TIDAL Music: HiFi Sound 12+

Good but not Great

I love Tidal music but their iPhone app needs some love.

1) Fix up the Now Playing Queue

The way it works at the moment is awkward. In fact it is so awkward that I’ve given up describing it in detail. If the devs can work this out then look at the way Apple’s music app works. Please!! Anyway…

If you start playing tracks using the Play or Shuffle button you can not add more tracks to the end of the queue. Why?!? The only option you have is Play Next and this inserts the new track into the Now Playing Queue pushing all your currently queue tracks down into a new queue and all other queue additions work in the new queue. Arg why????

The only way to make the Now Playing Queue work is to clear it first then add tracks but why?!?!?!

Creating Playlists to load into the queue is NOT a solution. Period. Fix this.

2) Why can’t we have Equalisation? Please.

3) Allow us to filter explicit tracks from everything. Seriously not everyone is hooked on profanity laced audio and some of us might want our kids to use the app but well...

4) I know Tidal buckled to the artists by providing the Tidal users a truly borked method to block tracks or artists they would prefer not to hear but Tidal needs to grow up and make this an adult level feature now. Give us the ability to specifically block tracks and artists in all places in the app.

Better streaming model - mildly annoying app

The sound quality and payment structure for Tidal mean that it’s well and truly the leader of the pack in terms of quality and working towards better payment for artists.

However the app is buggy on small details which is mildly, but consistently annoying. Things like the control buttons (play, skip, skip back etc.) are often unresponsive in the sense that you tap them, they make a visual signal they have been pressed, but nothing happens… press again, button responds and still nothing happens… third time lucky and it usually works. The app will semi-regularly just generally bug out and need to be closed completely and restarted (sometimes several times) before it works, and also semi-regularly (especially with longer playlists) it’ll get stuck in a loop playing only a handful of songs from a playlist getting to the end of its arbitrarily selected loop of songs, and then going back to the first song in its loop only.

It’s the little things that consistently aren’t responsive or stuff up that make the experience of using tidal kind of urgh … but I persist in the hope that the developers will pay more attention to these things and build it into the market leader it should be. Tidal crew if you’re listening: your app is holding you back, double down and get it running slick and smooth and you won’t look back

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your feedback about the TIDAL app. We’re happy to hear you enjoyed the audio quality and our support for artists, but we’re sorry to hear you experienced issues with the control buttons and the app's functionalities. Feel free to contact TIDAL Support at support.tidal.com for troubleshooting assistance.

Good Quality Music, Terrible User Experiene

The story of Tidal has always been quite consistent - high quality streaming, underthought, clunky app (I’ll leave the debate about MQA vs native flac for non-MQA device users alone here).

Compared to say Apple music’s app - which just works, and more importantly feels like it works, displays the most relevant results, shuffles related music consistently, and has a great in car interface - tidal is, and has always, felt like it’s stuck in the 00’s. It’s slow, it hangs, search results are inconsistent and what you’re looking for can be hard to find, sometimes music doesn’t play, UI doesn’t respect dark/light settings, often shuffle seems to be on crack, and don’t even get me started on the frustrating car play experience.

What you will get is high quality streams, so it does what it says on the tin, but that’s where the quality stops. Fortunately there are other apps which can consume Tidal streams so you don’t have to put up with their UI, but they’re not available everywhere. Ultimately this is an app review so covers the app - which just needs work.