Shane23
Member
Hmm good to know, I assumed it would a rolling limit where once you hit song# 531 song #1 gets purged but guess not..
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Holy crap Tidal makes the audio system come ALIVE.
- Thread starter ScoobyDoo82
- Start date
Thanks for the update. Maybe try unplugging the USB stick and see if the stored hifi songs go away?
Also, once we hit the limit how to we make room for new songs? I was assuming it was FIFO.
Finally activated the 3 mo trial for Tidal Plus a couple days ago. Sound definitely is richer /fuller. But I'm not sure if that trumps the ability to shuffle playlists. For now, I'll just have to add more music to my playlist I guess. Cannot wait for this feature!
How do you know? You check your phone's hotspot usage and note it, download a song of known length, longer is better so you get a larger sample, and check the increase of hotspot usage. Take the difference in usage and divide by length in seconds to get an approximate kbps spec. It doesn't matter how long it takes to download it, just how long it would play. Uncompressed music will always take the entire 1411kbps for CD quality but there can still be lossless compression. I don't know how or if that is applied. Or you can just watch usage on your router, at least mine has a phone app that shows it, mostly they do these days.So how do you know Tesla and the app are actually streaming this format and kbps? Is there a real-time debug mode that shows it or your 12yr old ears that can hear 20khz able to decipher?!?!
Nobody here can determine and know the difference between 320 kbps mp3 and 1192 kbps flac at our age. Not even on a reference system. You might be able to discern some difference over regular crappy Spotify that is easy even at 50+yrs old to determine. The wind noise will bleed over into the sound ranges people claim Tidal is streaming while you whip down the road and let’s not talk about how 20-50hz is muffled out entirely by the car as you drove. Stop the car and magically you can now discern and hear the actual bass of the music. Otherwise it too is drowned outside.
The entire concept of high quality in any car is a joke compared to a proper loudspeaker and reference setup in a home or studio.
We can debate all day about sound and audio. The basics are for sound quality:
1) Recording studio live.
2) Live performance at a quality theatre or performing arts center.
3) High end listening/auditioning room with loudspeakers and quality amp using high quality sources.
………
10) your crappy car and streaming and everything else way down the list.
320kbps may sound OK but what I always find is that putting on higher resolution just clarifies everything. And between even CD quality and true hi-res at 24/96 I hear a difference. Is it a big difference? No, it is subtle but it is there. Where something is somewhat indistinct on a CD it may have more oomph at higher res.
The Nyquist theory says that we only need 2x the highest frequency in a perfect world, and that's what CD provided, but CD was never perfect. Hi-res made sure it didn't matter that it wasn't perfect as the imperfections were way out of audible range. Besides, we don't use CD so much anymore, many of us have ripped them or use streaming.
The best audio component I ever bought, the one that blows everything else away, was my Yamaha. My Yamaha grand piano that is. Unfortunately for my family they have to listen to me play it. That's when they run to put the headphones on and listen to their MP3s.
surfrasch
Member
the other piece of info I forgot to add.....I had a problem where Tidal stopped loading music a few days back. It was sort of frozen, downloaded half a play list, couldn't do the rest, wasn't full storage, couldn't delete it. I emailed Tidal support and they were amazingly responsive, like 3-4 emails in the first two hours from them, and a follow up a day later.
In the end I solved the problem myself, I signed out of my account in the car, then signed back in, and everything worked.....something to remember, was better than rebooting (which I also tried).
In the end I solved the problem myself, I signed out of my account in the car, then signed back in, and everything worked.....something to remember, was better than rebooting (which I also tried).
Yes, lossless compression (FLAC) is applied. The compressed bitrate will vary depending on the needs of the song, about 800-1200 kbps is likely.
planetary
EndlessCheese spreader
Tested out Tidal today. Some notes:
- Sign-in was simple, as reported by others.
- Sound quality is not just noticeably better than Spotify, but impressively so.
- I pre-downloaded a playlist before heading out, and listened to those tracks mainly.
- I did try to play some un-downloaded music. Took a few seconds to queue the first song I selected, then no delays or problems. Quality was on-par with the downloaded stuff -- "high" quality tracks across the board.
- One problem. At one point while playing downloaded songs, I accidentally tapped the horn (stupid yoke horn button + new Model S driver) and the Tidal mini-player stopped playing and went into an endless "waiting" loop. Could not even change songs.
- Commentary: I suspect this was triggered because of a storage bandwidth issue: Tidal was playing from disk, and that's where the horn trigger caused a bunch of recent video to be written (because I have that configured, as well). The interruption in its disk access may have thrown the app into an unanticipated edge case. To recover, I needed to flip to Spotify, then back to Tidal. Worked again.
Ketorolac
MSLR, Blue/White/21s/FSD
I got to around 6-700 songs, then hit capacity. I read somewhere that it stores in the MCU -- doesn't store on your USB/SSD, because I have a 1 TB drive and would have plenty of room. It wouldn't be hard to let the app store to external drives, in whatever encrypted/protected form you want. Piraters have already pirated it anyway.
Have used tidal for home audio for years. Was out of town since update, so last night first opportunity to use in my 3. As expected, plus some! This is just great! I had been using usb flac in my teslas for 9 years, and it is so great to have that fidelity plus unlimited catalog!!! Yay.
I agree it's not likely using USB as I just unplugged mine and all the previously played hifi songs still say hifi next to them and seem to play fine.
If I keep playing songs while tethered to my phone does it store those as well? I keep seeing that once storage fills up you have issues until you manually clear it. Since I'm retired I don't use my car all that much so I haven't hit that yet but eventually I will.
kishkaru
Member
Tidal is hot garbage. 100% not recommended.
I've not used Tidal music streaming before, but since it's now a native streaming app on Tesla, I decided to give them a try. I paid the $2 for 3 months of service trial of the "HiFi Plus" plan which gives me "HiFi" streaming (lossless CD-quality [16-bit, 44.1 kHz], for Tesla) and "Master" (lossless studio-quality [24bit, 96 kHz], for home theater/desktop app).
Streaming in music in the "HiFi" setting in my car, while connected to wifi, I immediately noticed something didn't sound right. The low end bass was over saturated and there is added high frequency noise.
The higher saturation of bass is especially noticeable and jarring for me across all tracks. There are certain songs I've been listening to for years or decades that sounded so wrong. To compare, I went back and forth between playing the same song on a USB thumb drive (as 320kbps MP3) and Tidal "HiFi" and it sounds so much better off the USB drive. In fact, I had to put the subwoofer equalizer to -5.5dB in the Tesla to get a more accurate bass response, or even turn off the subwoofer completely because it was that bad. In contrast, playing the MP3 with the subwoofer at 0dB felt the most accurate. I even tried Tidal on my home theatre via HDMI to a 7.1 A/V receiver and the bass saturation is evident even over there, so it's not a Tesla-specific thing. So I thought, whatever filter Tidal is putting all the lossless tracks through is ruining the music.
I started doing some research on the MQA audio codec that Tidal uses, which they claim is "better than lossless". Turns out that not only is it not lossless, but its even worse than FLAC!
The tl;dr version:
When listening in either "HiFi" or "Master" setting in Tidal, you stream a MQA-encoded file. This MQA file is not lossless and is objectively worse than plain FLAC. The "Master" setting claims to stream in studio quality (24-bit/96 kHz), but most of the time it's just 16-bit/44.1kHz audio upstreamed. And since it goes through the MQA encoder, it comes out even worse than the original 16-bit/44.1kHz source! If Tidal just lets us stream in original CD-quality in FLAC without any re-encoding or touchup, then it may be worth it. But until that (unlikely) day...
It's all marketing snake oil: "it's better than lossless!"
(p.s. For those interested, there's a part 2 to the video above which goes over MQA/Tidal's response. Their response is even more absurd)
I've not used Tidal music streaming before, but since it's now a native streaming app on Tesla, I decided to give them a try. I paid the $2 for 3 months of service trial of the "HiFi Plus" plan which gives me "HiFi" streaming (lossless CD-quality [16-bit, 44.1 kHz], for Tesla) and "Master" (lossless studio-quality [24bit, 96 kHz], for home theater/desktop app).
Streaming in music in the "HiFi" setting in my car, while connected to wifi, I immediately noticed something didn't sound right. The low end bass was over saturated and there is added high frequency noise.
The higher saturation of bass is especially noticeable and jarring for me across all tracks. There are certain songs I've been listening to for years or decades that sounded so wrong. To compare, I went back and forth between playing the same song on a USB thumb drive (as 320kbps MP3) and Tidal "HiFi" and it sounds so much better off the USB drive. In fact, I had to put the subwoofer equalizer to -5.5dB in the Tesla to get a more accurate bass response, or even turn off the subwoofer completely because it was that bad. In contrast, playing the MP3 with the subwoofer at 0dB felt the most accurate. I even tried Tidal on my home theatre via HDMI to a 7.1 A/V receiver and the bass saturation is evident even over there, so it's not a Tesla-specific thing. So I thought, whatever filter Tidal is putting all the lossless tracks through is ruining the music.
I started doing some research on the MQA audio codec that Tidal uses, which they claim is "better than lossless". Turns out that not only is it not lossless, but its even worse than FLAC!
The tl;dr version:
When listening in either "HiFi" or "Master" setting in Tidal, you stream a MQA-encoded file. This MQA file is not lossless and is objectively worse than plain FLAC. The "Master" setting claims to stream in studio quality (24-bit/96 kHz), but most of the time it's just 16-bit/44.1kHz audio upstreamed. And since it goes through the MQA encoder, it comes out even worse than the original 16-bit/44.1kHz source! If Tidal just lets us stream in original CD-quality in FLAC without any re-encoding or touchup, then it may be worth it. But until that (unlikely) day...
It's all marketing snake oil: "it's better than lossless!"
(p.s. For those interested, there's a part 2 to the video above which goes over MQA/Tidal's response. Their response is even more absurd)
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bo3bdar
Member
I just tried this out. Let my Tesla Premium Connectvity expire, but still have Tidal access. You can't play anything. Every song requires some sort of authorization. Even stuff that is downloaded and HiFi on the display. I could play the one HiFi song from connecting via WiFi, but as soon as it tried to go on it errors out. So no playing of downloaded songs unless you have Premium Connectivity.
For me, I think that's a deal breaker. The HiFi/download is already bizarre and limited.
Same results I got. Somewhere around 500 songs, and I estimate that is roughly 10G of storage used. The storage is on the MCU flash, not on internal USB.
Once you max it out, it's broken, you can't play more songs, until you delete old ones. And the UI is clunky, you can only delete a playlist or album as long it's complete. To clear out the all the downloads and start over- the trick is to log out of Tidal.
planetary
EndlessCheese spreader
After living with Tidal since it rolled out, I'm thinking of dropping it.
I'm not an audio engineer, but I do think the quality of the music sounds markedly "better" than Spotify, to my untrained ears.
However, there are problems:
I'm not in the Apple Music ecosystem, but if they released an Apple Music player which addresses some of these problems (e.g. by using USB for storage, so you could get thousands of songs in high quality), I might take the plunge. Until then: Spotify seems best overall, for me.
I'm not an audio engineer, but I do think the quality of the music sounds markedly "better" than Spotify, to my untrained ears.
However, there are problems:
- If you don't download songs, there's a ton of buffering.
- You can only download relatively few songs. Several hundred.
- There's no shuffle play. Kill me.
- Tidal as a service has invested a whole lot less in playlists and playlist sharing.
- Tidal search is pretty bad -- way worse than Spotify. (I tried to port over some of my Spotify playlists. What a pain.)
I'm not in the Apple Music ecosystem, but if they released an Apple Music player which addresses some of these problems (e.g. by using USB for storage, so you could get thousands of songs in high quality), I might take the plunge. Until then: Spotify seems best overall, for me.
Let me try:
I've actually encountered the opposite with buffering. I'm always surprised that the music plays instantly.
Several Hundred can be stored at once, but so what? You are not limited to those. You can play anything at will.
I guess I've never been one to use shuffle, especially on albums. On playlists maybe. But aren't playlists already shuffled by the very fact that they are user controlled?
Maybe Spotify has more and better playlists. That I agree.
I haven't had any problem with Tidal search. Can you be more specific? Porting playlists is purposely a PITA. One service doesn't want another to have your playlist. Try porting a playlist to any service. It isn't specific to Tidal.
I'm not claiming that the Tidal implementation is perfect, far from it. But it is good enough that it is worth if for the better quality.
And Apple Music? Why would you want to be locked into that? I'm already locked into Apple for computing.
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planetary
EndlessCheese spreader
"Play anything at will" -- No, I can't play anything at will without buffering 10-20 sec between songs, in most cases. I need to do more testing here, but over LTE in my part of the SF Bay Area, performance was... poor, so it was mostly frustrating.
Shuffle. Essential to me. I rarely listen to albums; I mainly like to listen to random samples from playlists.
Search. Say you are building a playlist. You need to search for every song you want to add. No problem, happens on every service. On Spotify, I can type the first couple words, press return, and get a list of tracks, albums, artists, playlists, podcasts, whatever, each section stack ranked by perceived relevance. Tidal results are separated in tabs, and the candidates they pull from their index are *way* worse. For example, if part of the song title is in parentheses, and you don't include them, the song will often just not show up in yur results.
After trying to replicate a certain playlist from Spotify to Tidal by hand, I found I needed to type the first 3-4 words of the song title (EXACTLY) followed by the name of the artist (EXACTLY) if I wanted a hit.
...but then in 5-7% of cases, Tidal didn't have the track at all, so those songs just had to get dropped from the list. Oh, well.
Apple Music. I'm not eager to get locked in. If Spotify wants to increase fidelity, and Tesla agrees to increase their b/w cap, I'd be delighted.
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