So I want to swap off of Spotify. Most of the time it works great, but the annoyances with their UX are starting to build up. From not ordering albums in release order on certain screens, to having to wait a good few seconds before turning off their shuffle+, and their shuffle not being very shuffle-y to begin with.
I have a couple of requirements:
- A decent Linux client.
- Be able to easily select playback device from other devices (for example start playback on my PC from my phone).
- Preferably pretty straightforward UX philosophy, i.e. haven’t started going down any enshitification with AI, “we know best” kind of elements.
I don’t particularly care for the highest of lossless quality audio. I don’t posses any audio equipment where I would have any shot of telling the difference. As long as its not the experience I had with YouTube music where some random persons heavily compressed upload of a song would start playing.
My main contenders are Tidal, Qobuz, and deezer. The latter two I have very little experience with.
I’ve tried Tidal before, but my main gripe with it was scrolling through large playlists (about 2000 songs) was very slow, as it loaded in songs as you scrolled through (think endless scrolling on ddg or Lemmy) making it tedious to go to artists starting with a later character in the alphabet. Maybe it was just the Linux client, an issue on my machine, or if they’ve fixed it since, would be great to hear if any of you have had the same issue.
Qobuz and deezer I haven’t really tried or heard much about from a users perspective.
I know some people swear by buying (or ship in under the jolly roger) all their music and use jellyfin or just local files for playback. I’m not very keen on that idea, the convince and discoverability of music on a streaming platform is what made me go to Spotify and away from winamp in the first place.
As a community radio manager I wish just one of them would allow us to broadcast from their service. Since we aren’t allowed to, I can’t see how we can hope to get many younger presenters since most don’t have physical media or purchased tracks.
I know some stations including the ABC cheat and use it anyway.
I just switched to Deezer because I’m Canadian and I’m abolishing all American products that I can. I was a YouTube Music person for years though, and I absolutely loved Google Play Music, but YTM is trash. I will not use Spotify because of Joe Rogan, and I tried Apple Music and it’s not what I want because their classical music selection is different from all other platforms and it is missing stuff I want. I like Deezer so far.
I use Tidal (buy it from a cheap country by vpn) and Apple Music because the wife wants Apple TV so the bump to get the bundle wasn’t much. I prefer Tidal by a long shot, but use Apple Music when I need to play music that I don’t want fucking up my Tidal algorithm.
Over the past couple of months, I have tried out all the major streaming services as I moved away from Deezer, so I will give an overview of my perspectives on each.
Deezer
I used Deezer for the past five years, and for most of that time I loved it. In the past year they did a UI and branding overhaul which I didn’t really like, but it was fine. They have recently been getting more into music quizzes and games, which I am not very interested in. There was a big banner for games on the home screen at one point, but I ended up blocking it with UBlock Origin. I ended up leaving Deezer because they removed the option to sort downloaded music in any way. (I think they have added that back now)
Deezer has a fantastic range of curated playlists and radio stations, some of the best out of any service I have used. It has quality generated playlists and autoplay, and good algorithmic discovery.
Deezer seems to favour playlists; Your favourited playlists show in the sidebar at all times and there is no option to change this, I only listen to albums, so I don’t really like this.
They have a public forum for discussing Deezer and reporting incorrect artist catalogues.
In my time of using Deezer, I have noticed many annoying bugs and changes on Android, like when they temporarily removed the option to sort downloaded music and an ongoing bug where downloaded music isn’t playable offline.
I can’t figure out if they have a connect feature. Someone in this thread said they do, but I’ve never seen it.
The unofficial Linux app is just a basic electron wrapper.
Apple Music
Apple Music is a good streaming service, but it was a terrible experience to set up on Linux. I spent six hours trying to create an Apple account only to get stuck at a page where a button didn’t have any JavaScript attached to it, so it didn’t even let me.
Very infuriating, anyways, Apple Music doesn’t have an official Linux app, but the unofficial app https://cider.sh/ exists, and is the only fully-fledged non-electron app for a major streaming service that I know of on Linux. The app is impressively feature-rich, featuring connect, custom audio profiles, a fullscreen mode and miniplayer, real-time lyrics, and a plugin/theme store among many other things.
While the UI looks very nice and is customizable to an extent, there are many actions that require an extra click, such as favouriting an album, or editing a playlist, as many things are tucked away in menus. This, along with the excruciating account creation process is what led me to not choose Apple Music as my service of choice.
Discovery is good, although maybe not as good as on Spotify, Deezer, or Tidal, and the selection of curated playlists is less then what’s available on other services.
I have noticed UI bugs and inconsistencies, but nothing that largely detracts from the user experience.
Tidal
Tidal is pretty similar to Qobuz, and I don’t have many bad things to say about either of them.
It has all the features you would expect in a streaming service, and it does all of them pretty well. It has good algorithmically generated playlists and discovery, a clean, simple interface, and I’ve experienced no bugs. I don’t think it has anything like Spotify Connect.
The unofficial Linux app is an electron wrapper, but it does have some additional functionality that the official apps do not. Another unofficial GTK app also exists, called High Tide. Tidal is the service I ended up choosing personally.
Qobuz
Out of these, Qobuz is the one I have the least experience with. It seems pretty similar to Tidal in most regards, but seems more aimed towards audiophiles and has less automatic curation, and the manually curated playlists have are focused on a much narrower range of genres and artists, but are far more detailed and in-depth than any other service. The interface may also be nicer depending on your tastes, although it doesn’t have a lyrics view.
Qobuz is mostly known for allowing you to purchase music to download at full quality, which is pretty awesome.
The unofficial Linux app is a basic electron wrapper, but it doesn’t MPRIS support.
I don’t know if it hits all your needs but I switched to Deezer a couple of weeks ago and I really dig it.
Free trial month and absurdly easy to import all your stuff from spotify, so I’d just give it a shot and see if it scratches your itch!
The same for me. I tried Qobuz and Deezer.
I find Deezer better for my usage:
- Wide variety of great playlists
- Deezer Connect (equivalent to Spotify Connect) so you can instruct your speaker to play songs and completely disconnect your phone.
Ha, yeah that connection capability made me switch from Qobuz. (My receiver has an app that connects to Deezer, no such luck with Qobuz.)
And fully agree on the playlists, I’ve really dug a few already.
Tidal I believe has what you’re looking for and may be worth a shot.
Deezer is non American and I think it’s worth a shot to try if you wanna give that a shot as well as the seem the least shitty.
That said, Plex/emby/Jellyfin although lacking discoverability is what I used to transition off Spotify in conjunction with tidal. Eventually found out the local library had CDs and used that to discover new music, started buying CDs I liked and enjoyed and have been very happy since since I don’t have a month subscription now as I don’t need to rent my music.
(if you’re the type to be sailing, you could also copy CDs from the library)
I’d say your best shot is to just experiment around, Spotify is always going to be the most convenient. Deezer (as far as I know) the least shitty, and tidal the best quality.
I switched to Tidal recently; it feels a bit featureless in some areas. No Mono Audio mode (i frequently have 1 earbud in at work, don’t like hearing only half the audio.)
Shuffle is either on or off, theres no way i see to set it by playlist/album
I used it as a way to discover music not as my main player as I said but that’s also probably not a common issue (even if it is at its heart an accessibility issue for the partially deaf). I’m not sure if Deezer solves that issue but it also will feel shallow, but idk if it solves that issue.
Plex has gone kinda stupid lately. However Plexamp is very very feature heavy if you wanna own instead of rent the art you consume though. If you want a tier down from Plex, jellyfin with Finamp worked well for me as well when I switched. Emby isn’t feature heavy so maybe about Emby.
Personally though if you wanna get away from streaming I’ll throw in my two cents: an old iPod or iPhone would work great, have decent battery life, and allows you to listen to music without buffering. Takes a bit of getting used to but once you’re on it, you’re on it and it’s unfathomable for me to go back now.
Tidal is Australian
Isn’t it owned by square?
Oh you are correct, I was mistaken.
I have not personally got to the point of trying any yet, but I have heard several times about plugins for Jellyfin that add discoverability and recommendation features.
You still have the issue of actually tracking down the music, which Jellyseer or similar can help with. But if one of those plug-ins were to interface with Spotify or YouTube for preview purposes, that would be pretty slick!
Emby does as well. That said once you live without discover features and unshackle yourself from algorithms I will say … It’s really not that big a deal lol
I used to go hard finding new shit on Spotify and YouTube etc, but eventually word of mouth with friends and the library really solved the issue. Also changed how I consume music from songs in a playlist to looking at every album as one solid work of art to be understood.
Now I hit up my friends when I want new music recs, they hit me up. It’s a good ice breaker. The library is also mad under used as a resource, they love supplying new shit if people are wanting it.
I got to a point where I am now where I carry around an iPod, and some CDs for the car lol may be weird however works for me and I paid zero dollars for music the last couple months cause now I have a solid personal library.
Trust me, I hear you on the algorithmic shit.
I dont think i have a single playlist set up, and almost exclusivly listen to albums cover to cover. All I really want is for a service to occasionally say “Hey you spent 60 hours last month listening to these 3 bands… check out these guys if you want something fresh with a similar vibe”
Spotify did a semi decent job of that, and it’s how I’ve discovered a few new bands, but paying $18/mo just to discover a few per year is not a great value proposition. I’d rather torrent a random album and then pick up some merch or concert tickets if I end up liking them.
I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying.
I wish there was the infrastructure for that without Spotify like what radio used to be, or when the average person had nueanced opinions and it was easier to get recommendations from everyone.
However we don’t live in that world so there’s nothing to judge anyone on atm until Spotify collapses under its own weight.
Pandora; I use the terminal client Pianobar in Linux.
But I’m not a music nerd like you seem to be. I want RADIO, without ads. I pick a song, Pandora picks other music like it to play. I don’t have time to dick with “albums being in order” kinda shit.
I’ve used Deezer before. At the time I felt like their audio quality was better than Spotify. They also had a much cleaner and less cluttered interface. I don’t remember seeing the option to select the playback device though, but that was like 6 years ago where desktop clients were just running on electron. Not sure if they allow switching playback devices now.
Still not a thing. I switched away from deezer a month ago, when they removed the option to sort downloaded music and albums (why would they think that’s a good idea?) I am now on Tidal, and they’re audio quality is even better than deezer and Apple music, and I’m liking it a lot more.
Navidrome.
Foobar2000
I use Qobuz, and I like it a lot. You can easily download music for offline listening, there’s a lot of high def on there, and from what information is known about how much streaming services pay back to record labels, Qobuz appears to be the biggest payer per stream.
The app is no frills, they only added auto generated playlists a year or so ago. Their recommendations are less tailored, but high quality if you’re wanting to explore outside your usual tastes.
Plus, it’s just music. No podcasts, no audiobooks, no games, no generative ai for some reason.
I’ve been using RiMusic
I’m in a similar boat. Spotify is infuriating for a variety of reasons. For one, I just cannot understand how they screw up their android app so frequently. It’s constantly riddled with new bugs almost every update. And I hate how little they pay the actual artists.
I’ve been reading the buzz about music streaming services for a long while now. Qobuz is what I’m going to try next.
I also keep Pandora because their recommendations algorithm is the best in the business, in my experience.
I’m generally not particularly picky when I’m listening to music. I don’t often want just one specific song or artist. Usually I’m looking for a genre/vibe and that’s it.
With that in mind, I prefer Pandora. I’ve been using it for ~20 years now and have a lot of VERY well curated stations. I also don’t mind the ads so much, and, therefore, have never had to pay for it. On the rare occasions I want a very specific song, I can just pull it up on YouTube.
My wife and I recently sprung for a Spotify account. We have a 3 yo and 5 yo and, like most children, they want to listen to a few specific albums on repeat. We had Amazon Music for a bit, but really disliked it. So we switched to Spotify. I mostly only use it to play music for my kids.
Depends on if I want to listen to music or just have a radio on.
If I’m listening to music, I’m using Jellyfin. But I also have a large music collection.
If I just want a radio, it’s either Spotify or Amazon Music depending on where I am.
