"It is with a heavy heart that we report that Tidal is good now"
avclub.com
avclub.com
As I understand it, Apple’s 256 kbps AAC is probably higher quality than Spotify’s 320 kbps OGG. And most of us probably lack the audio equipment (DAC of sufficient quality) and auditory sensitivity to hear the difference between either Spotify’s or Apple’s lossy compressed audio and Tidal’s lossless FLAC. But it still grates on me that it’s so hard to buy access to a service that’ll steam CD-quality audio to me when I can get HD Bluray quality video streamed at me.
But the sins that I cannot forgive music streaming:
- Most don’t allow me to augment their catalog with stuff I own, and stream it back to me via a unified interface.
- Most don’t support gapless playback (no, crossfade very much does not count).
- Most don’t let me browse by genre according to any categorization remotely half as good as any small-town CD shop in the 90s
- Most will quietly remove albums, artists, and (most maddeningly) tracks from albums according to the whims of some capricious and malevolent spirit.
- Most have a UI on streaming devices that continually screams, “LOOK AT YOUR TV!” Rather than unobtrusively showing the track title or offering a “I just want to listen to music without distractions.”
Morally and practically speaking, there is no harm, and it's almost indistinguishable from a non-infringing self-made backup copy (unless there are tags indicative of being a pirated copy), but legally there is technically a difference.
Spotify on desktop (at least on Windows) lets you select some folders on your HD and adds them to your "collection". You can then play them thru Spotify. If they have ID3 tags, they get correctly tagged and you can click the artist name to go to their page. If you create a playlist with some local files in it, and download the playlist on a smartphone (while the pc is on), you have those files available there too. It's pretty convenient.