Tidal Quirks

[hmp10]

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.

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.

 

[SaratogaLefty]

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.

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.

 

[hmp10]

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.

Sounds as if I need to sit down and figure out at last how to make a Tidal playlist on my computer.

 

[McGriddle]

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.