ANECDOTE: I've never heard anyone mention Tidal in real life even once.
Korova - A kiss in the charnel fields
Dissection - Storm of the light's bane
Bishop of Hexen - The nightmarish compositions
Things that I already considered before I found Tidal:
1. Buying the physical disc and ripping it to FLAC works except it's generally (for those albums above) significantly more expensive than getting the FLAC from Tidal. discogs.com market is the best place for obscure metal CDs but most ship from Europe and the shipping costs are considerable.
2. 7digital.com has all those albums (in FLAC) for customers in Canada or the UK, not on the US marketplace...
3. bandcamp, my favorite FLAC source, doesn't have any of that (it's mostly for recent indie artist releases and not a good resource for music released a few decades ago)
There's also the issue that if Tidal were selling FLAC copies (which cost twice the MP3 version) that are just FLAC encoded MP3s I imagine there'd be a lot of complaining and/or lawsuits.
-Flash first - yup, it tries to force you to use Flash version of the site. You need to use a trick to disable their messages about it.
-Recommendation/Discovery is missing completely from the web app. On the mobile app, I will get recommended albums based on what I have listened to. On Web App, I will be given only latest, popular albums. No personalization at all.
-Manual discovery is broken - I do not know about their algorithm, but for example, when I listen to some electronic music and click to get tracks similar to that I am up for a surprise. I can get some metal track, popular top chart song or niche rap. Most of the times it is nothing related to what I am listening currently.
So yeah, for a free app its cool, but once my paid account expires, I am moving to Spotify.
And about the numbers - in Europe, many major mobile brands offer 1-year Tidal for free with a contract signed. Talk about inflated numbers.
My friends, especially my musician friends, are all pirates. It's by far the most practical way to do music.
I might change my tune if Tidal's streams are easy to save, but I haven't seen any technology for doing that.
I think the word 'archival' is the key word in this sentence:
>> A losslessly-encoded stream is near-worthless compared to a lossless rip, which is actually useful as archival material.
GP isn't comparing on the basis of quality; rather, GP is pointing out that streaming services don't function as an "archive".
It's a reasonable point. Modulo reasonable backup procedure, owning a copy of the track is a more robust as an "archive" than a streaming service that might stop serving the track at any moment.
However, I'm confused by the rest of GP's post. First, I'm not sure why pirating is necessary to get a lossless rip. Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors (of cards, or of coins, or of music tracks).
To rip an SACD, you either need a hacked PS3, or you need to download the rip through a torrent kindly provided by a pirate community member who does have a hacked PS3.
If you signed up for a pirate community to download those SACD rips, you might as well stick around and torrent lots of ordinary CD rips so that you don’t actually have to buy those CDs.
> Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors
I travel a lot, including in countries where mobile data is not cheap and wifi is thin on the ground. It’s nice to have my entire music collection with me on a small portable hard drive.
Secondly, film collectors are inclined to collect, not stream, because they have been bitten by films disappearing from release due to rights issues. Look at how many Criterion Collection releases are no longer available to purchase or stream, for instance, but it’s nice to have your own copy saved on a disk.
It can, in fact, be quite difficult to obtain the 5.1 surround sound layer of an SACD as a digital download for many releases. That is why people are inclined to rip the SACD or torrent someone else’s rip.
In any case, not even audiophiles are buying physical SACDs. There are digital downloads in DSD format, though.
Roon was marketed heavily to Audiophiles and the addition of Tidal was long sought-after. https://community.roonlabs.com/c/roon/tidal
Shady business dealings aside, Tidal is the best and best-looking music streaming service I've used.
The only reason to use lossless audio is for archival. Obviously streams are useless for that.
The problem with "can't hear the difference" statements is that they're highly dependent on the system you're listening to. The vast majority of systems are not resolving to a degree that there is an audible difference between AAC or a lossless format.
On my system, there is a profound difference between FLAC (at any bitrate) and higher rate DSD. Is DSD magically better? Not necessarily, but in my case my DAC bypasses its internal filtering for DSD playback, which means I can move the interpolation filter over to my CPU, which, running at 4GHz, is better at it than a (SOTA) DAC chip running at a few MHz.
It's a complicated topic, and the only people I personally discuss it with are professional audio engineers or serious hobbyists. No one else cares.
On topic, TIDAL is great in the sense that it's not US-centric for billing (just take my money please) and streams lossless. It's like a CD store for ~$20 a month (the max they'll take from me). I'd gladly pay a lot more and given the economics of it I'm worried it will go out of business at some point.
If you're interested in the topic you can check out the Roon community, "minimum vs linear phase interpolation filters", "DSD upsampling" or check out the work of Ted Smith (MIT / software guy turned DAC designer).
This is remarkably similar to the argument people make when backed into the corner for pseudoscientific health claims.
Such as the long-term benefits of anti-depressants? (What is and isn't pseudo-science depends on who you trust)
I can definitely hear the difference between an iTunes stream and a CD (maybe not in a car though).
Although this was a specific audio file I downloaded that was a known pathological case for mp3.
I've tried streaming services, but it ends up over complicating my experience because I still have to rely on my own hard copies to complete my collection. Further, I am extremely wary of my library up and disappearing. I like to have full control over all of my tracks, meta-data, playlist organization, etc. I won't even buy from iTunes anymore because it's too restricted. Only online music broker I use is Bandcamp because they give me full control of the music I purchased.
Even among my hard-core audiophile friends, admittedly a very small sample, none of them use Tidal.
If people are listening through some 'Beats by Dr Dre', or Airpods ,or linking to a bluetooth speaker, Spotify is fine.
If someone has a DAC and some decent headphones, or a decent hifi, you can notice the different easily, especially for certain genres. Not all music compresses well.