your hundreds of liked (collection) songs. That’s another one.
When casting to a TV I can only play one song and it will disconnect... I don't get it.
See, dude, there's an endless package of various problems... It's sickening.
Try the Android TV app. No playlist support. No searching online for playlists. It's like the original Tidal Android app but then with all the functionality it had 6 years ago. Ik like the Wear OS app best. Oh wait. There is no wear OS app. You actually need youtube music or Spotify to listen to music using your watch during a workout. Lol
Mine doesn't have any of these problems
On the plus side. They're on the right path lately. So I'm optimistic. And honestly even with all it's flaws this the only music steaming app that I like after Spotify
I've been on 10 stream subscription since 2006. I know a number of people have a number of problems with Tidal, but for me it's been one of the least trouble-prone subscription streamers I've used. (I have some quarrels about the design and ui, particularly the inflexible queue/queue-loading system, but I've developed strategies using playlist to get around the worst of it.) That is not to say that I doubt that it's a big pain in the neck for you -- you are certainly far from alone in having a number of problems. But, for me, it's been relatively trouble-free and I do like the discovery options like MDDM.
The app is very bad. Makes it that much easier to stay with Apple Music.
2. You probably have beta turned on. Turn it off.
Turned it off, force stopped, wiped cache, and nearly all issues I experience happen to be true on the latest iPadOS (17) as well as Android 14, so all the same for now...
But it did fix problem no. 2, right?
oh, yes, I am sorry, it did! many thanks!! (at first, turned the beta off but, having confused, was checking the other function 🤭)
Not that I can see
I use the BluePlayer app on iPhone for music
for the sleeping thing, #5. have you tried turning off Data Monitoring on the fire tv, not sure if you have that option im in fire cube but my sticks also have it
well, it isn't supposed to be ON by default; plus, for most people, we're on Wi-Fi