Music Streaming Services

Discussion in 'Computer Audiophile: Software, Configs, Tools' started by rott, Feb 22, 2017.

  1. allegro

    allegro Friend

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    Thanks guys Qobuz says:
    I am still going to open a ticket with customer support. It looks like they have been charging me 24.99 euros instead of dollars. I was a beta tester so had to sign up on the UK site. I think they may owe me a refund. Thanks for the clarification!

    I think Qobuz is going to kick Amazon's butt with this offer. Without exclusive mode there is no reason to choose Amazon Music HD over Qobuz now.

    Qobuz posted a video on Facebook today explaining the new pricing plan you can view here.
     
    Last edited: Nov 8, 2019
  2. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    On an annual subscription, the price of Qobuz will now essentially be the same as Amazon HD. Their 30 day free trial means I have 30 days to compare the two at no charge. This is what I was hoping would happen. I was hoping it would also result in Spotify coming up with a lossless service at about the same price. If Spotify offered just redbook at the same $13/mo. price point, that would be my choice, but barring that, qobuz will probably win out, as after only a few hours, qobuz pretty clearly sounds better than Amazon HD. I am going to use the whole 30 days to compare though.
     
  3. crazychile

    crazychile Eastern Iowa's Spiciest Pepper

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    I had just checked my emails right before viewing this last page of posts and got a little excited about the email. I’ve been using Quobuz for a little over a month now and am very happy with the sound quality in standard cd rez. Tidal was decent but something held it back from being as sonically engaging as I had hoped for. The catalog is a mixed bag. In some ways Quobuz is better, but sometimes it isn’t as good as Tidal. I hope Quobuz does well enough to expand their catalog to where it’s on the level of Spotify.

    One minor annoyance with Quobuz is that when I do a search for an artist there might be 100 titles that come up where maybe 20 are from the artist, and then the other 80 are a mixed bag of multi-artist compilations and covers from other bands or stuff that is named similarly. I’d like to see that partitioned off better so I don’t have to sift through all the titles to filter down what is really relevant.
     
  4. psuKinger

    psuKinger Facebook Friend

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    I took advantage too. They extended my Sublime sub for another 12 months for $250, and refunded me back the remainder of what I currently had on my old Sublime sub....

    This new pricing definitely makes Studio look like a better deal and Sublime less ideal... But this is the option that was open to me with a current Sublime account. So I took it!
     
  5. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    How good is Qobuz catalog comparing to Tidal could be better, and I think it will get better, but on the bright side Qobuz has some European classical labels, and new artists, I could not find on Tidal.
    What pisses me off the most on Qobuz is that in some,items that are in the catalog, there are parts marked "unavailable".

    But I left Tidal as soon the Roon integration with Qobuz became available.
    I hope this new offer is good for them and they succeed. Also Bryston added Qobuz to their latest framework for BDP-2 and that is my main digital player.
     
  6. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    24 hours in with Qobuz, and while the sound quality of Qobuz is better than Amazon when it works properly, unfortunately that condition rarely occurs. Playback is plagued with weird artifacts like pops, clicks, dropouts, buffering, etc. none of which have occurred even once with Amazon. These types of problems are exactly what has made me cancel Tidal twice. Since my attempts to use Tidal were early on (3-4 years ago) I assumed the tech would've advanced to the point that streaming of cd quality and above would be "solved." Apparently not so much, at least with Qobuz. For the music I have looked for, Amazon's catalog is better too; in fact I have only looked for one artist that Amazon didn't have, and it's one that no streaming service has. (Actually, Google has never heard of them either.) Bit perfect is all well and good, but is secondary to seamless playback by a long ways. So far I can't get that with Qobuz.
     
  7. allegro

    allegro Friend

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    Looks like many people who signed up for the US beta test were assigned to the Great Britain Qobuz shop, I know I was. If Qobuz has your sign up country listed as other than the US you would not have gotten the letter about the new lower Studio Premier pricing. Contact customer service to get your country of origin changed and monthly price dropped to $14.99.
     
  8. gaspasser

    gaspasser Flatulence Maestro

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    I’m new to Qobuz as of last night. I’m using it through Roon via an endpoint connected via ethernet. I did not experience any issues in streaming of CD or Hi-Res files whatsoever. Maybe your internet connection isn’t fast enough?
     
  9. allegro

    allegro Friend

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    Couple of recommendations. Like @Gaspasser said do you have a fast internet connection? If so go into Qobuz settings (speaker icon lower right next to the slider) and set your audio output to Wasapi exclusive mode. If you are still having problems download the free trial of Audirvana, enter your Qobuz credentials into Audirvana. Streaming Qobuz through Audirvana has always been glitch free for me. Hope this helps.
     
  10. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    Thanks guys. My internet connection is typically running at 50 to 80 mbps wired and 30 to 50mbps wirelessly. One of the pc's I typically use for music playback has no ethernet port so the latter is relevant, but either way I would think that speed should be more than sufficient. It certainly seems to be sufficient for Amazon at any bitrate, and as I have no trouble streaming 1080p video, i can't imagine that is the problem with Qobuz. I have tried exclusive mode and non-exclusive WASAPI with no change. As for Audirvana, (is it even available for Windows ?) if another piece of paid software is necessary to make it function properly, I wouldn't be interested in continuing with Qobuz, especially in light of the fact that Amazon HD works without issue.

    I have 29 more days to futz with it, so any other suggestions are welcome. It is disappointing for sure, but a first-world problem nonetheless.
     
  11. allegro

    allegro Friend

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    All I can tell you from experience is that some computers don't agree with the Qobuz app. Your internet speed is fine. Audirvana 3.5.0 is available for Windows 10. Internet speed is somewhat irrelevant because it loads files into memory before playing. Costs you nothing to try, then I think $75 to buy.

    Might be worth it to you if it fixes your problem. Alternative Roon is a heck of a lot more expensive. When the Qobuz app first came out it was buggy on Windows, would often hang and stutter and I found Audirvana was rock solid. The Qobuz app seems fine now but I still use Audirvana because, well, I bought it and I like it. Give it a try and tell us if it fixes your problem. Without exclusive mode sound quality of Amazon Music HD sucks.
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2019
  12. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    While my wireless speed might be marginal, it works for Amazon and 1080p video. The former is good enough if Qobuz doesn't work for me. Doesn't make much sense to try Audirvana if I have no intention to buy it. And I don't, when Amazon sounds good enough. I already have JRMC for local file playback, so streaming would be the only use case. I'm out. If I am stuck with Amazon because of it, that's ok.
     
  13. allegro

    allegro Friend

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    Have you tried Tidal lately to see if you have the same problems?
     
  14. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    No, I haven't for 3-4 years. I don't have any devices capable of playing back mqa (and wouldn't be interested anyway), but I am not interested in paying $20/mo. regardless. Amazon's pricing and Qobuz' response is all that got me interested in the first place. Keep in mind also that I am comparing Amazon to Spotify, so it already sounds pretty good to me. Even if Qobuz had no issues, and even given the improvement in sound over Amazon, I wouldn't be interested at Tidal's price. I have a serious case of "good enough" combined with poverty. (Proceedings are currently underway to revoke my audiophile card). But I will pay $12-13/ mo. for hassle free cd quality streaming. "High res" is just a bonus. If Tidal was at that price, I would be up to try it again.
     
  15. Ksaurav402

    Ksaurav402 Friend

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    I never had problem with Qobuz app so far on MacOS. I heard there were issues with windows app but I guess they ironed it out. Are you connecting laptop directly to DAC or are you using some streamer as well? Try once thru phone and tablet, if it works fine then definitely its laptop or app related.
     
  16. allegro

    allegro Friend

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    You don't need an MQA certified DAC to enjoy Tidal. You can set the app to do the first unfold of MQA encoded songs to 24/96. If Tidal lowers their prices to compete with Qobuz and Amazon you might have another option.
     
  17. Senorx12562

    Senorx12562 Case of the mondays

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    No streamer, just a laptop (wifi) and desktop (ethernet) directly to my dacs. It doesn't really matter whether the problem is hardware or the app, since Amazon works fine on all of my devices, if the functionality doesn't improve by the time my trial is up, I will just use Amazon. I am ok with that.
     
  18. Metro

    Metro Friend

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    There have been lots of complaints about the search function in Qobuz. A crazy case I encountered was when I searched for "szell" (as in George Szell, renowned conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra). The top search result was the album Dangerous by Michael Jackson, which used a recording by Szell on one of its tracks.

    Qobuz have been working on it. They began beta testing a new search function last month, and released it into the app in the past few days. Search is now much improved although some issues still being reported (there is a Qobuz issues thread on the Audiophile Style forum). I'll give them credit for trying.

    The Qobuz Windows app always had some issues. The app was barely usable in the early part of this year, consuming 25% CPU even with no music playing, frequently pausing and the UI becoming unresponsive. It improved quite a bit during the summer and now it mostly works well for me, although still with occasional problems. I run Qobuz on an old Lenovo laptop and I think some issues are related to running on older, slower computers. The playback stutters while the Chrome browser is launching. I have some issues with getting 24/192 streams to start playing, although once they begin playing they will continue fine. It helps if I first download/cache the album (Qobuz calls it "import").
     
  19. wormcycle

    wormcycle Friend

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    Money can pretty much solve both Tidal and Qobuz streaming and CPU problems.
    I know Roon is expensive but after early experience with both Qobuz and Tidal native apps I made a conscious decision to pay a bit more for improved streaming. There is no joy if you paid for hi res and the applications fails to support a stable streaming.
    A large part of the Roon core and RAAT protocol code is to deal with whatever are the streaming fuckups of the services like Qobuz and Tidal. RAAT controls the buffering by pushing a script to Roon endpoint based on the endpoint hardware configuration, that's why 1Gb RPi, and 16GB i7 8 gen PC work equally well in Roon network.
    Roon streaming features are often overlooked and the focus is metadata management, lyrics etc. I do not care much about this stuff and settled on Roon mostly because of its SQ and networking capabilities, including streaming and buffering management.
     
    Last edited: Nov 22, 2019
  20. RobS

    RobS RobS? More like RobDiarrhea.

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    Can anyone confirm that Qobuz sounds slightly thinner, dryer and less dynamic than Tidal? I find the same tracks on Tidal have more body to them. It doesn't make sense, unless we're right that Tidal is using some kind of background processor that EQs? I gravitate more to the sound of Tidal. Qobuz sounds slightly more brigther, detailed and clearer than Tidal but not as euphonic.

    Using both desktop apps in Windows 10.

    I also wish Qobuz would better organize albums by artist. Like separate by studio albums, compilations, live, etc. Also a top tracklist would be helpful as well so it's easy to add songs to playlists.
     

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