I’m wondering about Tidal’s weakness in Classical. I’d like to get a more precise idea of why Qobuz (for example) would be better.
As far as I can see, Tidal has great Classical content. The problem is that all the Tidal front ends (both the Tidal native apps, and the Tidal page in Roon) follow a bizarre editorial line that gives Classical extremely short shrift. But I find when searching Tidal from, for example, a Roon Composer page, I find it has much of what I want.
Can someone name some classical albums they are missing in Tidal? Concrete albums, not just “Qobuz is better”.
(This is all distinct from the problem of Roon/Tidal integration, which is good but not as good as it should be IMO. And Tidal’s native metadata is rubbish, but so its Qobuz’s, at least judging from the downloads I buy.)
This is exactly my question: whether the problem with Tidal is actually accessing the classical albums in the first place, rather than what is theoretically available to stream.
I agree with you that the search engine could be better. Maybe a lot better.
Well, if you value anecdote I have definitely had problems accessing classical material from Roon that I know to be in the Tidal library, and it’s not a localisation availability problem.
Well, finding the album mentioned in this post through Roon was phenomenally difficult for me. I can’t even remember how I eventually managed to do it.
I’m a little confused, because as far as I know, there is no Hyperion on Tidal, nor Qobuz. The owner of Hyperion Records believe streaming to be A Bad Thing. So I’m not surprised you couldn’t find it.
I remember meeting a guy in a pub once who said his sister’s next door neighbour’s brother in law heard of a chap who thought there were less classical albums on Tidal.
Tidals search engine for classical is frankly terrible.
Tidal has almost all the albums Qobuz has (except for some that are only for the European market), but they are extremely difficult to find,
Roon doesn’t help that much because they don’t function like a true search engine for Tidal.
For example, Qobuz lets you search by record company. If you try doing this in Roon under Label “Lyrita”, you only get the albums you own are have selected as favorites in Tidal – you don’t get to see the whole Lyrita catalog like you see in Qobuz.
Another problem with the Rovi metadata is that it is not specific for each track. It will provide all the artists on an album.
However, for opera, and for many classical albums released as collections, you don’t get specific artist information by track – only for the entire album. I feel this is a limitation.
At this moment, in the Tidal Genres section, Classical, there are 7 new releases shown for the month of May. On the Qobuz site, where I typically browse for new releases, there are 80, going back only to 13 May - so I’d expect about 150 (or so) for the whole month. 7 vs. 150.
So while many of the new releases may actually be available on Tidal, they are not easily visible, so unless I specifically go looking for them, how would I even know they are there?
I actually did the exercise of actually listing all the new releases for a specific week once before - I recall Qobuz had about 30, Tidal had about 10. Still a significant gap.
I will make a (very basic and uncomplete) test over the weekend.
I will translate a (large) Spotify (some classical) playlist into Tidal and Qobuz.
I am interested to see how much can be found on either service.