Plex does Tidal

[ChupaChups]

For those who runs Plex, you can now incorporate Tidal. Info here,

 

https://www.plex.tv/tidal/

 

https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/29/18117564/tidal-plex-subscriptions-costs-less-together

 

 

 

 

[Peter Sherriff]

A bit of a shame that the MQA content isn't available through the integration... anyone know whether there's any issues with a Tidal Family account as it's not available through the Plex page for signing up to TIDAL.

 

I've been looking for a good reason to justify the cost of a switch to TIDAL from Spotify and this is a definite nudge in that direction for me!

[davewantsmoore]

36 minutes ago, PSherriff said:

I've been looking for a good reason to justify the cost of a switch to TIDAL from Spotify and this is a definite nudge in that direction for me!

Same.

 

I am a Plex Lifetime, and Spotify Family subscriber....   I'm likely adopting Roon also, and this is all just screaming "switch to tidal".    I'll have to looky if they have my music.

 

 

Spotify just don't seem to want to place nicely with others.  >_<

 

[ChupaChups]

22 minutes ago, davewantsmoore said:

Same.

 

I am a Plex Lifetime, and Spotify Family subscriber....   I'm likely adopting Roon also, and this is all just screaming "switch to tidal".    I'll have to looky if they have my music.

 

 

Spotify just don't seem to want to place nicely with others.  >_<

 

Likewise, I am also a Plex Lifetime member. But It is only for Movies mainly. My mac mini is performing Spotify duties, might give Tidal a go.  Jriver running on the mini and the backend is my Qnap NAS. Tried Roon, wasn't to my liking..haha. Think this is my most flexible setup yet. The only downside is constant patches and upgrades associated with OSes. 

[Peter Sherriff]

43 minutes ago, Sirmorebeer said:

I am a Plex Lifetime, and Spotify Family subscriber....

Likewise...  To date they've had the most WAF across a wide range of devices and both even play nicely with Android Auto in her car!

44 minutes ago, Sirmorebeer said:

I'm likely adopting Roon also, and this is all just screaming "switch to tidal".

I keep looking at Roon...  But...  it's not cheap for a music server and, and this might be my bigger immediate hurdle...

1 hour ago, davewantsmoore said:

Spotify just don't seem to want to place nicely with others.  >_<

...  by luck or judgement the wireless speakers (LG MusicFlow we got very cheap!) dotted around the house are all Spotify Connect endpoints as is the Marantz AV Amp and the couple of Chromecast Audios and Fire TV sticks also play nice with Spotify.

 

None of these are natively Roon endpoints so I'd be relying on them all playing nice as Chromecast devices.

 

57 minutes ago, Sirmorebeer said:

Likewise, I am also a Plex Lifetime member. But It is only for Movies mainly. My mac mini is performing Spotify duties, might give Tidal a go.

We find it most useful for Movies & TV Shows, especially to supplement/replace in-flight entertainment by syncing content to our tablets/phones.  The music side of things has got much better of the years but it's still not a great front end for browsing and rediscovering forgotten gems.

 

 

Tidal looks like it should be able to fill the role of Spotify across the majority of the devices we have, albeit via Chromecast for a lot of them, and would possibly make music in Plex a better experience overall.

 

I'll put it on the back-burner as something to look at after a house move is completed, but if either of you give Tidal a try inside Plex in the meantime I'd be interested to hear your experience with it. 

 

[davewantsmoore]

32 minutes ago, PSherriff said:

...  by luck or judgement the wireless speakers (LG MusicFlow we got very cheap!) dotted around the house are all Spotify Connect endpoints as is the Marantz AV Amp and the couple of Chromecast Audios and Fire TV sticks also play nice with Spotify.

I'm not looking for a "spotify endpoint" .....   I want Spotify to allow their content to appear inside another platform.   Like Tidal does with Roon, and now Plex.

[kukynas]

2 weeks of using Tidal and comparing to Spotify:

- music discovery - shait

- search engine - shait

- content - shait

- playlists - shait

- sound quality - excellent 

 

no way I'm giving up on Spotify and even if I'm Plex lifetime member Tidal integration keeps me cold

I hope Spotify will introduce premium quality sound ASAP and hopefully it starts to integrate into traditional streamer apps same way like Tidal and Qobuz 

 

[Peter Sherriff]

I'm not looking for a "spotify endpoint" .....   I want Spotify to allow their content to appear inside another platform.   Like Tidal does with Roon, and now Plex.

I'm completely with you on that, I think it's something Spotify needs to do to make it a better all-round solution but I see little to no evidence of Spotify paying attention to feature requests on their own forums.

In the absence of that kind of integration though I just need things that work well consistently and are simple.

[Hi-Fi Whipped]

Spotify want 100% control of the user experience and I can hardly blame them. Spotify connect was created for this very reason and I think has been a huge success for them integrating into other manufacturers hardware. I think the Spotify app is the best streaming experience I’ve seen so thier approach has been successful and they don’t my need to integrate thier software into others.

 

Unless Spotify go down the minority smaller road of high res streaming I can’t see it changing either.

[Peter Sherriff]

I bit the bullet yesterday and signed up for a trial of Tidal, got it installed on a couple of things and hooked it into Plex.

 

First impressions:

1) Music Content on Tidal - So far it seems be have most of what we'd generally listen to on Spotify, it was missing the Irreverence album by Faithless which sadly means one of my 'goto tracks' for testing isn't available but otherwise it was ok

 

2) User Interface / Music Discovery on Tidal - Not nice, at least on Android.  It's UI doesn't seem to follow any guidelines for anything, it's not at all intuitive and things don't always seem to behave as we're used to from other apps.  I guess it'll take time for it to 'learn' what we're interested in and hopefully improve its suggestions to us but finding new music doesn't seem as easy as Spotify on first use.

 

3) Integration with Plex - This has been well done, searching is seamless and regardless of whether we have existing content from the artist or not the Tidal entries appear quickly and seamlessly.  This could be the answer to getting usage accepted across the household as I think the Tidal UI might be too off-putting.

 

4) Sound Quality - I signed up for the trial of Tidal HiFI and initial impressions are good, we're not having any dropouts, stuttering etc. that I've seen other people report but then we have a very solid 50/20Mbps connection so we're in the fortunate category here.

 

The plan is to have everyone using it instead of Spotify for the next 4 weeks and then make a call whether we make the switch from Spotify or stick with what we know.  I'll circle back and let everyone know where we landed.

[Peter Sherriff]

A quick update on this.

 

The trial period with Tidal is over and at this stage we've decided to stick with Spotify.  The integration with Plex worked well and was great at home, sadly it didn't extend out to being visible through Plex on Android Auto which meant having to use Tidal natively in the car.  Tidal via Android Auto isn't good or if it is then it's well disguised - simple things like continuing a playlist from where you left off don't seem to be possible so it gets repetitive quickly if you're running around for the day.  The voice control was really hit and miss - I don't know if that's more Google Assistant than Tidal but ultimately it doesn't matter, using Tidal via Android Auto in the car is too frustrating.

 

Beyond that the Android UI seemed to cause confusion a lot of the time, it has a unique way of doing things compared to other apps which meant me spending more time answering questions on how to do things.

 

As a streaming solution for casual listening / background music / car music the sound quality is a secondary concern, ultimately this means Tidal currently fails 'acceptance testing' in my household as a daily driver.  I'll watch out for improvements on usability but for now the comparative ease of use of Spotify has won the day.

[Jared Devers]

I'm a lifetime member of Roon and Plex and finally got around to trying out Plex for music & TIDAL the last few days.  The biggest benefit of Plex over Roon is that you can make your collection available remotely so I can listen to the music stored on my media server from my car, at work etc.   I was originally driven by the idea of getting rid of TIDAL in favour of just buying FLAC digital music for my favourite albums each month instead of the $23.99 per month subscription.  I'm still continuing with Spotify as my wife likes it and I still need it too for the wide selection.  So I'm spending $40 a month on music subscriptions plus I have a Vinyl habit (2-3 per month). 

 

At the moment with using Roon -  I need TIDAL still if I want lossless music in my car/while at work.  So Im having to use two different mobile apps to access my music, this annoys me no end and makes me die for Spotify to release lossless streaming.  I'd get rid of all this complexity in a heart beat. 

 

Anyway back to it. So after a few days fiddling with Plex, the interface is currently not as enjoyable to use at Roon.   Sure it has the album art, the information about the artist and that tactileish interface but no where near refined as Roon.  There isn't any capability to group speakers, No DSP, no MQA etc, also TIDAL users wouldnt be able to use an iPad/Mobile app to remote play Tidal music via the Plex Apps to their media server (where its connected to my Hifi) - thats not supported yet anyway. 

 

Looks like I'll have to live with this setup for a little while longer.   

 

Just curious has anyone done any A/B audio quality comparisons between Plex and Roon?

 

 

 

[Grumpy]

I have PLEX on my new TV, but l have no idea how to use it or how to stream stuff    -    umm! what am l misunderstanding or needing to 'stream' ?'

 

[davewantsmoore]

40 minutes ago, Grumpy said:

I have PLEX on my new TV, but l have no idea how to use it or how to stream stuff    -    umm! what am l misunderstanding or needing to 'stream' ?'

 

A plex server

[kukynas]

2 hours ago, davewantsmoore said:

A plex server

Running on separate machine such as silent mini PC or NAS, I would recommend 4 core proc version for seamless operation as plex is resource hungry

[powerav]

On 03/03/2019 at 5:26 PM, mrbrown66 said:

The biggest benefit of Plex over Roon is that you can make your collection available remotely so I can listen to the music stored on my media server from my car, at work etc. 

 

 

 

Yes this is awesome, I have just realised I can access my full library on nas on my iPhone from anywhere, I don’t have a Plex pass so completely free....incredible.

[captain starlight]

Plex does fall down when you have large music collections though - ie over 75,000 songs.  It doesn’t technically fall down, but the interface when searching and finding material in large collections is just terrible.

 

plus, I think plex still has the dreaded gap playback in flac files. Don’t know if this has been fixed yet.

 

dont get me wrong, I still use plex but only for movies and tv shows. It is great for those media types - but to me, it is just no good for music.

 

i use Jriver for music - and plex for movies and tv shows.  All the media sits on a nas and I can access any form of media over the network.  Suits me fine. Plus jriver has some very nifty rules that I can put in place that makes it far more flexible when listening to music. The tag system, zoning and in my mind, the playback quality in jriver is also much better.

 

but be careful, if you are looking at plex for music, then think carefully if you have a large collection and also check out if you can get around the gaps between tracks in flac files.

Edited March 8, 2019 by captain starlight
Fixed typo

[powerav]

18 hours ago, captain starlight said:

 

plus, I think plex still has the dreaded gap playback in flac files. Don’t know if this has been fixed yet

Yes it is not gapless which is pretty poor and is why I can’t use it in my main system.

[Jared Devers]

Gapless playback works fine for me on the iOS/MacOSX Plex clients. 

[Cardiiiii]

Does anyone have any issues playing Tidal via the Plex app through Google Cast? I'm using the native Tidal app anyway, and Plex seems to stream my downloaded content just fine, but can't seem to play Tidal via Plex.