Tidal, y u no shuffle?

[Gasaraki]

OK, came back from a 15 min drive. Happy to report that streaming does work. Your Mixes stream, your Radio lists stream, you favorite artists stream, etc. Data seems to be linked from the car and your apps (PC and Android). Meaning it keeps track of your just listened songs between the apps and the car.

However, streaming looks to be of lower quality than Hi-Fi. You can download, your Mixes, Radio, your own playlist etc and in that case, you'll get the Hi-Fi quality.

Issues or Missing Features:
-No shuffle. "Tidal, y u no shuffle?"
-Can't start a radio station from a song.
-Typical Tidal Usability Questions

 

[Higgs1]

OK, came back from a 15 min drive. Happy to report that streaming does work. Your Mixes stream, your Radio lists stream, you favorite artists stream, etc. Data seems to be linked from the car and your apps (PC and Android). Meaning it keeps track of your just listened songs between the apps and the car.

However, streaming looks to be of lower quality than Hi-Fi. You can download, your Mixes, Radio, your own playlist etc and in that case, you'll get the Hi-Fi quality.

Issues or Missing Features:
-No shuffle. "Tidal, y u no shuffle?"
-Can't start a radio station from a song.
-Typical Tidal Usability Questions

Thanks for the feedback. Do you think you notice a difference in streaming quality vs. spotify's?

 

[Gasaraki]

Thanks for the feedback. Do you think you notice a difference in streaming quality vs. spotify's?

Sorry, don't know because I don't use Spotify.

 

[Zacster]

Were you streaming over the car's LTE? Have you tried streaming over a wifi hotspot from your phone? I hope to find all this out myself soon enough.

 

[Sir Surfalot]

I set Tidal up yesterday - created a new HiFi tier account (they had a 3 month trial offer for $A1/month so hard to refuse) then logged in to it from my car (2021 LR). My car is running 2021.40.6 firmware.

When the car is connected to wifi - either home wifi in the garage or tethering to my 5G mobile phone - tracks are streamed as HiFi: a little green label saying “HiFi“ is shown after the track title. When using the car’s LTE connection (I have premium connectivity) there is no such “HiFi” label on the tracks streamed.

After streaming a few tracks successfully, I tried downloading a couple of albums (while on wifi) and it doesn’t want to work reliably for me. Seems to download one track then stop. Furthermore, after this happens, trying to stream a track from Tidal OR (weirdly) to play a station from TuneIn fails with a “load error” which persists until the entertainment system is rebooted with the two steering wheel buttons. Doesn’t affect Spotify playback, the car’s web browser, traffic information or anything else, just Tidal and TuneIn. The issue persists even when switching to LTE (turning off wifi) or switching to another wifi network.

I mucked around with it for a couple of hours just now. Ended up logging out of the Tidal account in the car and back in again, which seems to have got rid of the partially-downloaded album and the others that were queued and - more importantly - seems to have stopped whatever side-effect of the Tidal downloading was breaking Tidal and TuneIn streaming.

How is everyone else’s experimenting with Tidal in their cars going? I think I will use it with my phone tethered to get the HiFi quality and avoid downloading until I (or someone else) can work out a workaround for what downloading is doing wrongly in this first car firmware version.

 

[GReed121]

I had a similar experience with Tidal in my Model 3 - "load error". When I have a chance, I will try your suggestion of logging out.

 

[Sir Surfalot]

I had a similar experience with Tidal in my Model 3 - "load error". When I have a chance, I will try your suggestion of logging out.

What cleared the “load error” - in Tidal and TuneIn (and seemingly caused by the downloading function in Tidal going wrong and getting “stuck” on a track) - for me was rebooting the infotainment system by holding the two steering wheel buttons. Changing to a different wifi network or changing to use LTE by turning off wifi didn‘t help.

Logging out of Tidal definitely stopped the “load error” problem being caused in TuneIn, but I found when I logged back in to Tidal the albums were still queued for downloading. i hoped deleting them from “my collection” might clear them from the download queue, but it doesn’t - when I added them back again they were still flagged as being in the download queue

I have a support ticket open with Tidal since about 12 hours ago about the downloads not working. The back-and-forth emails with their support so far have only managed to get as far as “when did you notice it happening” and “what OS version is your car running”, so I don’t know how far away a resolution might be… Not sure whether I should have raised it with Tesla instead but at least i have taken some photos of the Tidal screens in the car showing the problem now, so if I get nowhere with Tidal support, then turning around and trying again with Tesla should be easy.

 

[ncinc99]

I'm having pretty good luck with Tidal. All downloaded songs (roughly 100 tracks so far) play beautifully, although without shuffle. Hopefully, there will be an update to address this.

Radio stations or My Lists play over streaming at non-HiFi quality, although still sounds nice. If you have a saved song within those lists, it will play that song in HiFi.

I had one instance of Load Error and it seemed to happen while playing a song on wireless from my garage and then traveling out of range and switching to LTE. I pressed the reload button, and it began playing like normal.

So far, pretty good. With the HiFi plan, you get great audio at home/personal players that are equipped to handle the Master Quality files. In the car over WiFi or Downloaded, you get CD quality sound. And, finally in the car over LTE you get pretty good sound quality compared to Spotify or even bluetooth, in my opinion.

 

[Zacster]

I finally got the update! I've subscribed to Tidal for $2 for the Master quality, whether the car can use it or not.

In the meantime I need to copy a few playlists over from Qobuz. There is some software that does that but it is included in neither Tidal nor Qobuz.

I'll report back on what I find. In the meantime the update is installing and it is late here, I'm slightly drunk and high, and I'm not going anywhere with the car. Tomorrow.

 

[Gasaraki]

I set Tidal up yesterday - created a new HiFi tier account (they had a 3 month trial offer for $A1/month so hard to refuse) then logged in to it from my car (2021 LR). My car is running 2021.40.6 firmware.

When the car is connected to wifi - either home wifi in the garage or tethering to my 5G mobile phone - tracks are streamed as HiFi: a little green label saying “HiFi“ is shown after the track title. When using the car’s LTE connection (I have premium connectivity) there is no such “HiFi” label on the tracks streamed.

After streaming a few tracks successfully, I tried downloading a couple of albums (while on wifi) and it doesn’t want to work reliably for me. Seems to download one track then stop. Furthermore, after this happens, trying to stream a track from Tidal OR (weirdly) to play a station from TuneIn fails with a “load error” which persists until the entertainment system is rebooted with the two steering wheel buttons. Doesn’t affect Spotify playback, the car’s web browser, traffic information or anything else, just Tidal and TuneIn. The issue persists even when switching to LTE (turning off wifi) or switching to another wifi network.

I mucked around with it for a couple of hours just now. Ended up logging out of the Tidal account in the car and back in again, which seems to have got rid of the partially-downloaded album and the others that were queued and - more importantly - seems to have stopped whatever side-effect of the Tidal downloading was breaking Tidal and TuneIn streaming.

How is everyone else’s experimenting with Tidal in their cars going? I think I will use it with my phone tethered to get the HiFi quality and avoid downloading until I (or someone else) can work out a workaround for what downloading is doing wrongly in this first car firmware version.

Didn't have issues with downloading but I do have a large SSD. Don't know if that make a difference.

 

[Jejunjm]

Signed up for fsd subscription (almost entirely for tidal) and got the update.

I was able to download two playlists but that's it.

 

[Zacster]

I just gave Tidal a try and I will say that it is MUCH better than anything I've heard in the car before, except when I could play Qobuz while parked through the browser. It is on par with that. As for the higher priced tier of Tidal with MQA, it isn't necessary because it just doesn't support it. Download of a playlist took a while because it was long, an album downloaded pretty fast. No issues at all with it. The sign on went smoothly with using the phone to attach to my account. The first song I played off of an Indie playlist displayed the 'hifi' symbol at top and I noticed that the next song in the list started displaying it as well once I started the first one. This is the same as at home where Qobuz will stage the next song in the queue so it plays seamlessly. If you go to something else, then that will download on the fly but there could be a slight hesitation. I'll have to see if there is gapless playback where one track goes straight to the next as in most opera performances. I'm not a huge opera fan but sometimes...

I still need to take it on a long drive to see if it removes my urge to just shut it off like the bluetooth did. I'm pretty hopeful based on what I've already heard.

I just don't understand why it took so long for Tesla to recognize that what they had was crap. Oh wait, EM.

The hard part now will be deciding what to download before I leave the house because no matter what you do you always want to hear something else. My phone plan for hotspots doesn't start until next week. It gives me 40gb of hotspot activity per month, and that can get used up really quickly if you are downloading music.

 

[Jejunjm]

Where does tidal download too? Mcu buffer?. Thanks for telling me about the mqa limitation. I signed up for the 2$ promo thinking it would be better then $1

 

[Knightshade]

I'm kinda confused that the people who insisted loading lossless music on local storage, as those of us enjoying high quality music in their teslas for years have done, wasn't an acceptable solution are now thrilled they've added an option to let you..... load worse than lossless onto local storage and play it from there, with the added cost of a subscription.

That's just USB music with extra steps (and less quality)

 

[Higgs1]

I'm kinda confused that the people who insisted loading lossless music on local storage, as those of us enjoying high quality music in their teslas for years have done, wasn't an acceptable solution are now thrilled they've added an option to let you..... load worse than lossless onto local storage and play it from there, with the added cost of a subscription.

That's just USB music with extra steps (and less quality)

While I agree with the sentiment I also see it as a bit easier as you are just using the system in the car & hitting download, rather than taking a hard drive, bringing it inside to a computer & downloading the files. I personally do not have any songs downloaded onto my computer, I stream with Spotify / Tidal so having the capability to download via the car is a nice bonus, but i'll probably stick with streaming / linking to wifi to stream HIFi.

I assume you can't download from either of these apps on your pc then plug into the car, so you'd have to have music already downloaded to do that.

 

[AlbieCardiff]

Hi..I am based in the UK and have Tidal Hi-fi streaming at home. In my Tesla 3, I can now listen to Tidal songs in the car via live streaming on the new App, and I can definitely tell the difference between Tidal vs Spotify. As some people have pointed out, there are a few early Tesla user issues. 1. I can’t shuffle songs from a playlist with Tidal. 2. The voice activation capability seems to “wake up” and work only with Spotify and not Tidal, regardless of which App you had opened. 3. I cannot see what format the Tidal songs or Spotify, for that matter, are streaming at. We are assuming if you have a Spotify Premium account, you will stream at 320kbps compressed into your car. Likewise, if you have a Tidal Hi-fi account, we are assuming you are streaming at 1411kbps or 16-bit/44.1 kHz for uncompressed lossless quality or even 9216 Kbps or 24-bit/192 kHz for some MQA encoded songs. Not sure about this due to lack of verification. The alternative is what we had previously, which was to connect via Bluetooth from a smart device to the Tesla interface. You can set your Bluetooth streaming to its max quality (e.g. aptX, LDAC) but this may not support 96khz files at high 1411kbps bitrate streaming. Direct streaming is always better. 4. Finally, if you use the “Download” functionality of the Tesla Tidal App, I am assuming the songs are saved on the USB stick, but again I am not sure in what file format/bitrate playback you will get. Answers, please, Mr Musk?

 

[AlbieCardiff]

Early days and yes, the Sound Quality from Tidal is far superior to Spotify in my TM3 when live streaming into the car. I have had a Tidal Hi-fi account for 2 years now. I also have a Family Spotify Premium account. A few comments confirming what others have found and some new ones….1) Cannot shuffle songs in a Tidal playlist 2) Voice activation instruction to play any song only activates Spotify, not Tidal, regardless of which App was first selected. 3) Cannot confirm if Spotify is indeed streaming into the Tesla at 320 Kbps or if Tidal is streaming at 1411 kbps (or higher, up to 9216 kbps, for MQA-encoded files). At home, this is easy to set up and confirm on the respective Apps. 4) Finally, have not used the “Download” function, but if the songs are sent to the Tesla supplied USB stick, then technically this should hold about 5,000 (5 minute) songs in uncompressed Flac format at 16-bit 44.1kHz file size, or a smaller number if Tidal recordings are recorded in 24-bit / 192 kHz file size. However, as some Forum members have commented, you need to partition USB drive to allow normal sentry/ traffic issues. This is easy to do if you are downloading songs to a USB storage device on your home computer, but do not know how this works via the Tesla Tidal app. Of course the alternative is to link your phone with the Tidal App to the Tesla via Bluetooth. You need to set the highest quality Bluetooth sound Quality setting on your phone (e.g. aptX or LDAC), but I am not sure what the resultant playback rate will be. For example, my Samsung S10 phone will support Bluetooth transmission of songs at 16-bit depth and only 48.0 kHz Maximum frequency. As I said earlier, direct streaming will always be better, providing you have good connectivity in your area

 

[AlbieCardiff]

Sorry…meant to have deleted 1st post. It was uploaded by mistake, but still relevant, I guess.

 

[Knightshade]

3) Cannot confirm if Spotify is indeed streaming into the Tesla at 320 Kbps or if Tidal is streaming at 1411 kbps (or higher, up to 9216 kbps, for MQA-encoded files).

To my knowledge neither streams anywhere near that high over LTE.

Here's a user mentioning Spotify as only 96kb for example:

Spotify: Bluetooth vs Tesla built in app

Is there a difference in sound quality using Spotify via Bluetooth (iPhone 11) vs using Tesla built in Spotify app? I find it much easier to navigate and edit playlist in my iPhone than the in-car app. so, I want to know if I’m giving up sound quality if I continue using my iPhone app.

teslamotorsclub.com

Likewise the original streaming source in the US, slacker, only streamed at between 64-128kb, no matter how "high quality" you set your account online or what kind of subscription you had.

 

[Jejunjm]

Spotify and slacker sound terrible imo.
@Knightshade I don't mind listening to music on USB but in my old age this means I listen to the same stuff over and over. No new music. The interface is better in Spotify/tidal/slacker then USB music as well..