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My favourite thing about Qobuz is they have a store where you pay money and they give you audio files, like in the old days. So you can pay for your music then keep it without an ongoing subscription.
While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.
I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.
Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!
While true, and I have a lot of DRM-free music that I’ve bought from Apple, the difference is that getting music purchased from Apple onto your computer in a usable format is a bit of a pain, and it’s all lossy. Music from Qobuz can be downloaded directly from their site after purchasing, in lossless FLAC format, and many of their albums are available in high-res 24-bit and/or 96 kHz format as well.
Apple Music in its current form is basically a direct evolution out of iTunes. It's a very old feature.
I know Apple has a music store. But if I use Android and Linux, how do I access it?
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I feel I should mention Bandcamp, which gives 70% of a sale directly to the artist. In the music world that's a lot. All DRM free and in most audio formats you could want. My process when buying music is usually: bandcamp > qobuz (or similar) > if all else fails... use other means. I'll also skip step one and two depending on the artist :p
Bandcamp is great. Especially the genres I like to listen too are usually on there. Only minor inconvenience is, that the mobile app doesn't allow you to download the tracks in a way, so you can play them in another music player.
If you really need to download the music on your phone you could use the website. I just organise everything on my PC then copy the files over.. But I agree that it would be nice to have DRM free downloads on the app
Yeah Bandcamp is great. They also do Bandcamp Friday events where all the revenue goes to the artist.
The problem is it's really hard to find any mainstream bands on there. Presumably most of them sign away those rights when they get a label.
Yeah, really depends on what kind of music you listen to. I guess I'm lucky in that regard, since most artists I listen to have their music on BC ^^
I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it's a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.
Which features does it miss compared to Spotify?
The only deal-breaker for me was that the android app doesn't persist its play state, so if I pause and do other stuff on my phone, it usually loses its place.
Qobuz's audio quality is a game changer. I had some technical issues with it with glitches short pauses in playback awhile back when I tried it; hopefully those are worked out now. It's great if you know exactly what you want to listen too. It's well known for lacking good algorithms for music discovery. I use Tidal and really like the daily discovery feature, automated Playlists, and the "track radio" that will give you a large list of songs similar to the exact song you are listening to. I've heard similar laments from people looking to switch from Spotify to Qobuz.
The number one thing I've been missing are Spotify jams. Spotify also has a wider selection of music, but tbh it's rare for Spotify to have something that Qobuz doesn't. Spotify also has lyrics, playlist folders, and audiobooks; though tbh I haven't checked to see if Qobuz has the latter.
One example is podcasts. I would miss the single interface for both podcasts and music, although Spotify is enshittifying rapidly; the turning point may be closer than I thought.
Tbh, podcasts through a "storefront" is a poor way to experience them. It's meant to be decentralized via RSS feeds. Tho having some cross-device metadata about what you've listened to is definitely helpful.
I've been using Pocket Casts for a long time for that more refined experience and ease of use between listening devices. Their new owners are ethically complicated nowadays (Automattic), and the cost for their pro features is a bit high unless you are a podcast fiend (I was grandfathered in from their old mid-2010s pricing scheme that was pay once/own forever), but it's a good app (for now).
100% with you, plus, with spotify premium you still get shitty ads on podcasts (that also do ad reads like hello fresh...) so there's no advantage at all at listening to podcasts on spotify. I also find their media library management to be clunky at best so a dedicated podcast app is a far better option IMHO.
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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.
Throwing out there that I use qobuz with Strawberry player on Linux and it works great.
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.
Yeah, I wasn't sure initially if I'd like it enough to pull the trigger on lifetime. I should have. Been paying for the annual subscription for the past ~2 years, but the price of lifetime has steadily been increasing. Will probably pull the trigger later this year as a little celebration gift to myself for wrapping up other financial obligations.
You could try music assistant, it uses navidrome/jellyfin/spotify/tidal ecc as a source, and streams them to your speakers. Pretty neat. It also supports squeezelite clients, so that's neat. BTW, for navidrome I recommend Tempo, pretty nice FOSS app.
Too bad they block VPNs
I use proton for VPN and qobuz works for me! I've had a couple of other bugs but streaming and downloading both work!
I use Proton as well but it won't even let me sign up and explicitly says it's because of the VPN.
I use Surfshark and don't have problems with it 99% of the time. I think you probably just have to have the VPN off for signing up and logging in (I've noticed zero issues when I'm already logged in).
Still a pain :( they’re too afraid we’ll use regional pricing?
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...
Been using Qobuz for several months now. Pretty happy with it overall so far. You can get full audio quality via browser, which is great since lots of services have poor Linux support.
Same here
I loved last FM when it came out, best recommendation engine in its days. Then they kinda died and reborn into you tube powered.
Moved to Spotify, then the paid bit rate was down graded.
Then moved to Deezer, but the buffering and errors after a few hours play are really annoying.
This week my qobuz trial was over, so I cancelled Deezer and I'm paying for qobuz.
Streaming services are kinda a commodity now, the catalogs are basically the same, except Pandora that had a better coverage for Nina Pastori than others. But this also changed from time to time.
I chose this service to replace my yt music subscription, and I have nothing but praise for their service, the quality of the music or their ethics.
Unfortunately they're not available everywhere.
This is great to see. I ended up moving to Tidal from Spotify, and even though there are some nice to have features missing from Tidal (an equivilant to spotify's sync between devices/speakers as well as a better Android Auto experience), it's a far superior experience.
Quobuz is also on my radar, but they've traditionally lacked in the music catalog space. I need to give them a try again now that it's been a few years.
That said, Tidal barely has Linux clients and I don't think I've seen much movement for Quobuz on Linux, unless I've just missed it.
I moved from Spotify to tidal as well. Tidal is fine except for their catalogue mess. They tend to group different artists with same name to a single artist. Here and there I feedback them, they correct it in a week or so but the first next album is wrong again. But I'm glad that at least it pays music owners better and doesn't throw money at shit podcasts and such
i love tidal so much <3 it's lacking a bit in japanese artists compared to spotify but that's not a dealbreaker for me
I've moved to Deezer, love the HiFi audio! Also works well under Linux using Mellowplayer
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I've been using Qobuz for a couple of years and I love it. Great audio quality, has 90% of any music I'm looking for, and seems to be far less morally bankrupt than many alternatives.
I'm pretty happy with Tidal so far; I tried Qobuz back when I was looking for an alternative to Spotify and I remember the Android app being borderline unusable. I might be misremembering things though.
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
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.
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this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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