RFI: Streaming Music

[Chance]

After using Spotify for the better part of a decade, I'm ready to give up on it: the sound quality, even at the highest available level, just isn't great. I'm giving Tidal a try, and there's a major difference in quality, but it's also not cheap and it's recommendation algorithms don't seem as robust as Spotify's.

There's a lot of competition in the streaming market these days, so I'm curious to hear what folks here use. Does any service really stand out, or are they all six-to-one / half-a-dozen to the other?

[Guerrero]

I've been thinking of setting up my own streaming music/TV/movie server with Plex

https://support.plex.tv/articles/200...y-step-guides/

I admittedly don't have a massive library, but it's free, and it's MINE, ALL MINE!

[vcdgrips]

I am a simpleton on this issue. I already have Amazon Prime so the music streaming was a natural there for me.

I do that and some curated mixes on Youtube.

As a child of the 80s (Walkmans + Dance Clubs 2-3x night a week for years in which I left with my ears ringing + shooting = It sounds good enough to me thru my equipment (Sony Receiver w extension cord for speaker wire + some Infinity bookshelf speakers and a Velodyne powered sub-thank you Crutchfield)

[LOKNLOD]

I still use Pandora lot... but i'm to the point i usually start a channel and eventually it's playing the same stuff.

If you're in the apple ecosystem, I like Apple music a lot.

[Darth_Uno]

I have Apple Music, and it's suggested quite a few bands I now like that I'd have never known about otherwise. I don't know that it's any better, worse or different than Spotify though. Never used it.

You're asking the wrong guy about audio quality.

[TOTS]

I have not tried it, but, other than Tidal, Qobuz is the only other hi res music streaming service I’m aware of. I haven’t looked into it for a while, but it had some discussion on the Forums when I was super into high fidelity audio.

[rob_s]

We have Spotify and I’ve never had a complaint about the audio quality, but then we’re listening on stock car speakers and outdoor speakers in the tiki hut.

That said, given that we are on iPhones and Apple TV’s at home, I’ve often considered making the switch over to Apple Music so interested to hear others’ experience there.

[jh9]

Apple Music is ok. The carplay support is shit. I don't use siri. Well, I did once. Since I don't want the ever-listening ear of sauron data mining my occasionally profane critique of other drivers I have to double tap the right side button to active siri. "Play Metallica". A playlist of one song. Good job, siri. Well done. Thank you for that.

The concept of "stations" is front and center in the head unit with carplay. "Stations" is just trying to re-invent FM radio. Which can only be done badly, because FM radio is a plague. No thank you, Apple. I don't want to listen to ten stations full of rando-pop any more than I wanted that free fucking U2 album. Suck it, Bono. Also, the stations at the top of the stack are all entire genres that I don't now and never will listen to. With no option to make them just... you know... go away. So they're always there, standing between me and listening to something that isn't shit.

And since the head unit is a touch screen trying to scroll past the sea of shit is fraught with peril. Ooops, lingered too long on that icon and now it's playing... what was... Lil Bean? Lil Bean? You know what, fuck you siri. "Oh, in addition to playing that shit you didn't want to hear in the first place I better add that to your recommendations for the next thousand years." Great. Awesome. Yes please do that.

Apple seems to have discontinued the "recently played" playlist. That used to be the only useful bit of the service to work with carplay. It still shows up in the head unit so I can easily scroll to an album that isn't shit. But it's no longer updated, so it's like playlist that's frozen in time from mid 2021. Which I guess isn't the worst thing ever. It's basically all I use with carplay.

Apple music is a service that you pay $11/mo for them to take music that doesn't suck and essentially hold it hostage. It's like they saw what Netflix was doing to people with their search and UI and thought... "you know what, I can do even worse". And then they did. Bravo.

Other than that, it's ok.

[Default.mp3]

Sorry, no suggestions on the streaming part, my ass is still clinging on to carrying my entire music collection everywhere. The closest I got to streaming was using Google Music, but that was still uploading my own songs to my library, rather than a service, and then Google killed it and went to YouTube Music, which sucks ass.

[mmc45414]

the sound quality, even at the highest available level, just isn't great.

I signed up for Amazon Music because I expected it to sound better than listening to Pandora on the Roku, and it really didn't. Then I searched around for why, and ended up adding a Digital Analog Converter ("DAC") and it made a difference. I bought their Echo product, expecting it to be easy and it really isn't, but the sound quality is better. So if you are not using any sort of DAC on a home stereo system I would suggest considering it.

But the Echo is clunky, unless you are using it with Alexia, and that is not what I want. If anyone else is more hip to this than I am, what I want is the ability to surf on my phone or computer and be able to browse for tunes that I can dump into a playlist queue that plays through the system that can either be on the WiFi or direct wired to the ethernet, while not spilling my beer.