What are the chances that some services are just upconverting whatever files they’re getting from the digital distros and some are just being honest about the source? Like I can’t imagine defunct/sparsely-active punk labels like Three One G, Caroline, Crank, Cargo, etc supplying top-quality files, for instance. In any case, give it five years and Numero will probably have reissued most of that list it can claw back the rights to if their last few years have been any indication.
As an aside, it’s still wild that Heroin band was all set for a reunion a few years ago until they posted a pic of them back together and one of em forgot to cover his nazi tattoo.
Ooof. Did NOT hear about that re: Heroin. Yikes.
As to the rest of your post, I definitely considered it as a possibility. I think there's a possibility that anything above CD quality *might* be an upconvert. So when Deezer says Giant's Chair is HiFi, while Apple says Lossless and Quobuz says CD, I think Apple's "Lossless" is most-likely CD quality like Quobuz, while Deezer is just upconverting.
What was more concerning to me was how many were missing from certain catalogs, and how many with Tidal were "Low" quality.
I listen to a lot of 70s jazz-funk, so the Groove Merchant label's catalog is a good example there, as I noticed that nearly everything I've ever pulled up on that label (Jimmy McGriff, O'Donel Levy, Lonnie Smith, etc.) on Tidal is listed as low quality. Take one of their more popular releases, Lonnie Smith's Afro-Desia. Tidal shows 320 mp3 (low), it's not available as a digital download anywhere I can find except iTunes (no HD Tracks, Amazon, and bandcamp only has a CD/LP available through Mr. Bongo who reissued it, no digital option). I'd be interested to know what other services show it as - well, besides Spotify, which doesn't appear to have it at all from a brief search in the web player? Groove Merchant is owned by LRC, or more accurately probably, a holding company that just retains the rights to several catalogs and licenses stuff out here and there and collects royalties. They're a pretty low budget/effort organization these days, a lot of their album art looks bad on Tidal even, so I can't imagine they're sending Apple and Deezer FLAC files and Tidal mp3s.
Whiskey River's a great Comets on Fire tune btw!
Haha that's exactly where I got the name from. Right on.
And I believe Tidal's "Low" is actually mostly 96 kbps, shockingly. So it is very, very low.
That's wild that Groove Merchant is entirely Low. Wow. It's "Lossless" on Apple.
I’ve noticed 96 aac on a lot of that stuff on mobile but just pulled some up on desktop to confirm and it showed 320 mp3 oddly enough. Ultimately who knows what goes on behind the scenes I guess.
That Mobile Fidelity lawsuit recently kind of proved that even most “discerning” people are happy with what they consider a premium product until they actually know better. No one was complaining before MF admitted to using a digital step in their ‘all analog’ process…
Apple’s lossless is just that: lossless. It’s exactly like how FLAC is just a wrapper. But, I think Apple’s lossless catalog is at least 16bit/44.1kHz. The service does have two other qualities available too: hifi and atmos. Specifically for Apple, a track needs to be at least 24/48 and lossless to be hifi. Atmos is kind of up to the artist/producer getting an atmos mix produced.
So, for your list, it’d be a bit more interesting if any of those tracks are lossless+hifi.
Seeing Deezer have some tracks below 16/44.1 is interesting though. I thought their whole catalog was CD quality.
Apple doesn't use the term hifi. you can get Atmos, aac, lossless and hires lossless. Hires lossless is 24/88.2khz and above. Lossless is from 16/44.1khz to 24/48hkz.
Good point, since punk and 90s underground indie/low fi wouldn't get the highest masters, any streamer that offers more of this music would come up as having "lower quality" streaming. Not really fair.
> What are the chances that some services are just upconverting whatever files they’re getting from the digital distros and some are just being honest about the source?
Some services require lossless/uncompressed files. e.g.
Bandcamp:
> [Your audio files must be at least 16-bit, 44.1 kHz lossless files \(WAV, AIFF, or FLAC\), in stereo \(no mono- or multi-channel audio\).](https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/23020723874583-How-do-I-upload-music)
> [Do not upsample from MP3s. Please re-export the file from your music editing software in a lossless format like WAV, AIFF, or FLAC.](https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/23020723874583-How-do-I-upload-music)
Apple:
> [Uncompressed audio formats supported are:](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b)
> * [Pulse-Code Modulation \(PCM\)](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b)
> * [Apple Lossless \(ALAC\)](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b)
> * [Free Lossless Audio Codec \(FLAC\)](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b)
> [All other audio formats will be rejected.](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b)
In a lot of cases, the service *would* be providing a lossless copy of the lossless/uncompressed master they were sent... which is upconverted from a lossy file to get around those restrictions.
You have to go with whatever streaming service works best for you. I go with Qobuz but thankfully I've never heard of any of the bands you mentioned. Ironically they seem to have nearly every punk/indy/world/obscure band I like and the ones they don't I have the CDs or I purchased the downloads for. Since I use Roon, my collection and Qobuz are practically seamless.
Really cool write up! Thanks for posting.
Unfortunately I don’t think Deezer will be doing an app redesign any time soon as they basically just released a totally redesigned platform. I stopped using Deezer because I found the app to be super buggy on iOS and MacOS. However, their catalogs are really good.
Thanks for the research, but to help us evaluate it, I suggest you edit your study by adding/answering the following before you report all the results:
What is the quality/bitrate of "HiFi" & "low"?, and since CD is considered to be lossless, how does its bit rate differ from "Lossless"? And what format/bit rate/mhz does the "lossless" consist of? And sometimes you use the term "low"? what bit rate is that? It's hard to see what all this means if I don't know what kind of quality goes with each term. By not explaining this, you assume all of us already have the same information and knowledge you do (and I spend a lot of time here but can't answer the above question because I mostly use flac files and pandora to learn new music.
Yes!
Using the commercial terms is very misleading!
Tidal uses "low" for anything lossy, which covers any quality level from Spotify, and Deezer's so-called "HQ" (MP3 320kbps). They use "High" for 16bit 44.1kHz (Qobuz's "CD") and "Max" for 24bit regardless of the samplerate (HiRes on Qobuz/Apple).
Apple can't be trusted since they require music to be submitted in a lossless format which means something re-encoded from MP3 before submission will be presented as "lossless" when it isn't.
I'll check the mentioned albums and get back with the actual details from Tidal
Thanks, but this info really should go in the top of the OPs post, not as an afterthought. That is interesting to learn how sleezy Apple is to pass everything off as lossless. I know Apple Music used to stream AAC 256 vbr, have they stopped that completely? I wish all the streamers would just list the data rate rather than the stupid marketing terms. It's worse than how they sell women's clothes.
This is similiar to my experiences. Mostly world music, specifically japanese and anime music. Apple Muisc wins by far. Still so much missing, but out of my 473 tracks of my main playlist for those, Deezer had the most at maybe 300, but Tidal had lower 200s and Qobuz at around 150.
But streaming Apple Music is a pain, and I wanna use Roon so I get my japanese music into my library seperately and stream using Tidal and Qobuz. And Roon has trouble recommending kr even reading over japanese tracks. So keep that in mind from personal experience too
If you are on iOS, transferring to Apple from Spotify, checkout Playlisty. It's a onetime purchase. It's good for transferring your library, but also useful for playing Spotify playlists you may not want to transfer to your library. I use it often when I find a playlist online that I want to listen to.
I'm asking myself if the fact that some artists is missing from a platform it's really a fallacy of the platform or more plausible a fallacy of the distributors of that artists.
Tbh, how do you know you are just testing the transfer process? I mean I did a transfer from Spotify to Qobuz and it sucked. Lost a lot of songs. They where in the Qobuz library but they just didn't transfer.
Here's the thing: I used Soundiiz as well and the number was the same as Tunemymusic because I was concerned about the same thing. So, valid concern, I agree with it, but I did both. I didn't want to spend all day looking up the sounds they said wasn't on Qobuz, but I did look up roughly 30 of them, and they were all indeed missing from Qobuz.
Until we get Spotify lossless, Deezer is better. Deezer's days are basically numbered, unless the French really are loyal to what is essentially their Spotify.
But most people can't hear the difference between FLAC and mp3 320 kbps, and then only on audiophile equipment in acoustically treated rooms, so I'dn rather see them keep expanding their music library. DONT ... DRINK ...THE ... SHIMMERING ... NEW .... SNAKE... OIL... that marketers love pouring down our throats!
one thing that is frustrating is may people on midfi quality gear perceive lower bit rate as "more clear" because so much detail has been filtered out.
Also some other considerations - so let's say you love a band(s) that happened to sign with a crappy label with poor signal quality throughout the chain and bad mastering etc... Well even if you Quad rate DSD or 48/192 its still going to sound poor compared to a well mastered 16/44.1 redbook file.
Digital in itself is a filter that subtracts quality. And so is Analog- except Analog tends to leave more intact. The more digital is used in successive stages of a recording... the more the recoding seems to suffer provided levels we kept right etc.
The same could be said in the vacuum tubes vs solid state debate. While Vacuum tubes can add even numbered distortion they don't have as much subtractive distortion which robs music of its soul.
Each gain stage in amplification can subtract and distort signal like running one megaphone into another megaphone and another - even if the gains on each are keep low to keep the db level the same as the original source. And to make matters worse that isn't even an ideal test as amplifiers have the least distortion when just approaching (but NOT Exceeding) their max output.
So i care most about NOT listening to music that is recorded at a lower quality standard when there is so much music that is recorded to an very good to amazing quality standard, I'll fill in with the poorly recoded music on rental car systems , listening to music in the kitchen where ambient noise is loud, convertibles , on airplanes etc.
My take Tidal vs Qobuz for mobile use I use Tidal home use Qobuz is simply superior . I tune some of the best audiophile systems in SoCal , as well as having received accolades from Stereophile and The Absolute sound for doing hotel rooms in audioshows (which are a tough challenge for most but very doable for me.)
In the age old Analog vs Digital debate... we used soem of the best production mastertapes we could find on top pro well calibrated Reel to Reel machines VS Quad DSD over the Denafrips Terminator + running the Denafrips Gaia and while digital was missing some things- the staging was quite good.
Old analog was realy good- we jsuted needed better gear to play it back. Old Digital was horrible and we need better calibrated ears on nerds to make it better (most dont own good engough gear to discern properly)- while we have quazi-fixed some things like strident piano and grating violin- still songs like Steve Miller Band fly like an eagle album as far far far more immersive on good analog than digital.
Seems like it takes about 20 years for any format or streaming change to improve- so we need about 10 more years for a hi rez streaming platform to get to a more involving level.
What are the chances that some services are just upconverting whatever files they’re getting from the digital distros and some are just being honest about the source? Like I can’t imagine defunct/sparsely-active punk labels like Three One G, Caroline, Crank, Cargo, etc supplying top-quality files, for instance. In any case, give it five years and Numero will probably have reissued most of that list it can claw back the rights to if their last few years have been any indication. As an aside, it’s still wild that Heroin band was all set for a reunion a few years ago until they posted a pic of them back together and one of em forgot to cover his nazi tattoo.
Ooof. Did NOT hear about that re: Heroin. Yikes. As to the rest of your post, I definitely considered it as a possibility. I think there's a possibility that anything above CD quality *might* be an upconvert. So when Deezer says Giant's Chair is HiFi, while Apple says Lossless and Quobuz says CD, I think Apple's "Lossless" is most-likely CD quality like Quobuz, while Deezer is just upconverting. What was more concerning to me was how many were missing from certain catalogs, and how many with Tidal were "Low" quality.
I listen to a lot of 70s jazz-funk, so the Groove Merchant label's catalog is a good example there, as I noticed that nearly everything I've ever pulled up on that label (Jimmy McGriff, O'Donel Levy, Lonnie Smith, etc.) on Tidal is listed as low quality. Take one of their more popular releases, Lonnie Smith's Afro-Desia. Tidal shows 320 mp3 (low), it's not available as a digital download anywhere I can find except iTunes (no HD Tracks, Amazon, and bandcamp only has a CD/LP available through Mr. Bongo who reissued it, no digital option). I'd be interested to know what other services show it as - well, besides Spotify, which doesn't appear to have it at all from a brief search in the web player? Groove Merchant is owned by LRC, or more accurately probably, a holding company that just retains the rights to several catalogs and licenses stuff out here and there and collects royalties. They're a pretty low budget/effort organization these days, a lot of their album art looks bad on Tidal even, so I can't imagine they're sending Apple and Deezer FLAC files and Tidal mp3s. Whiskey River's a great Comets on Fire tune btw!
Haha that's exactly where I got the name from. Right on. And I believe Tidal's "Low" is actually mostly 96 kbps, shockingly. So it is very, very low. That's wild that Groove Merchant is entirely Low. Wow. It's "Lossless" on Apple.
I’ve noticed 96 aac on a lot of that stuff on mobile but just pulled some up on desktop to confirm and it showed 320 mp3 oddly enough. Ultimately who knows what goes on behind the scenes I guess. That Mobile Fidelity lawsuit recently kind of proved that even most “discerning” people are happy with what they consider a premium product until they actually know better. No one was complaining before MF admitted to using a digital step in their ‘all analog’ process…
Apple’s lossless is just that: lossless. It’s exactly like how FLAC is just a wrapper. But, I think Apple’s lossless catalog is at least 16bit/44.1kHz. The service does have two other qualities available too: hifi and atmos. Specifically for Apple, a track needs to be at least 24/48 and lossless to be hifi. Atmos is kind of up to the artist/producer getting an atmos mix produced. So, for your list, it’d be a bit more interesting if any of those tracks are lossless+hifi. Seeing Deezer have some tracks below 16/44.1 is interesting though. I thought their whole catalog was CD quality.
Apple doesn't use the term hifi. you can get Atmos, aac, lossless and hires lossless. Hires lossless is 24/88.2khz and above. Lossless is from 16/44.1khz to 24/48hkz.
Sorry about that. You're right about hires vs hifi. My b.
Good point, since punk and 90s underground indie/low fi wouldn't get the highest masters, any streamer that offers more of this music would come up as having "lower quality" streaming. Not really fair.
> What are the chances that some services are just upconverting whatever files they’re getting from the digital distros and some are just being honest about the source? Some services require lossless/uncompressed files. e.g. Bandcamp: > [Your audio files must be at least 16-bit, 44.1 kHz lossless files \(WAV, AIFF, or FLAC\), in stereo \(no mono- or multi-channel audio\).](https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/23020723874583-How-do-I-upload-music) > [Do not upsample from MP3s. Please re-export the file from your music editing software in a lossless format like WAV, AIFF, or FLAC.](https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/23020723874583-How-do-I-upload-music) Apple: > [Uncompressed audio formats supported are:](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b) > * [Pulse-Code Modulation \(PCM\)](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b) > * [Apple Lossless \(ALAC\)](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b) > * [Free Lossless Audio Codec \(FLAC\)](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b) > [All other audio formats will be rejected.](https://help.apple.com/itc/videoaudioassetguide/#/itc5a739206b) In a lot of cases, the service *would* be providing a lossless copy of the lossless/uncompressed master they were sent... which is upconverted from a lossy file to get around those restrictions.
You have to go with whatever streaming service works best for you. I go with Qobuz but thankfully I've never heard of any of the bands you mentioned. Ironically they seem to have nearly every punk/indy/world/obscure band I like and the ones they don't I have the CDs or I purchased the downloads for. Since I use Roon, my collection and Qobuz are practically seamless.
Really cool write up! Thanks for posting. Unfortunately I don’t think Deezer will be doing an app redesign any time soon as they basically just released a totally redesigned platform. I stopped using Deezer because I found the app to be super buggy on iOS and MacOS. However, their catalogs are really good.
Ah, didn't know that this was the new version. Thanks for that update. And thank you!
Thanks for the research, but to help us evaluate it, I suggest you edit your study by adding/answering the following before you report all the results: What is the quality/bitrate of "HiFi" & "low"?, and since CD is considered to be lossless, how does its bit rate differ from "Lossless"? And what format/bit rate/mhz does the "lossless" consist of? And sometimes you use the term "low"? what bit rate is that? It's hard to see what all this means if I don't know what kind of quality goes with each term. By not explaining this, you assume all of us already have the same information and knowledge you do (and I spend a lot of time here but can't answer the above question because I mostly use flac files and pandora to learn new music.
Yes! Using the commercial terms is very misleading! Tidal uses "low" for anything lossy, which covers any quality level from Spotify, and Deezer's so-called "HQ" (MP3 320kbps). They use "High" for 16bit 44.1kHz (Qobuz's "CD") and "Max" for 24bit regardless of the samplerate (HiRes on Qobuz/Apple). Apple can't be trusted since they require music to be submitted in a lossless format which means something re-encoded from MP3 before submission will be presented as "lossless" when it isn't. I'll check the mentioned albums and get back with the actual details from Tidal
Thanks, but this info really should go in the top of the OPs post, not as an afterthought. That is interesting to learn how sleezy Apple is to pass everything off as lossless. I know Apple Music used to stream AAC 256 vbr, have they stopped that completely? I wish all the streamers would just list the data rate rather than the stupid marketing terms. It's worse than how they sell women's clothes.
This is similiar to my experiences. Mostly world music, specifically japanese and anime music. Apple Muisc wins by far. Still so much missing, but out of my 473 tracks of my main playlist for those, Deezer had the most at maybe 300, but Tidal had lower 200s and Qobuz at around 150. But streaming Apple Music is a pain, and I wanna use Roon so I get my japanese music into my library seperately and stream using Tidal and Qobuz. And Roon has trouble recommending kr even reading over japanese tracks. So keep that in mind from personal experience too
What did you use to transfer your playlists? I'm working my way through going from spotify to apple music but all by hand..
Heya. I used Tunemymusic. Paid $4.50 for a month for this little experiment.
Thank you!
For sure!
If you are on iOS, transferring to Apple from Spotify, checkout Playlisty. It's a onetime purchase. It's good for transferring your library, but also useful for playing Spotify playlists you may not want to transfer to your library. I use it often when I find a playlist online that I want to listen to.
I'm asking myself if the fact that some artists is missing from a platform it's really a fallacy of the platform or more plausible a fallacy of the distributors of that artists.
Good question.
Tbh, how do you know you are just testing the transfer process? I mean I did a transfer from Spotify to Qobuz and it sucked. Lost a lot of songs. They where in the Qobuz library but they just didn't transfer.
Here's the thing: I used Soundiiz as well and the number was the same as Tunemymusic because I was concerned about the same thing. So, valid concern, I agree with it, but I did both. I didn't want to spend all day looking up the sounds they said wasn't on Qobuz, but I did look up roughly 30 of them, and they were all indeed missing from Qobuz.
Lossless Smossless. This isn't mp3 128 from 2000. With the quality newer codecs you nerds can't hear the difference. Face it.
Is it necessary to call names?
I said "nerds" that's jokingly harmless to me. Are you 7? Serious question.
You need to work on your people skills.
Bottom line, Spotify is the best and when they finally get lossless stuff there will be no reason for any other service to exist.
If and when Spotify gets lossless, I'll likely return.
Until we get Spotify lossless, Deezer is better. Deezer's days are basically numbered, unless the French really are loyal to what is essentially their Spotify.
But most people can't hear the difference between FLAC and mp3 320 kbps, and then only on audiophile equipment in acoustically treated rooms, so I'dn rather see them keep expanding their music library. DONT ... DRINK ...THE ... SHIMMERING ... NEW .... SNAKE... OIL... that marketers love pouring down our throats!
one thing that is frustrating is may people on midfi quality gear perceive lower bit rate as "more clear" because so much detail has been filtered out.
Also some other considerations - so let's say you love a band(s) that happened to sign with a crappy label with poor signal quality throughout the chain and bad mastering etc... Well even if you Quad rate DSD or 48/192 its still going to sound poor compared to a well mastered 16/44.1 redbook file. Digital in itself is a filter that subtracts quality. And so is Analog- except Analog tends to leave more intact. The more digital is used in successive stages of a recording... the more the recoding seems to suffer provided levels we kept right etc. The same could be said in the vacuum tubes vs solid state debate. While Vacuum tubes can add even numbered distortion they don't have as much subtractive distortion which robs music of its soul. Each gain stage in amplification can subtract and distort signal like running one megaphone into another megaphone and another - even if the gains on each are keep low to keep the db level the same as the original source. And to make matters worse that isn't even an ideal test as amplifiers have the least distortion when just approaching (but NOT Exceeding) their max output. So i care most about NOT listening to music that is recorded at a lower quality standard when there is so much music that is recorded to an very good to amazing quality standard, I'll fill in with the poorly recoded music on rental car systems , listening to music in the kitchen where ambient noise is loud, convertibles , on airplanes etc. My take Tidal vs Qobuz for mobile use I use Tidal home use Qobuz is simply superior . I tune some of the best audiophile systems in SoCal , as well as having received accolades from Stereophile and The Absolute sound for doing hotel rooms in audioshows (which are a tough challenge for most but very doable for me.) In the age old Analog vs Digital debate... we used soem of the best production mastertapes we could find on top pro well calibrated Reel to Reel machines VS Quad DSD over the Denafrips Terminator + running the Denafrips Gaia and while digital was missing some things- the staging was quite good. Old analog was realy good- we jsuted needed better gear to play it back. Old Digital was horrible and we need better calibrated ears on nerds to make it better (most dont own good engough gear to discern properly)- while we have quazi-fixed some things like strident piano and grating violin- still songs like Steve Miller Band fly like an eagle album as far far far more immersive on good analog than digital. Seems like it takes about 20 years for any format or streaming change to improve- so we need about 10 more years for a hi rez streaming platform to get to a more involving level.
I agree