Tidal? meh….

TL; DR; – it’s expensive and it sucks… Better save some money and buy vinyl record!

I always wanted to try Tidal. And especially when I found out that there’s a new feature in my Sony headphones App allowing me to start 360degrees audio. So when I received an offer to try HiFi Tidal for 4 months for only 2CHF I couldn’t resist.

I was very looking forward to it when I was installing the app. But then…. Just a big disappointment 🙁

• library…. it sucks!
  Maybe I have weird taste. Maybe I want to listen too much to non-english music… But when I compare the library with Spotify – I was not able to find all the music I like in Tidal. And so far I haven’t found tracks/albums in Tidal that were only there (ok… there are some special live events extra…. but I’d rather have full discography)
• search it’s even worse
  Don’t know who is working on the search engine on Tidal. But WTF really? Very often I had to scroll down artist list to find the one I was looking for even when I put the name exactly as it is. Usually the faster way how to find an artist was to search for a song or album name and then open an artist page
• podcasts
  This is recently killing feature for Spotify. I was big fan of podcasts back in 2005+. Then I was not able to find so many new and interesting ones because many podcasters became youtubers. But now it’s the 2nd wave and you can get a lot of interesting channels there.
  It’s true that there are few feeds in Tidal, but not interesting ones 🙁
• videos
  this should be the special feature that only Tidal provides. And I didn’t tried it much. I wanted to have music streaming app
• Overall the application is super ugly with annoying ads (I  don’t want to see Kanye West’s opera. And there is no need to advertise it every single time I start the app)
• and last not least – playlists…. 
  I really love the way I can browse my friends playlists, inspire myself etc. As well searching for public playlists (created based on films, series, special events etc).
  Honestly – I haven’t found any playlist that I would listen for more than 5 minutes of skipping songs in Tidal. As well all playlists I found there were pretty short

But what about the main reason why try Tidal… Its excellent sound quality?!
Well…. Honestly I found few tracks in the master quality that are much better than in Spotify Premium.  Few. Really FEW!
But the HiFi is the same quality as Spotify Premium. Actually I am pretty sure they are using the same source. My favourite test is J.A.R. – Náš Klan. This song was fu*ked up in Google Music, is fu*ked up in Spotify and exactly the same way it is fu*ked up in Tidal!
And what is worse – I found a lot of tracks in “Normal” quality which sounds worse than Spotify 🙁 The sound of “normal” quality is just annoying!

So as I said in the first line – expensive for no extra reason. I’ll stay with my Spotify premium and for the money I will save I’m going to buy vinyl LPs to enjoy the proper quality (and the ritual of playing record).