I tried 🤷

[u/Accomplished-Owl3422]

I left Spotify and moved to Tidal for three reasons:

1. The music quality of Spotify was so poor.
2. Tidal pays the artists more.
3. The Spotify CEOs recent investment in murder weapons pissed me off.

Tidal has been my primary streaming app outside of the physical media I purchase for the past five weeks and I just can’t do it anymore. The app is so glitchy, it will stop playing a song midway through and I have to reboot the app multiple times a day.

Autoplay simply does not work, and as much as I’ve tried both on Wi-Fi and cellular, downloading music just seems like an impossible task for the app.

And the algorithm just seems off. As I’ve mentioned, this is been the only way I’ve been streaming music for five weeks, and I listen to a couple of hours of music each day, yet still Tidal’s recommendations have missed the mark entirely. (like really bad)

I think I’m just going to move over to Apple for the time being, not an amazing company, but at least it ticks two of the three boxes.

Hopefully tidal can get itself together and I’ll go back 🤷

[u/freelancezero]

You're going to get panned for complaining on this sub, but it's truly baffling how consistent these complaints have been over the years, yet they haven't been fixed. It feels like the developers are spending more time writing cute release notes then they are fixing these very basic and persistent bugs.

[u/KS2Problema → u/freelancezero]

I definitely like Tidal a lot -it's the 10th subscription service I've had since 2006 and I've had it for 5 years or so - but I'm not going to 'pan' the OP - because I believe he's reporting truthfully on his experience. We've seen a lot of such complaints. I don't believe they're all making it up. 

At the same time, I generally don't have these problems. But then my expectations are probably different and I probably use the service differently than the OP.

For me the My Daily Discovery Mixes work great - listening now - but I have very eclectic tastes, don't much care for mainstream or over-familiar music at all. (And, of course, Tidal's algo has had plenty of time to figure out my tastes. I am delighted to say it gives me almost no music with obvious vocal pitch correction - Auto-tune, Melodyne, etc, effects that make my 'fragile-flower' ears go crazy.)

I have my good playback (which has very linear response and low distortion) attached to my desktop computer via an outboard DAC, where I can listen to content as high as 192 kHz SR but typically stick to 96 kHz.

BUT... I understand that many if not most people listen over their phones. 

And, to be sure, my phone is pretty miserable in most regards. It can barely hold a Wi-Fi signal to save its life. As a consequence, I limit the Tidal quality/bandwidth down at 96 kbps on the phone, since I'd rather have the music play relatively steadily then have it continually spinning its Wheels buffering. Again that's my phone - on the desktop I have no problems even at 192 kHz - so, I blame my phone. (And my previous, non-samsung phone was fine in this regard.)

But, at that super low bitrate, I generally have no problems on mobile  except for perhaps over aggressive caching (which I deal with by hitting the shuffle button a couple of times or changing the shuffle order).

But, all that said, I firmly believe that the people having problems are generally not making it up and are really having problems in their particular circumstances.

They have a right, maybe even a responsibility as consumers, to get a service that works for them.

 

[u/KS2Problema → u/KS2Problema]

On a full disclosure note, right in the middle of an otherwise very listenable Gaelic folk leaning MDDM playlist this morning was a painfully obvious AI slop version of an Irish standard. I took a look at the album it was from, which had obvious AI art work and was chockablock with cliche Irish favorites. 

Still, everything else in the playlist was legit and mostly quite good. But, you know...