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.

  • tabris@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 days ago

    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.