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.
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-website-wrapper 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.
Wow, that's a fantastic write up! Very cool to hear from someone who has used all the major platforms. I'm leaning towards Tidal, but they all seem to work quite well for everyone in here. I think what I'm going to do is dedicate a month to each service, write down my experiences with it, and go from there. Deezer has the free trial, so could start with that. Some other people in this thread has noted about the non-sorting of downloaded tracks and other questionable UI choices, so I'll keep an eye out for that.
I didn't expect to find any native apps, even Spotify's client is an unoffical distribution, but I'm glad to hear they all have something available at least. I'm intrigued by Cider, seems like one hell of a project.
Thanks! All of the services have a one-month free trial, and Tidal has a two-month $3 trial. I'm currently on the trial for most of them.