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Tidal Quirks

L-Dude said:
Tidal is, IMO, a complete POS. I tried it out for a few days, and found it to be the mostly poorly designed music interface I've ever seen.
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After the Tidal connection went down in our Air and could not be restored, we quit trying and went months without Tidal without missing it at all. When our Gravity DE arrived, I really wanted to check out its Atmos performance, so I re-subscribed. The sound is glorious, but the app is a hot mess.

If we want to listen to Tidal we select our music before we back the car out of the garage when we have the time to try to coax it into playing an album instead of just one song before starting to switch to (vaguely) similar selections from other artists. Once on the road, if we want to switch music selections, we just go back to Spotify or to our USB music sticks.

While it's nice, at this point I view Atmos as more a party trick than something one can really enjoy on the road due to the aggravation of dealing with Tidal.
 
hmp10 said:
After the Tidal connection went down in our Air and could not be restored, we quit trying and went months without Tidal without missing it at all. When our Gravity DE arrived, I really wanted to check out its Atmos performance, so I re-subscribed. The sound is glorious, but the app is a hot mess.

If we want to listen to Tidal we select our music before we back the car out of the garage when we have the time to try to coax it into playing an album instead of just one song before starting to switch to (vaguely) similar selections from other artists. Once on the road, if we want to switch music selections, we just go back to Spotify or to our USB music sticks.

While it's nice, at this point I view Atmos as more a party trick than something one can really enjoy on the road due to the aggravation of dealing with Tidal.
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The key for me has been to create a Tidal playlist with only Dolby Atmos recordings. I keep adding to the playlist and now its up to around 3000 recordings. Then I put it on shuffle and skip those I don't want to listen to.
 
SaratogaLefty said:
The key for me has been to create a Tidal playlist with only Dolby Atmos recordings. I keep adding to the playlist and now its up to around 3000 recordings. Then I put it on shuffle and skip those I don't want to listen to.
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Sounds as if I need to sit down and figure out at last how to make a Tidal playlist on my computer.
 
Tidal is quite frustrating having an interface that doesn't either let you search for only Dolby Atmos tracks nor have a setting to "prefer" Dolby Atmos at all times (e.g., between an Atmos and non-atoms track). Seems like a simple fix, but not one that they appear to care to address.

That said, many songs in Atmos are truly a revelation when care is taken by the audio technician or whomever mixes the track. Other tracks seem to be simply re-encoded but without any true remixing.
 
I have spent so much time fumbling around in this app. I feel less incompetent after reading this. Why is there no artist profile page? Why can’t I get to the search bar if I launch tidal in the lower iPad thingy? Does anyone consistently use this app and what is your workflow?!?
 
nashvillelucid said:
I have spent so much time fumbling around in this app. I feel less incompetent after reading this. Why is there no artist profile page? Why can’t I get to the search bar if I launch tidal in the lower iPad thingy? Does anyone consistently use this app and what is your workflow?!?
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Use the app from your phone or computer for “setup”

In-car, I use it *exclusively* for playback of playlists, artists, albums etc that I’ve previously favorited.

Forget the terrible search, the biggest reason is that there is no differentiation in the search results between Atmos mixes and stereo mixes; on the app or computer, it’s much clearer.
 
borski said:
Use the app from your phone or computer for “setup”...on the app or computer, it’s much clearer.
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If you are using an Apple device, it's reasonable.
If you are using Windows or a Pixel device, it's quite difficult to differentiate Atmos tracks from non-Atmos, as Tidal hides the "Atmos" button you need.
 
I've historically used YouTube Music (and Google Play Music before that) but I'm trying out both Tidal and Spotify to see if I can live with one of them until Lucid graces us with a native YTM app.

Right now, my biggest gripes with Tidal (aka quirks) on my Air (v2.10.0) are:

1. It seems to list my playlists in a completely random order, not related to alphabetic or recently used, forcing me to spend far too much time looking down at the screen scrolling through to find the playlist I want to play.
2. Unlike Spotify, when you tap on the playlist (or artist or album), instead of showing a list of the tracks or albums (in the case of an artist) it just starts playing the first item in that list.
3. The search doesn't seem to return any of my playlists, so I can't use the search as a workaround for item 1.

I'd be curious to know if any of this is improved in the 3.x UI in the Gravity or not.
 
prgarg said:
It's the same, unfortunately. I use it but rely on my phone's app to manage everything and just use the native app to press play
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That's just sad and doesn't really make for a safe user experience.

I feel like Lucid kind of painted themselves into a corner by trying to use a heavily customized Android Automotive - forcing them to depend on custom written apps instead of just being able to open up access to apps from the play store, but then failing to allocate sufficient resources to actually maintain the apps they started with, let alone add new apps that customers might want. Really I'd kill for a YTM app, and maybe Waze.

I hope the new leadership is smart enough to put proper development into the apps (in addition to fixing stability issues - they can both be worked on by different teams) rather than letting the apps languish.

If they aren't going to maintain a decent app ecosystem then they should consider moving away from the customized interface and allow for full access to apps in the automotive play store .
 
My main problem with Tidal is that it’ll play about four or five of my tracks, and then run off in another direction completely, with the artists presented getting more and more obscure. Then after by turns annoying then bewildering me, Tidal then goes back to playing one my “favourited” treacks.

Is this a quirk of Tidal’s way with streaming music that I just have to live with?
 
My gripes are:
1. It always starts with the first track in the list, not the one where I left off when I left the car.
2. My lists are all from 60's 70's and 80's then it suddenly starts playing obscure tracks I have never heard before.
 
Yes lots of problems with the Tidal app. I'll add that it will only display the first 250 albums that you've favorited (in the order you added them), so as you go over that number you won't see the first albums you added anymore. I think the answer, as others have said, is to manage your playlists elsewhere and just get in the car and hit play. Still annoying.

For me, this is outweighed by the sonic quality and the high artist payout. Spotify's outright disdain for artists is a deal breaker for me. Apple isn't terrible. YouTube is pretty bad.
 
doubletwist said:
I hope the new leadership is smart enough to put proper development into the apps (in addition to fixing stability issues - they can both be worked on by different teams) rather than letting the apps languish.
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Who writes the apps? I’m thinking Lucid functions more like an app portal. Lucid provides an SDK to the Tidal and Tidal is the company actually writing the app.

I prefer using the integrated UX instead of being forced to use CarPlay or Android Auto. I blame the terrible in-car app on Tidal and not Lucid.
 
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Saksak said:
Who writes the apps? I’m thinking Lucid functions more like an app portal. Lucid provides an SDK to the Tidal and Tidal is the company actually writing the app.

I prefer using the integrated UX instead of being forced to use CarPlay or Android Auto. I blame the terrible in-car app on Tidal and not Lucid.
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That's not really any better. If anything that's still them painted into an even worse corner, in that they'd be entirely dependent on the third parties to decide to put in the effort to write and provide ongoing support for apps on yet another custom 'platform' and UI beyond what they already do.

If I'm an app/service provider already working and supporting apps on Windows, macos, iOS, Android, and maybe Linux, and some upstart car company says, "Hey, you want to write yet another app that only works on a few thousand of our cars?", I'm going to laugh them out of the room.




I mean I like the interested UI
 
doubletwist said:
forcing them to depend on custom written apps instead of just being able to open up access to apps from the play store, but then failing to allocate sufficient resources to actually maintain the apps they started with, let alone add new apps that customers might want.
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Lucid does not write the infotainment apps.

Saksak said:
Who writes the apps? I’m thinking Lucid functions more like an app portal. Lucid provides an SDK to the Tidal and Tidal is the company actually writing the app.
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They are simply Android apps, and yes, written by the respective companies. I don’t love it either, but fwiw that’s how it works for most manufacturers.

doubletwist said:
That's not really any better. If anything that's still them painted into an even worse corner, in that they'd be entirely dependent on the third parties to decide to put in the effort to write and provide ongoing support for apps on yet another custom 'platform' and UI beyond what they already do.
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I agree it isn’t ideal, but that is how it works, across the ecosystem, as I understand it.

doubletwist said:
If I'm an app/service provider already working and supporting apps on Windows, macos, iOS, Android, and maybe Linux, and some upstart car company says, "Hey, you want to write yet another app that only works on a few thousand of our cars?", I'm going to laugh them out of the room.
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It’s just an Android app. Last time I used Tidal on Android it also sucked. Is it possible tidal on Android just sucks?
 
borski said:
Lucid does not write the infotainment apps.


They are simply Android apps, and yes, written by the respective companies. I don’t love it either, but fwiw that’s how it works for most manufacturers.


I agree it isn’t ideal, but that is how it works, across the ecosystem, as I understand it.


It’s just an Android app. Last time I used Tidal on Android it also sucked. Is it possible tidal on Android just sucks?
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Tidal on Android does suck, but it sucks even more in the Lucid interface. just because they both are 'Android' under the hood doesn't mean they are even remotely the same.

Maybe similar function calls internally, but the interface design and implementation is complete different, and they (Tidal) obviously haven't b pick much thought or effort into its design and implementation, let alone ongoing maintenance.

Not that Spotify is perfect, but it's at least better than Tidal, which seems to unnecessarily lack basic functionality.
 
It also means that Lucid has effectively no control over what applications get created for their own platform. If they want to say have a YouTube music app, they have to somehow convince Google, whether verbally or financially, to spend the time and effort to do so.

That's not a great path to a well supported platform.
 
doubletwist said:
Tidal on Android does suck, but it sucks even more in the Lucid interface. just because they both are 'Android' under the hood doesn't mean they are even remotely the same.

Maybe similar function calls internally, but the interface design and implementation is complete different, and they (Tidal) obviously haven't b pick much thought or effort into its design and implementation, let alone ongoing maintenance.

Not that Spotify is perfect, but it's at least better than Tidal, which seems to unnecessarily lack basic functionality.
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I tried to use the TiDAL API for a Home Assistant dashboard I’ve been building to run on Google Hubs. It’s an absolute piece of crap! Thinking of ripping it out of the code altogether. So it seems that it sucks everywhere 😂
 
doubletwist said:
It also means that Lucid has effectively no control over what applications get created for their own platform. If they want to say have a YouTube music app, they have to somehow convince Google, whether verbally or financially, to spend the time and effort to do so.

That's not a great path to a well supported platform.
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Won't find me disagreeing there.
 
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