I’ve preferred Qobuz to Tidal since they were hocking MQA snake oil and lying about being lossless. Tidal eventually stopped using MQA, but I can’t help feel leftover ick at their dishonesty.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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MQA was so weird, replacing a perfectly fine lossless open codec that plays on everything with a proprietary lossy codec that plays on barely anything. Also, so many people suddenly telling you that MQA sounds better than FLAC.
I once wrote a downloader for Tidal and always "downgraded" to 16-bit FLAC when I detected the "high quality" version is in MQA format.
Qobuz is pretty great for music downloads. Which I think is the real value they have. I'm able to get pretty high quality flac files for new releases from them.
I love Qobuz, they seem to be the only service with a real API. Although poorly documented. I have integrated some things with my home automation and it works with very high res sounds on my connected amplifiers.
For anyone else who decides to give Qobuz a try, I wouldn't recommend using TuneYourMusic to transfer playlists and favorites. A ton of songs were transfered but just say unavailable in Qobuz. They have a partnership that let's you transfer for free using Soundiiz, so I'd try that instead.
Otherwise I'm enjoying it so far. The UI is nice, and search actually functions, so thats a big plus over Tidal. You can listen to full quality audio in the browser client, which I like since Zen Browser just added a nice media player UI in the side bar.
Edit: Retried my transfer using the free Soundiiz transfer and it worked perfectly, even found a song that TuneYourMusic completely failed to transfer. My only remaining issue is the fact that there's no button to shuffle your favorites tracks. You have to choose one, then shuffle. Minor, but something the other options offer.
Throwing out there that I use qobuz with Strawberry player on Linux and it works great.
Wow just what I was looking for! How do you get the App ID etc.?
I of course have a premium account, but anyway I logged into QBDLX (software for downloading from qobuz) which generates log files that contain everything you need to use Qobuz with strawberry. It's too bad qbdlx can't playback, and strawberry can't download, so I use both
It's finally working, thanks a lot! :)
thats from an old unused distrokid account. i hid songtitles cuz they are noob songs. Too bad phone has no easy way to just censor the middle column so i can show the entire thing. 1 cent per stream is good. for as bad as google is, Youtube red and youtube are among the best for amount paid. A bunch of services in china, india, africa etc its like 1000 plays for a cent. spotify is also on the cheap side and takes 5 or 6 streams for a cent. There is also often huge variation within the same service. A youtube ad may be 1 cent for a song and then 0.1 cents for the same song. country may play a role.
anyway, havent done it in forever but about to get back in.
i forget what tidal is like and that artist account didnt have anything catch on tidal (nor anywhere else. was probably my least effective artist account ever).
Spotify actually stopped paying anything at all to artists that have less than a thousand streams
How is qobuz's music recommendation? I've been wanting to get off of spotify, but I listen to a lot of niche music and spotify's recommendation engine still allows me to discover new music. I also scrobble all my plays to last.fm and listenbrainz, but I don't think either of them have the userbase to get me the recommendations I need
Qobuz is sound quality and being able to buy music without DRM, not discovery. I use my friends to find music for me, instead. It's a good service.
Hope they add a listen with friends feature so i can switch over. Use this too often
I run Qobuz through a roon server on my Linux pc and it works great. I also have qobuz set up through strawberry, but it's nice to be able to switch the output on the fly between different audio setups in my house (between my office setup and my bluesound streamer in the living room). The interface for roon is nice, but I get that it's kinda expensive and there are cheaper ways to achieve the same thing. I like to stream while I'm biking on my indoor trainer and sometimes it's nice to spin up a few songs and let roon take the wheel to keep the vibe going. I can also stream qobuz through roon to my Google home devices, but it doesn't stream bit perfect.
All that to say, I like qobuz and roon is pretty solid as well, albeit an extravagance and totally not necessary. The writeups qobuz has are also solid.
I do think the qobuz app interface leaves something to be desired.
Oh boy, I have wanted to purchase Roon server for probably 10 years now but haven't pulled the trigger. I haven't really looked at it in a while either. I now wonder how much it's changed since. Wow, it's $829 for a lifetime now! I wanna say it was like $400 when I first wanted it. I knew i should have!
I used to use Subsonic, then it was abandoned and felt like I needed something better. I ended up on a fork of it called Navidrome which is pretty impressive and are doing some great work improving things lately like adding in more tags to the original subsonic API to do more. The best app Symfonium also came out only a few years ago and is incredible now. It offers soooo much it's kind of crazy. It also opted to make use of the new API, which allows more as well. One day I'll move to Roon.
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The article mentions streaming, but anyone know how much of purchases go to the artist? I'm not interested in streaming, but their store looks attractive.
Also, can I redownload the music later? Or is it a one and done deal? Just thinking about backups.
I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.
Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
I purchase from Bandcamp, should I be looking to move over?
Not necessarily. If you can find on Bandcamp, it’s probably best to buy from there since I heard more money goes to the artists. I buy from wherever I can find the music, and thus I’ll cycle between Bandcamp or HDTracks if I can’t find it on Qobuz.
Separately I dislike how Bandcamp embeds their name in the metadata of the tracks you buy, but it’s trivial to remove it. Just rubs me the wrong way, so most of the times if songs are on Qobuz I buy it there since they don’t do that.
Everything I get usually has it's metadata updated / overwritten by Musicbrainz anyway
But, yeah, it's slow going if you're in a niche...
I've created / updated a few albums in there and it takes a few minutes to get it all done, but there's some satisfaction in giving back
Awesome, thanks!
I'll certainly put it on multiple devices (phone, desktop, NAS), but probably won't bother with offsite backups since that gets expensive.
I currently use tidal and I'm thinking of switching. The most important feature of an audio streaming service for me is, audio radio. Meaning, I have a base playlist and I want it to auto generate it with more similar songs so it doesn't stop. New discoveries are important too.
Does it offer this recommendation feature? The last time I briefly checked it I didn't find information about that. I'd like some confirmation before I begin merging my 1k+ liked songs...
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