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.

  • HereIAm@lemmy.worldOP
    2·
    5 days ago

    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.