I would love to find a happy medium. I want Courtney Barnett & Kurt Vile and Nick Cave & Warren Ellis but I want Janelle Monae - track name (feat Big Boi) not Janelle Monae & Big Boi AND track name including (fear Big Boi) but that doesn’t seem to work consistently with any streaming service I have tried so far. You get the issue you outlined with Steve Gunn, or one with Nick and Warren. I just need to accept I need to edit my scrobbles I imagine
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In-depth reply about audio quality here
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Wait, you can get radio stations on Spotify? Or is that just an American thing?
It’s their own radio I think. At least that’s deffo the case with Apple Music on the same grid
Random q for Tidal or Apple Music users (likely to go to one for various reasons)
How is the shuffle on long playlists?
I ask because Spotify does this irritating algorithmic shuffle on long playlists rather than just… putting the songs in a random order. I really hate it.
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i assumed it was just referring to like when you search for eg Pavement and it gives you the option of ‘Pavement Radio’ where it plays a lot of songs by Pavement and similar artists in a sort of random order rather than a playlist
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I find that Tidal is very similar in this regard. I wonder if it’s inherent to streaming platforms as I’m not sure I’ve ever had a service - Deezer, Apple, Tidal, Spotify - where the shuffle felt truly random.
I find that all platforms operate similarly when it comes to shuffle
Very good, I look forward to continuing to hear the same songs over and over.
(Thanks @elthamsmateowen & @anon73286315 )
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However, Tidal is only available in the United States on Alexa.
ffs! how is this a thing
as with all things streaming-related (music and video), it will be a licensing thing. My brother works for an audio tech company and the list of things they could do (and often do in their employee-only apps) versus the things they’re actually allowed to do is pretty incredible.
e.g. Spotify announced their HiFi tier a year ago. My bro’s had it for well over six months. AFAIK they still haven’t announced when it’s going to be made available to the general public and I have to assume that’s down to some kind of legal/licensing/pricing nonsense.
They advised its indefinitely postponed. Probably just can’t justify the extra bandwidth or something internally and are like AHHHHHHH I’m sure people will forget about it. Unless they plan to stick Hi Res audio logo all over the place or use MQA I guess which do carry licencing fees
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I can’t find anything online on this, can you remember where did you see that?
Ah ok, I did see that - headline is b/s - this is someone extrapolating because Spotify responded to someone’s questions on their help pages saying they “didn’t have timings to share yet”.
I think I read something some years back about shuffle, could have pre-dated streaming apps and related to iTunes. But it was in response to people complaining about shuffle repeating songs, and the response was that shuffle is basically a randomizer, it’s not thinking too hard and creating a new order or keeping track of what it’s already played. It’s just that…shuffle.
Having said that, I do notice on Spotify that when I shuffle a playlist, long or short, it will stop at some point. So that kind of tells me it’s keeping track of what it has played and realizes I’ve heard everything. For better or worse.
Signed up for a Tidal trial yesterday. So far the service/catalogue seems good, but I’m a bit disappointed by their device support compared to Spotify for the devices I use to listen to music:
(+) Android (client exists and works fine)
(-) Playstation (no app)
(-) Kodi box (no working app; no program I can install to use as a target, a la Spotify Connect)
(-) Desktop app (no Linux client)
Found that the BubbleUPnP app for Android does a decent job of casting to Kodi though. Not as smooth as using Spotify Connect, but good enough not to be a dealbreaker.
It’ll be a shame if they don’t add a Playstation app at some point, as I like being able to put whatever music I like over games.
Yeah. By far the strongest attribute spotify has vs other apps is just the support it has. Its basically universal whereas all the others aren’t
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Trying a tidal switch again. Interesting when I transfer album library from Spotify account. From 468 albums in my Spotify library, 48 are missing on Tidal. Quite a lot huh?
Afghan Whigs, Keaton Henson, failure, Idaho, isotope 217, HIM, siv Jacobsen, American football, mates of state etc.
Still going to give it a go though.
Edit…many of the albums are in fact available. They just don’t transfer properly. But can be added again manually.
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I fellow Idaho fan! 
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