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    The Computer Audiophile

    Definitive Guide: How To Copy Favorites and Playlists from Tidal to Qobuz

    The reign of Tidal for audiophiles here in the US is nearly over. Yes, I can't believe I wrote the words reign and Tidal in the same sentence, but it's true. Tidal has been the only lossless streaming service supported on high end platforms here in the US for several years. Hold your letters, calls, and emails to notify me about the lossless service offered by the Scottish Nose Whistle label streaming at 32 bit / 768 kHz. For all intents and purposes in the US it has been Tidal or nothing (unless you wisely subscribed to Qobuz by circumventing the geographic rules). 

     

    In preparation for the October release of Qobuz here in the US, a few of us at CA have been taking the service for a spin. So far, I love what I hear and see. However, the thought of switching from Tidal to Qobuz and manually marking nearly 1,000 albums as favorites again is too daunting. This is the point where everyone who purchases all their music laughs at me and says I told you so. 

     

    Anyway, those of us who are tightly interwoven with Tidal should rest easy. The service called Soundiiz has all of us covered for less than a cup of coffee. Soundiiz can synchronize playlists between services for those of us who subscribe to several. It can also do what many members of the CA Community will happily pay for, copy favorite artists, albums, tracks and playlists from one service to another (Tidal > Qobuz). 

     

    This is the part in the article where I tell all the Tidal users to bookmark this page for future reference. You'll switch to Qobuz (trust me) and this will save you so much time you can actually listen to your audio system rather than mess with a computer :~)

     

     

    Step By Step 

     

    First, signup for Soundiiz and pay the tiny bit extra for the Premium service that enables one to use the Platform to Platform feature.

     

    Second, connect both Tidal and Qobuz accounts within the Soundiiz site / app by clicking on them and selecting connect. Very simple. If you skip this step, there will be another chance to login when conducting the Tidal to Qobuz copy. 

     


    Select Platform to Platform Transfers from the left column, then select Let's Go.

     

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    Select Tidal as your source service.

     

     

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    If you didn't already login to Tidal, you'll get this popup window to do so.

     

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    Select Qobuz as your destination service.

     

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    Select which items you want to copy from Tidal to Qobuz. You can click the gear icon to specify within each category what you want to copy. Click Confirm My Selection when done. 

     

     

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    Make sure everything looks good and select Begin the Transfer.

     

     

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    You can watch the process or even leave the process and wait for an email from Soundiiz the the batch has completed. 


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    When everything is done you'll see the green bars up top and be able to scroll through your content for items that need further attention such as Not Found or partial playlists. 

     

     

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    That's really it. Soundiiz makes everything really easy. Now for some additional details.

     

     

     

    A Note About High Resolution

     

    Some of my albums from Tidal appear in Qobuz as the high resolution versions. This is a cool, possibly unintended feature of the transfer. One strange things happened with the transfer of Jose James' album yesterday I Had the Blues. I have it as a Tidal favorite, but the content is no longer available in Tidal. Soundiiz selected the 24/96 version of this album as my Qobuz version. Not the identical album, but I'll take it. A cursory look of my other albums shows several high resolution versions as Qobuz favorites (nothing to do with MQA).

     

    Here is a shot of my newly created favorites imported from Tidal.

     

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    Jose James album not found in Tidal

     

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    Qobuz has the high resolution version of the Jose James album favorited, even though this wasn't the version favorite in Tidal and Tidal no longer has the album available.

     

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    A Note On Not Found Albums


    Roughly 150 of 1,000 albums weren't found on Qobuz, but this could be the quality of the transfer software in finding the exact version or the fact that I favorited some special version in Tidal and only the standard version exists in Qobuz. Let's take a look.


    Th first album on my list of Not Founds is 12 Years A Slave. Searching both Tidal and Qobuz yields the exact same album with the exact same number of available tracks. Perhaps the fact that the entire album isn't available for streaming has something to do with this one not being identified by Soundiiz. 


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    Searching for Traffic's Mr. Fantasy that Tidal calls the Remastered Remasters, I see both album in both services. Unfortunately Soundiiz couldn't translate the funky title even though both albums have 22 tracks identically named. 

     

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    Finally, searching for The April Maze's album Recycled Soul yields the expected result. It's available in Tidal but not Qobuz, thus the Not Found identifier in Soundiiz. 


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    After looking over several more, it seems that there's a mix of truly unavailable albums, stranger named albums, and different versions of albums between the services. Hopefully Soundiiz will improve at matching the same albums with slightly different titles. 


    After the batch, as Soundiiz calls it, was complete I wanted to export a list of my Not Found albums. Or, at least export a list of albums so I could compare to see which one's I needed to look for in Qobuz. Souniiz's ability to export lists is less than stellar. 

    To view completed batches click on My Batches, then the three little dots on the right for details.

     

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    First, there's no way to export the entire list of items copied from Tidal to Qobuz. Even though it appears in a nice spreadsheet-looking format within Soundiiz, the site can't export this exact view. I tried to work around this limitation by exporting a list of all my albums. I figured the list would contain a single line of all the albums not found in Qobuz and a double line (listing one entry for Tidal and one for Qobuz) for the albums found on both services. This ended in disappointment as well because Soundiiz exports a strange csv file that doesn't separate the Artist and Album when imported into Google Sheets. However, upon closer inspection, one must manually specify the separator as a semicolon rather than a comma during the data import. For some reason, Soundiiz uses a semicolon in its "comma separated value" exports.  

     


    Playlist export

     

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    Albums export

     

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    If you don't click download this file, your web browser may just open the csv and it will look like this.

     

     

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    When you download the csv file and let Google decide what the separator is, the imported data looks like this

     

     

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    After telling Google to use a semicolon, the spreadsheet looks good and one can scroll through to find the non-duplicated rows. These are the row that are found in only Tidal as the duplicated rows show one row for Tidal and one for Qobuz. It would be much better if all the data visible on the batch screen was exported, but this will suffice. 

     

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    Lastly, I thought I could use the filters available within the Soundiiz site to only show the albums that weren't found in Qobuz. This wasn't the case. The one heading by which I needed to filter was called Score, but Soundiiz only enables filtering by Status and Types (artists, albums etc...). The only way I could get a logical list of items Not Found in Qobuz was to sort the Soundiiz batch by Score with Not Found on top. This enabled me to screenshot several pages of items that required further investigation. Far from ideal, but a first world problem indeed. 

     


    Filtering options

     

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    Wrap Up

     

    Although Soundiiz isn't perfect, it's a huge time saver for those of us who've spent years curating a Tidal collection of favorites and playlists. I highly recommend using it if you value your time and if you have more than a couple dozen items you'd like to appear in Qobuz when you switch over from Tidal. 


     

     

     




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    one question, do I have to have the TIDAL and Qobuz app on my computer to do this?

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    Just now, AudioDoctor said:

    one question, do I have to have the TIDAL and Qobuz app on my computer to do this?

    No need for anything on your computer. Logging in to the services through Soundiiz is all you have to do. The Soundiiz API communicates to both services.

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    Just now, The Computer Audiophile said:

    No need for anything on your computer. Logging in to the services through Soundiiz is all you have to do. The Soundiiz API communicates to both services.

     

    Good to know, thanks Chris.  I will probably get to it this weekend and see if I have any questions then.

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    Hi.  In the 4th paragraph of the post it says

    " You'll switch to Qobuz (trust me) "

     

    What are the top 3 bullet points why a US Tidal user would be compelled to switch to Qobuz?

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    7 minutes ago, rodrigaj said:

    Here is what Tidal has been doing to classical recordings. This is a comparison of title descriptions between Tidal and Spotify Premium.

    394725018_ScreenShot2018-08-06at4_18_59PM.thumb.jpg.91218cf2ea744d8c0fc5f6597a450d96.jpg666399017_ScreenShot2018-08-06at4_18_06PM.thumb.jpg.546c61c34fe7c78c313c134e5a012248.jpg

     

    Note the meaningless titles given to tracks in Tidal. Note the complete titles given to tracks in Spotify.

     

    Same album in Qobuz, in A+

     

     

    Screen Shot 2018-08-28 at 11.24.26 PM.png

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    @The Computer Audiophile

     

    Will this method work between Spotify Premium and Qobuz?

     

    I gave up on Tidal one month ago and switched to Spotify Premium as an interim until Qobuz came on board in the USA.

     

     

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    Ah yes...but no Roon integration...:(  If only there was a Qobuz/HQPlayer/Roon solution...

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    Yet.

     

    I think qobuz is on the Aurender now as well.

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    I can't wait for Roon with other streaming services. 

    Tidal is so limited and biased. 

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    1 hour ago, sdolezalek said:

    Ah yes...but no Roon integration...:(  If only there was a Qobuz/HQPlayer/Roon solution...

     

    1 hour ago, rickca said:

    Well Roon/Qobuz integration is an open secret.  We've already been given the nudge nudge wink wink.  And at least some Roon/HQplayer integration is already there.

     

    I for one won't switch until there's Roon integration. And I'm not as optimistic as ricka, we've actually only been told that they are talking. Hopefully it Will result in an agreement.

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    3 hours ago, rodrigaj said:

    @The Computer Audiophile

     

    Will this method work between Spotify Premium and Qobuz?

     

    I gave up on Tidal one month ago and switched to Spotify Premium as an interim until Qobuz came on board in the USA.

     

     

    Yes. 

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    I’ll definitely switch from Tidal to Qobuz when it is integrated into Roon, and Sonos, the 2 systems I won’t do without now. (ManCave for Roon, Sonos for the rest of the house)

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    Soundiiz can also import your pc/device playlists and match them up to the streaming service.

     

    I used this feature when trying out Tidal and Spotify. Exported JRiver playlists to .m3u files and imported these into Soundiiz. Worked great. Got about 90% hits and the exceptions were similar to what you found -- different spellings, extraneous info in album/artist tags, etc. In a few instances, it picked a karaoke or cover version on Spotify. Lol.

     

    But yeah, Soundiiz is a pretty nice app/service.

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    7 hours ago, rickca said:

    Well Roon/Qobuz integration is an open secret.  We've already been given the nudge nudge wink wink.  And at least some Roon/HQplayer integration is already there.

    I am loving Qobuz so far, and HQPlayer integration would put it over the top in regards to Tidal IMO. If I may ask, what integration is already there? I don't see anything. Then again, I cannot seem to get the desktop app to work. It loads the GUI on Win10,64, but it just sits there unless I am doing something stupid(likely).

     

    Do you have any links or a simple synopsis?

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    Does anybody know if there’s any ability to move playlist off of the Aurender software to other software platforms? For example, I would love to transfer some of those playlists from Aurender onto my Roon stuff, or even in Tidal/Qobuz so it could potentially  be used when I’m not at home and streaming to someone else’s device for example or camping and what not.

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    8 hours ago, The Computer Audiophile said:

    These four plus many more. Once its released in the US I'll publish much more on the differences and why someone would want to switch or stay.

    Looking forward to the reviews and it's indeed good news Qobuz is venturing into the US market, the more hires options available the better. I will be watching this space to see how it all unfolds.

     

     I used to have Qobuz (in UK) but was not happy with it as there were lots of problems which I presume they have sorted in order to make such a big step. I switched to Tidal/Roon a few years ago and never looked back.

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    9 minutes ago, 4est said:

    If I may ask, what integration is already there?

    There is currently some integration between Roon and HQPlayer.  I'm expecting integration between Roon and Qobuz in the RMAF timeframe from the hints dropped by @David.. Qobuz, Hi-Res Music Evangelist.  It's possible I'm reading too much into his comments but I don't think so.

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    6 hours ago, firedog said:

     

     

    I for one won't switch until there's Roon integration. And I'm not as optimistic as ricka, we've actually only been told that they are talking. Hopefully it Will result in an agreement.

     

    Same here. I have this optimistic dream that Quobuz will launch with Roon integration from day 1, and that Roon's nudging and winking is the result of lessons learned from the painful, drawn out series of delays and communication changes that dogged the launch of ROCK.

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    37 minutes ago, 4est said:

    I cannot seem to get the desktop app to work. It loads the GUI on Win10,64, but it just sits there unless I am doing something stupid(likely).

    Well, you need a Qobuz account.  Until Qobuz launches in USA, you need to sign up for a trial in a country like France or UK where Qobuz is already available.  Use a VPN and select a server in one such country to create the account.  You won't need the VPN to actually use the service for streaming once your account is created.  Use PayPal, don't try to pay with a US credit card.

     

    I've been a Qobuz subscriber for the past 3 years.  Their desktop app keeps getting better and better and support for DLNA renderers will be very welcome.  Current integration between Qobuz and A+ is excellent, and A+ already provides support for DLNA renderers like the ultraRendu. 

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    I’ve just gotten a Qobuz account, so will be playing with it. Right now, I’m using the desktop app to find high-res content, but actual playback is through the LMS app on my Zenith SE.

     

    I’ll be trying Soundiiz to copy Tidal playlists and Favorites.

     

    So far, it looks very promising, especially  for a classical lover. Room integration should pretty much seal the deal in its favor.

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