There are a few dimensions involved in determining that something “is MQA”:
- Whether an MQA version is available at all
- Your location–not all tracks play in same quality in all places
- Your account type
- Whether it’s streamable as MQA today, since streaming rights change day to day.
We’re not going to tag files based on less than all of the information. Then all we’d be providing is a “could be MQA” indicator that was sometimes wrong in both directions.
I don’t see a way to tag files as MQA precisely without having a way to go from the rights data we have access to, to a decision-making procedure that would determine whether, in a given region, for a given user account, on a given day, this track is going to play as MQA or not.
We have a mechanism for figuring out which content we are allowed to display and which content we are allowed to offer for playback–but we don’t have a mechanism for determining quality prior to the moment of playback. This is the thing TIDAL would need to improve.
We are not very interested in a partial/imprecise solution to this. It’s not a good product for us to be building–it will create confusion and support load, as people will be pointing to all of the situations where the imprecise solution gets it wrong (false positives and false negatives) and expecting us to take responsibility for fixing it.
We’re happy to do this right with TIDAL’s cooperation, but doing something desperate to get it sort of right some of the time doesn’t seem like a good path forward.