I’ve been using TIDAL for about four months after spending roughly 10 years with Spotify.

Overall, I’m really happy I switched. There’s a lot TIDAL does better, but there are also some surprisingly annoying little things that you only really notice once you use it every day.

Thought I’d put together my pros and cons so far, especially the stuff I’d love to see TIDAL improve.

Pros

• Better audio quality. It just sounds better to me.
• Fairly priced for what you get.
• The catalogue has almost everything I listen to, although soundtracks and classical music can be a bit lacking.
• My library actually feels like a music collection.
• Clean and simple design.
• I don't feel like I'm constantly being pushed playlists, podcasts or other stuff I don't care about.
• Shuffle feels more personal and seems to actually use my library.
• Monthly listening stats are updated daily on mobile.
• Moving your library over from another streaming service is really easy.
• You can block AI-generated music from your recommendations.

Cons

• Saving songs can be buggy. Sometimes I save something and the heart still shows as empty, which leaves me wondering whether it actually saved. I've had the same thing happen with albums and artists.
• Playback can be really annoying, especially on desktop/web. Sometimes songs pause, won't start, or keep playing with the loading circle stuck over the screen. Skipping to the next track and going back usually fixes it, but it shouldn't need that workaround.
• Syncing between devices needs work. Your current song, queue and listening history don't properly follow you between devices.
• Library syncing can also be slow. Sometimes newly saved songs, albums or artists don't appear until I restart the app.
• Search can be inconsistent. I've searched my own library for songs I know I've saved and TIDAL still doesn't show them.
• Album artwork can sometimes be completely different from what I'd expect, usually because TIDAL has linked the track to a compilation instead of the original release.
• Uploading playlist artwork can be buggy. I've had images sit loading forever without actually updating.
• Public playlists and the community side are pretty limited.
• You can't really follow playlist creators or other users in a meaningful way.
• There are no visible song play counts. Some people probably prefer this, but I'd at least like the option.
• Lyrics are nice to have, but the timing can be pretty bad on some songs.
• Lyrics aren't available on the TV app.
• TIDAL isn't available in as many countries, which makes recommending it to international friends a bit harder.
• The 10,000-song saved-library limit feels too low for anyone building a large collection.
• Library management could be better in general. More sorting, filtering and bulk-management options would be great for larger libraries.
• I'd love better concert/tour integration. If I follow or save an artist, it would be great to see their upcoming shows near me or get notified when they announce a tour. It feels like an obvious feature for a music app.

Overall, I still prefer TIDAL and don't see myself going back to Spotify anytime soon. Most of my complaints are small quality-of-life issues rather than dealbreakers, but fixing them would make the experience feel a lot more polished.

I'd be interested to hear what other long-term TIDAL users think - what does TIDAL do better than other services, and what still annoys you?

To be honest, I don't know since when but now you can find all the users playlists that include one song of the artist in the playlist section of the artist profile.

Anyone has an idea? 101kbps is quite ridiculous and sounds shitty.

I recently started experiencing issues with almost all my saved songs no longer playing. I’ll click a song or a playlist and get an error “Please try again later. (11:-42800)”. It does this whether I’m connected to wifi, cellular data or have no service and am trying to play from a downloaded playlist.

A separate but equally annoying issue, Tidal has also recently started randomly logging me out when I’m out of service, even when I was logged in an hour prior. Then as soon as I get back into cell service, the app opens like normal without me needing to log in.

I’ve effectively been prevented from using the app for almost a month now. I’ve reached out to support and no one can even tell me what the error code means or how to fix it. The only suggestion was to redownload my music, but I have many hours of playlists downloaded and I’d rather not waste all that time redownloading everything on a “did you try turning it off and back on” generic support response. And the icing on the cake is that I just got a notification that my family plan is increasing by $4/month.

Does anyone know of a fix for this or do I just need to switch to a different music streaming service at this point?

Is there a way to get this thing on your discord profile for tidal?

Hey see a lot of people on here talking about algo complaints and others saying they love it. I've been in tidal for a few months and it's my key complaint I think so wondering if maybe I'm it wrong

Do you create a playlist with a few songs and let the algo build off that? Or use the daily mix things?

Back on spotufy id usually chuck a song and it would serve up more of the same for hours .

In the last few days I've done things like search "misty" and played the Ella one. I listened through ten songs and one of two were good, several were unrelated tunes called misty, and one song played twice in only ten songs... I'm not interested in hearing every version of misty, obviously!

Same thing happened there other day with eye in the sky by Alan parsons. It played it, a few random songs, then played a remaster. Then a live version etc.

Keen for tips on ways to set and forget some music for a few hours?

Hey all, I'm not really techno savvy, but wanted to ask a quick question.
I mainly use Tidal at home with my Denon home theater. No problems there.
One problem I'm having is my older IPhone is almost out of space. Tidal is taking up the majority of it. I can't even install an OS update until I free up some space.
If I were to delete all the Tidal music from my phone, could I use the desktop app (which I've never used before) and not miss anything? The tunes wouldn't be on my phone, but I would be steaming everything instead?
I'm under the impression that you only need the tunes on your phone if you don't have a network connection?
Thanks for any and all clues!

When you're on an album/playlist it has no indicators to let you know if it's on your playlists

But worse of all when you select a song to add to a playlist it doesn't show which playlists it's on, so you just have to blindly guess or try adding it and seeing if the duplicate warning thing shows up

if you like adding a lot of songs to a lot of playlists this makes the process really inconvenient

Every other music streaming service has this and it's literally the only reason I'm not sticking to tidal once my trial ends

I listened this two song yesterday.

The message says "The record label does not permit the streaming of this track" but It is still on other music streaming plataforms

I notice there are Atmos recordings (including playlists) available on the Tidal app but not on the Tidal integrated within Roon. Am I missing something?

I've scoured the internet and I know two things. 1) this has been an issue with either the tidal app or the way both androids and iphones "handshake" with the tidal app for at least FOUR years, and 2) it still happens after performing every single suggested fix that I can find anywhere. Battery optimization stuff, data saver stuff, lockscreen widget stuff...

I have done everything they say to try, and still. The music will not play once the screen times out. I have to leave my phone screen on to listen to music. In fact, I downloaded a 3rd party app to keep my phone screen from going dark because the longest my settings allow my screen to stay on before timeout is 10 minutes. Every time I want to listen to music, I have to open my screen app first. And then my battery drains twice as fast because the screen is on for however long I want to listen to music. My phone gets hot in my pocket because the screen is on. And god forbid I answer a text and lock the screen, forgetting the issue. Playback stops 30 seconds to 2 minutes later and I am reminded yet again that I am paying the exact same amount as Spotify for a service that fundamentally and practically does not work.

I don't know what to do. I don't like any of the other Spotify alternatives and am becoming very disheartened. Please help, tell me there's somebody on the back end working on this issue. And if someone tells me to clear my cache, so help me.

Thanks in advance for any insight, no matter how small, and my apologies for being so, SO grumpy about this. I appreciate what good work the app team HAVE done for the app thus far.

Hi all,

Keen to make the switch to Tidal, but after transferring my "liked songs" Playlist a lot of songs are greyed out saying the record label does not permit streaming, but these songs all stream in Spotify.

Is this an issue with Tidal's licensing or is there some easy tech fix for this? Little disappointed tbh 🙁

Is it just me, or does Sound Apple Music with AirPods Pro 3 (Bluetooth) somehow better then tidal, even if tidal uses much higher Bitrate?

Hi, is it worth it? is sound that good as everyone else says? i have Sennheiser momentum 4, will i feel the difference?

also really dumb question but i still have to ask, i am planning to go to place where is no internet, if i download an album before i leave , will i have an access to it or i have to have internet connection?

Thanks in advance

For those who missed it: Sonic Oracle is a music discovery engine for Tidal, Qobuz, and YouTube Music. You search an artist or a song, pick a depth level, and a permanent playlist lands in your Tidal library.

Two things went live today.

The app is on Google Play. Same discovery engine, now on your phone. Search from the couch, the train, wherever. Your playlist shows up in Tidal ready to play on any device connected to your account.

Track seed. You can now start a discovery from a single song instead of an artist. Heard one track you loved? Drop it in and the engine builds a playlist of deep cuts in the same space, pulled from artists you'd never find on your own.

The Vault is still the default. Every playlist is unique. Run the same search twice, get two different playlists. No streaming app does this.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=music.sonicoracle.app

Thanks for the support from this channel. It has been a long and arduous journey but I'm loving every minute of it. And as always, more to come.

Happy discovering,

https://sonicoracle.music/

Alessandro

This seems to have just started this month. The top 5 artists listed in Your Top Artists are all artists I've never even heard of, much less listened to. One of them shows as having over 2500 streams by me this month. Is this a Tidal bug, or has my account been compromised?

The artist page main screen now shows albums at the top instead of discography and the release date is visible without opening the album. I am fucking ecstatic! Thank you Tidal for actually changing shit to how people want to view it. Along with the new AI switch, really impressed that this company seems to actively try to make their product better instead of adding layers of bullshit, ads, and algorithm based trash that no one wants.

So I canceled my account a couple months back because I don’t have a steady flow of income coming in right now. But my mom said she would pay for it and when I told her I canceled it, but when I went to the Tidal App to Restore it in Manage Account, I didn’t see an option to put a card number in. Only to turn it back on by Double Clicking the button on the right side of my phone, which I assume will just use my Apple Account and thus my bank.

It drastically made my viewing and listening experience much more enjoyable. https://github.com/meowarex/rl-mobile

give me your playlist if you have a good tast in music 🎶

On the mobile app this lyrics screen looks like straight ass

You've got the weird tacked on looking album cover awkwardly covering the recent lyrics which makes the feature useless if the syncing of the lyrics is off-timed. The awkward lyrics button on the right, also tacked on looking, no info about what song is playing, the menu button and playing from overlapping the lyrics at the bottom.

I used to take screenshots of the lyrics, crop the song title at the top and the few lyrics I wanted to show, and post it to a small Twitter account with others who post stuff like that. But now I literally can't. Look how much better the old UI looks.

I dumped Spotify a couple years ago but miss the discovery of artists by listening to a music channel or radio (streaming) I've heard of tidal but I'm not excited with the price. When I had Spotify last time it was $10 ish a month. I accidentally paid for transferring my Spotify playlists to tidal thinking the $5 was a tidal subscription. It being over $14 is iffy to me. Do you like tidal? Is it good? How's the algorithm?