Moving to Qobuz

June 10, 2022

I’ve been using Deezer as my music streaming platform of choice for the last year. I moved from Spotify mostly because after I’ve tried Deezer HiFi FLAC streaming I could noticeably hear the difference in sound quality with my equipment (and ears) so I had to move to a better quality streaming service. At the time I’ve tried a few and decided to go with Deezer mostly because it felt as the best alternative to Spotify in terms of user experience and catalogue offer. I’ve been mostly happy with Deezer - I’ve never missed any album or artist, sounded good, the app worked fine. My biggest complaints with it have been about their customer service and the occasional hic up of the service (like when all my saved albums disappeared for a day only to come back the day after in my favourites section without being bookmarked, so I had to re-save about 350 albums manually in fear of losing it all again). They have also been quite obscure with their changes in pricing that cost me a few extra £ just because they didn’t tell me I could switch my plan to a (new) cheaper one for the same exact features.

Annoying.

A few days ago though I gave Qobuz a second try. I already gave it a shot last year for a month but it didn’t impress me for some reason - I remember in particular the iOS app was a bit too much on the crashy side of things. Also I couldn’t find some albums. Now Qobuz has a new trial offer which gives you 3 months for free and so I went with it again.

So much better!

This is clearly a service made with music lovers in mind, first and foremost:

The desktop app (Windows 10) is great - I love how, for some albums, they have the full CD booklet available one click away. And a good looking full screen mode doesn’t hurt either.
The desktop app (on Windows 10) can see all your audio devices and let you even choose what driver to use. You can easily play bit perfect Hi Res music with WASAPI Exclusive mode in just a click. Awesome!
The sound quality is amazing and it’s great to have Hi-Res versions of a lot of albums.
There are nice filters for the favourites library that actually work. You can easily search inside your library as well.
You can check out labels pages with all their latest (and oldest) releases.
The home page is always filled with interesting new releases that are actually good and not some hip hop trashy super star that paid to be on the homepage (hello Tidal).
I still have to find any missing artist or albums so they have definitely improved the offer of their catalogue.
There are no podcast - I use different services for those, I don’t feel the need of cluttering my music app with extra fluff.
There are a lot of interesting articles on each artist or album page.
I still have to try their discover algorithm but honestly I rarely ever use those to find new music, so it doesn’t matter too much to me.
The iOS app seems to work much better than a year ago, no crashes at all so far.

After these 3 free months I think I’m going for the yearly subscription plan, it will be a bit over £10 per month this way which is a great price point considering I was paying £12 p.m. to Deezer.

Overall I highly recommend Qobuz.