Improve Playlist - Upgrade Quality prioritising MQA?

[DonRom]

First of all - yes, I know that I should have created a backup.

With that said, why, even with a global setting of “Treat MQA as worse than CD Quality, but not as bad as lossy codecs” did the playlist improver decide to “uPgRadE” my lossless tracks to MQA?

I now have 88 MQA tracks in the playlist that I need to manually replace with Red book versions.

[Jim_F]

If you have Tidal set for MAX and Tidal does not yet have a high resolution flac file, they will send MQA. If you set Tidal on HIGH you will still get some MQA if that’s all they have.

The Playlist Improver seems sometimes to favor MQA and sometimes not. I think this is still because of the funky situation at Tidal as they phase out MQA very slowly.

[DonRom]

Thanks Jim, I do have Tidal set to Max but also have Qobuz set to “Hi Res up to 192 kHz” as well.

Strangely enough, some of the tracks that were allegedly converted to MQA do not actually playback as MQA:

Clicking through to the album from the playlist flags the album as MQA, however, no MQA version even exists:

Is this a meta data issue?

[Jim_F]

I don’t know. I do know that some of the Tidal MQA will not play as MQA. I never see any issues with Qobuz, just Tidal MQA due to the very slow phase out.

I still have 542 Tidal MQA albums, but they all sound good to me so I don’t worry about it.

[daniel]

Hi @DonRom,
Thank you for this report about playlist improver. We have an ongoing investigation into this feature right now. I will add this case to that ticket. I cannot give you an exact timeline on this investigation but once we know more we will let you know here.