Official Qobuz Issues Thread

[zacster]

I was clearing out my Chrome browser and when I went back to the Qobuz page it came up inviting me to sign up instead of the "not available in your country" message.  So I did with my Audirvana 3 month trial.  But with all the talk about it I thought I'd be able to get hi-res, but no dice.  It is 16/44.1 only for the trial.  I haven't had a look yet at the catalog but I have so much in front of me between this and Tidal it doesn't much matter.  Oh, and I couldn't get it to play anything.  My guess is it isn't quite ready yet but within a day or two, or maybe Sept 1 is the official date.

[AudioDoctor]

When you are able to, even the 16/44 from Qobuz sounds pretty damn good but the Hi-Res, without MQA, is amazing. Last night I was sitting with my SO on the other end of my office, by the fireplace with no fire going, and it sounded like Diana Krall on a smaller scale, yet real, was behind us.

[rando]

Thanks for the heads up.  Will give it a day or so before I register (Good to see we have the option to do so as a non-binary entity ) when the US site actually goes live.  At least on my end it directs inquiries to the GB-EN site where you can register or sign in. 

[Le Concombre Masqué]

does anybody use Qobuz via a Cabasse's Stream control or such third party app ?

 

my ex wife has multiple sclerosis (vision motion cognition alterations...), we live 1000km apart, I visited her and put things together about 3 weeks ago and I can't online support her last issue :

 

We sorted out issues up to :

seems her Samsung tablet is wifi connected + her Cabasse Stream amp is Wifi connected + ethernet connected since she can launch internet radios saved as "Favorites of application"( application being Cabasse Stream Control)

However nothing happens if she tries to select a Qobuz based track either  via "Favorites of application" or "Playlists of application"

Qobuz support says her suscription is on and that everything should work, I logged out of any app and web player I connected to from my Mac in order to try to remotely create new playlists for her and of course I had her log out/login

Any help welcome !

[Sal1950]

17 hours ago, David.. Qobuz, Hi-Res Music Evangelist said:

 

Hi Sal, Let me clarify.

 

It's like Apple in that you can download music that you can purchase on our site. If you belong to the top tier, it will cost about the same as an mp3 from Apple. 

 

With Tidal, you can offline only to your phone. With Qobuz, you can also offline anything on the site to your computer at the resolution on the site. When I say "true" resolution, there is no special encoding/decoding process other than rendering a FLAC file, so any DAC that will resolve 24/192 can playback in full resolution on any device that can do the same. 

 

All of the music is in FLAC, so when you play tracks, you get a full, bit-perfect recording. 

 

Hope this helps. 

Yes that clears it up for me,  thank you very much for the personal reply!

I'm on Spotify now, always refused to do business with the punk gangster ownership of Tidal. I'll probably switch over to you after the US rollout. Hoping many Tidal customers do the same. Good luck.

[zacster]

What little I can get to play is only 25-30 second samples.  I am seeing some hires too now, but also just samples.  The full selection comes up on my Audirvana screen but most doesn't play.

[Sevenfeet]

2 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

 

I'm on Spotify now, always refused to do business with the punk gangster ownership of Tidal.

 

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

[rodrigaj]

2 hours ago, Sal1950 said:

Yes that clears it up for me,  thank you very much for the personal reply!

I'm on Spotify now, always refused to do business with the punk gangster ownership of Tidal. I'll probably switch over to you after the US rollout. Hoping many Tidal customers do the same. Good luck.

 

In the USA, there was a short period of time of about a year in 2014 to 2015 when Tidal was a great music service. This was when it was first introduced in the USA. They had their startup issues, but they were responsive to their customers and understood the needs of all music lovers. I have often wondered what the original WiMP management must think of the service today.

 

Spotify Premium is quite good. I have been pleasantly surprised. Not HiRes or Redbook but it serves me quite well for music exploration in the classical genre.

 

Qobuz will hopefully be what Tidal set out to be in the beginning - only better. I'm looking forward to the introduction.

[buonassi]

when this is all sorted out and Qobuz has a working alternative to Tidal in the USA - I wonder if that'll be enough to pull Tidal under.  Or will MQA be their saving grace?  

[AudioDoctor]

3 minutes ago, buonassi said:

when this is all sorted out and Qobuz has a working alternative to Tidal in the USA - I wonder if that'll be enough to pull Tidal under.  Or will MQA be their saving grace?  

 

If TIDAL survives I suspect it will be at the $9.99 tier of mp3 streaming.

[buonassi]

Sux for me.  I've put a lot of time into organizing artists, albums, playlists, etc in Tidal.  For the music I like, I hope Qobuz has it.  I'll probably start familiarizing myself with Qobuz, or perhaps this is the time to give up on the streaming segment and just buy all my music and own it - concurrently use apple music for new artist/album discovery.  

 

Tidal.....goes to show that you can be a daring entrepreneur (JayZ), but a horrible businessman.  

[Sonicularity]

7 hours ago, zacster said:

What little I can get to play is only 25-30 second samples.  I am seeing some hires too now, but also just samples.  The full selection comes up on my Audirvana screen but most doesn't play.

 

I hope that some lossless streaming option will be available with Roon if Tidal dies for good.

[buonassi]

Lossless streaming companies need to focus on the audiophile community, something Tidal didn't do well IMO.  Tidal haven't been very responsive to hardware manufacturers wanting to integrate their apps/services into their products.  

 

So Qobuz needs to take notice and fill this void.  Give us streaming in CD quality (or better) and make sure you've got the means to support the listening end points (software and hardware) we audiophiles actually use!  To your point @Sonicularity

 

Nobody needs lossless streaming on their cell phone with some ear buds (or beats headphones, or Bose bluetooth player) that can't resolve the difference between it and MP3/AAC.  To cater to this market with lossless is pointless.

[Sal1950]

21 hours ago, Sevenfeet said:

 

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

Read what semente wrote in this post for a general idea of how I feel about supporting that convicted felon and his other little crew of gang associated "business partners".. 

 

[mrvco]

I’m concerned about the ultimate viability of the business model for lossless / hi-res streaming services in the mid to long term.  Tidal and the other services that support lossless have yet to see enough success for the major players (Spotify, iTunes, et al.) to offer lossless as an option / upgrade for their service offerings.  Even the few services that have catered specifically to audiophiles and/or popular audiophile genres have yet to figure out how to be successful (afaik).

[gmgraves]

On 8/31/2018 at 7:37 PM, zacster said:

I was clearing out my Chrome browser and when I went back to the Qobuz page it came up inviting me to sign up instead of the "not available in your country" message.  So I did with my Audirvana 3 month trial.  But with all the talk about it I thought I'd be able to get hi-res, but no dice.  It is 16/44.1 only for the trial.  I haven't had a look yet at the catalog but I have so much in front of me between this and Tidal it doesn't much matter.  Oh, and I couldn't get it to play anything.  My guess is it isn't quite ready yet but within a day or two, or maybe Sept 1 is the official date.

I've had access to Qobuz for a couple of months here in the States. It's not available generally, but my Editor signed me up for a "press preview". I haven't seen anything that I really wanted yet, so I haven't used it, but that's probably because I've not done more than take a cursory look. 

[gmgraves]

8 hours ago, mrvco said:

I’m concerned about the ultimate viability of the business model for lossless / hi-res streaming services in the mid to long term.  Tidal and the other services that support lossless have yet to see enough success for the major players (Spotify, iTunes, et al.) to offer lossless as an option / upgrade for their service offerings.  Even the few services that have catered specifically to audiophiles and/or popular audiophile genres have yet to figure out how to be successful (afaik).

I've wondered the same thing for many of the same reasons.

 

[austinpop]

There is an ongoing Qobuz discussion over on the Official Qobuz Support thread. I posted my impressions here, relative to Tidal:

 

 

[left channel]

@The Computer Audiophile maybe these threads should be merged?

[The Computer Audiophile]

4 minutes ago, left channel said:

@The Computer Audiophile maybe these threads should be merged?

Done. Thanks. 

[Jud]

On 8/29/2018 at 9:17 PM, austinpop said:

Through the good offices of @The Computer Audiophile and @David.. Qobuz, Hi-Res Music Evangelist, I have been given trial access to Qobuz Sublime+. Having used it for a couple days, I thought I'd post my impressions so far.

 

My focus is classical music, and I have also been focussed on high-resolution content. Not because I don't listen to Redbook, but I want to assess the availability of high-res content in particular, as that is one of the selling points. I'm using the Qobuz app support in LMS that's built in to my Innuos Zenith SE server. While this isn't my preferred experience - I use Roon primarily - this works fine for now. I use a somewhat disjointed approach to finding content using the Qobuz desktop app on MacOS, tagging albums I want to listen to as Favorites, and then locating them during playback using the iPeng app controlling LMS. Not ideal, but tolerable, knowing Roon is coming,

 

One feature I'd urgently suggest to Qobuz is to provide a way to filter and sort search results. Sorting is available in some areas of the app, but not others. I would love to filter results by resolution - i.e. only results that are high-resolution.

 

I sure hope the rumors of Roon integration with Qobuz are true, and there again, my fervent suggestion to Qobuz would be to ensure from day 1 that high-res content was clearly identifiable in Roon. I can't tell you how frustrating it was to not have Tidal MQA content visible in Roon. Not that I'm promoting MQA - just saying that high-resolution results need to be visible from day 1.

 

As regards Qobuz content. I used the Soundiiz service referenced in Chris's excellent article to migrate my Tidal favorites and playlists to Qobuz. I am going to equate MQA content on Tidal with high-res content on Qobuz - again, not because I believe MQA to have inherent value, but because both are value-adds on their respective platforms. I had a lot of MQA albums tagged as favorites in Tidal. I was gratified to find that most of them (I'd say > 90%) had high-resolution counterparts on Qobuz. So to the extent that MQA content on Tidal is a proxy for high-resolution music, Qobuz seems to have that well-covered.

 

But from this point on, Qobuz left Tidal in the dust. Again, speaking from the perspective of a classical music lover, the sheer amount of high-resolution content on Qobuz was far greater than MQA content on Tidal. For example, take symphonies by Mahler. There are exactly 0 MQA versions of Mahler Symphony 3, while on Qobuz, I count 5 or more high-resolution versions. This is just one example. But the pattern is repeated over and over. Take Haydn's The Creation (Die Schöpfung). There is exactly 1 MQA version of this album on Tidal. Just a quick count of Qobuz yields at least 7 high-res versions.

 

I can't comment yet on sound quality. I'm not really expecting the same lossless track on Tidal and Qobuz to sound different, but it wouldn't surprise me. I will defer this kind of testing until Roon integration happens. Until then, I'm focusing on content.

 

And based on that criterion, even after just a couple days of exploration, Qobuz is light years ahead of Tidal.

 

With all that said, Qobuz is far from perfect. I hope to see a continued focus on usability on their app, including the missing features I highlighted.

 

But all in all - bravo, Qobuz!

 

I also have @The Computer Audiophile and @David.. Qobuz, Hi-Res Music Evangelist to thank for a Qobuz Sublime+ trial.

 

I tried Tidal's service twice, once for RedBook resolution music, and once for RedBook and MQA.  Neither impressed me; I didn't ever feel this was something I needed.  (As I've said before, I always felt the MQA versions sounded just a little less good than my local high resolution files.)

 

I really have no idea whether there is anything that Qobuz is doing differently than Tidal.  Maybe it's my current setup with Audirvana+ for Windows (which wasn't available when I tried Tidal) doing DSD512.  But from the first notes of the first track I played - Cassandra Wilson's performance of Strange Fruit - I was completely hooked.  I never got the sense with the Qobuz hi res or RedBook files that I was listening to something different than my local files.  In the space of 10 seconds, my attitude went from "I don't think I'd want to pay for a streaming service" to "OK, this feels very much worth it to me."

 

For anyone using Audirvana+, it's dead simple to play from Qobuz.  You login to your Qobuz account through Audirvana+, and everything Qobuz has appears as an option for playback along with your local files.  The only small complaint I have at this point is there's no advance indication of, or search for, high resolution files as distinct from RedBook in the Audirvana+ GUI, a situation I hope will be remedied soon. 

 

I was also happy with Qobuz's selection.  There are things they're missing, which I expected - some of my tastes run to fairly rare stuff (though they had music I didn't expect, like Spirit's "Spirit of '76" album, a favorite of mine and besides me probably just some close personal friends and family of the band, if sales were any indication).  But they have what seems to me to be a very satisfactory level of coverage of not only classical, but also early music, rock, rap, alternative, folk, blues, jazz, world (there are approximately a zillion Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan albums  ), even country.

 

Hey, did I mention the sound?   

 

So yeah, it appears a real RedBook-and-above high quality streaming service is coming to the USA very soon.  It may be something you want to check out.

[left channel]

On 9/1/2018 at 11:08 AM, buonassi said:

Sux for me.  I've put a lot of time into organizing artists, albums, playlists, etc in Tidal.

 

That time was not wasted: https://soundiiz.com/
 

I haven't tried it, but Soundiiz supports transfer of playlists, artists, albums, and tracks between these services.

Many thanks to @shadowlight for mentioning the Soundiiz service here (and to @The Computer Audiophile for merging these threads so I could find it again).

[AudioDoctor]

Why is this album even appearing in the list of available albums if it is 100% unstreamable?

[EuroChamp]

2 hours ago, AudioDoctor said:

Why is this album even appearing in the list of available albums if it is 100% unstreamable?

 

I wonder if in your case you shouldn’t ask the Audirvana+ support. At least the Qobuz app highlights all tracks as „Excerpt“ (Auszug). Which means, you will only get the first 30 seconds.

 

 

[mourip]

Wish List.

1. Apple CarPlay integration.

2. Addition of "Golden Age of Stereo" 50's and 60's Classical titles from RCA. Mercury, Everest, Decca, Melodiya, EMI

3. Integration with JRiver Media Center ecosystem.

4. Native IOS/Android remote app to directly control Qobuz app running on Win/OSX music server.

 

One can dream ?