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.
Select Tidal as your source service.
If you didn't already login to Tidal, you'll get this popup window to do so.
Select Qobuz as your destination service.
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.
Make sure everything looks good and select Begin the Transfer.
You can watch the process or even leave the process and wait for an email from Soundiiz the the batch has completed.
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.
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.
Jose James album not found in Tidal
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Albums export
If you don't click download this file, your web browser may just open the csv and it will look like this.
When you download the csv file and let Google decide what the separator is, the imported data looks like this
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.
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
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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