Qobuz is pretty great for music downloads. Which I think is the real value they have. I'm able to get pretty high quality flac files for new releases from them.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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For anyone else who decides to give Qobuz a try, I wouldn't recommend using TuneYourMusic to transfer playlists and favorites. A ton of songs were transfered but just say unavailable in Qobuz. They have a partnership that let's you transfer for free using Soundiiz, so I'd try that instead.
Otherwise I'm enjoying it so far. The UI is nice, and search actually functions, so thats a big plus over Tidal. You can listen to full quality audio in the browser client, which I like since Zen Browser just added a nice media player UI in the side bar.
Edit: Retried my transfer using the free Soundiiz transfer and it worked perfectly, even found a song that TuneYourMusic completely failed to transfer. My only remaining issue is the fact that there's no button to shuffle your favorites tracks. You have to choose one, then shuffle. Minor, but something the other options offer.
I love Qobuz, they seem to be the only service with a real API. Although poorly documented. I have integrated some things with my home automation and it works with very high res sounds on my connected amplifiers.
thats from an old unused distrokid account. i hid songtitles cuz they are noob songs. Too bad phone has no easy way to just censor the middle column so i can show the entire thing. 1 cent per stream is good. for as bad as google is, Youtube red and youtube are among the best for amount paid. A bunch of services in china, india, africa etc its like 1000 plays for a cent. spotify is also on the cheap side and takes 5 or 6 streams for a cent. There is also often huge variation within the same service. A youtube ad may be 1 cent for a song and then 0.1 cents for the same song. country may play a role.
anyway, havent done it in forever but about to get back in.
i forget what tidal is like and that artist account didnt have anything catch on tidal (nor anywhere else. was probably my least effective artist account ever).
Spotify actually stopped paying anything at all to artists that have less than a thousand streams
How is qobuz's music recommendation? I've been wanting to get off of spotify, but I listen to a lot of niche music and spotify's recommendation engine still allows me to discover new music. I also scrobble all my plays to last.fm and listenbrainz, but I don't think either of them have the userbase to get me the recommendations I need
Qobuz is sound quality and being able to buy music without DRM, not discovery. I use my friends to find music for me, instead. It's a good service.
Hope they add a listen with friends feature so i can switch over. Use this too often
The article mentions streaming, but anyone know how much of purchases go to the artist? I'm not interested in streaming, but their store looks attractive.
Also, can I redownload the music later? Or is it a one and done deal? Just thinking about backups.
I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.
Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
I purchase from Bandcamp, should I be looking to move over?
Not necessarily. If you can find on Bandcamp, it’s probably best to buy from there since I heard more money goes to the artists. I buy from wherever I can find the music, and thus I’ll cycle between Bandcamp or HDTracks if I can’t find it on Qobuz.
Separately I dislike how Bandcamp embeds their name in the metadata of the tracks you buy, but it’s trivial to remove it. Just rubs me the wrong way, so most of the times if songs are on Qobuz I buy it there since they don’t do that.
Everything I get usually has it's metadata updated / overwritten by Musicbrainz anyway
But, yeah, it's slow going if you're in a niche...
I've created / updated a few albums in there and it takes a few minutes to get it all done, but there's some satisfaction in giving back
Awesome, thanks!
I'll certainly put it on multiple devices (phone, desktop, NAS), but probably won't bother with offsite backups since that gets expensive.
I'm interested, but does anyone know if there's something like a ReVanced version for it so I can use it for free without ads, like I can with YouTube Music ReVanced?
I think there isn't. And why would there be such a version?
Why wouldn't there be? People like free stuff and piracy is a thing.
In addition to high music quality, fairer payment for artists is one of Qobuz's main philosophies. Therefore, there will be nothing official where you can listen to the music for free and without adverts. Moreover, I have no idea of any free listening with adverts on Qobuz.
Whether there is something illegal that you can use to get the music should not be discussed here. The monthly fee for a subscription is a fair price, however, and you should be fair enough to do it legally.
Last time I used qobuz it had the worst UI in history and no way to discover music or was awful, I am now on Tidal and it's brilliant.
I don't know how it used to be, but I've just switched to it from Tidal and am generally enjoying the UI more. Plus it has functioning search, unlike Tidal. My only issue is the lack of a shuffle button on my favorited tracks.
It was probably 3+ years ago since I tried it, perhaps I'll give it another go.
You can shuffle favorites if you first select the tag "Tracks" from the top of the page, then the shuffle button should appear
Thats what I was doing, but I don't see any shuffle button. Does one appear for you?
Edit:
This is what I see, if I'm missing it please let me know! There is the shuffle toggle at the bottom, but to use it I still have to manually choose a song, then skip it for the next one to be random.
I did it from the Android client, but I can't do it anymore apparently
My favourite thing about Qobuz is they have a store where you pay money and they give you audio files, like in the old days. So you can pay for your music then keep it without an ongoing subscription.
I feel I should mention Bandcamp, which gives 70% of a sale directly to the artist. In the music world that's a lot. All DRM free and in most audio formats you could want. My process when buying music is usually: bandcamp > qobuz (or similar) > if all else fails... use other means. I'll also skip step one and two depending on the artist :p
Yeah Bandcamp is great. They also do Bandcamp Friday events where all the revenue goes to the artist.
The problem is it's really hard to find any mainstream bands on there. Presumably most of them sign away those rights when they get a label.
Yeah, really depends on what kind of music you listen to. I guess I'm lucky in that regard, since most artists I listen to have their music on BC ^^
Bandcamp is great. Especially the genres I like to listen too are usually on there. Only minor inconvenience is, that the mobile app doesn't allow you to download the tracks in a way, so you can play them in another music player.
If you really need to download the music on your phone you could use the website. I just organise everything on my PC then copy the files over.. But I agree that it would be nice to have DRM free downloads on the app
While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.
I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.
Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!
While true, and I have a lot of DRM-free music that I’ve bought from Apple, the difference is that getting music purchased from Apple onto your computer in a usable format is a bit of a pain, and it’s all lossy. Music from Qobuz can be downloaded directly from their site after purchasing, in lossless FLAC format, and many of their albums are available in high-res 24-bit and/or 96 kHz format as well.
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I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it's a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.
Huh, I always thought Spotify is European.
EDIT: Spotify is Swedish company.
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I chose this service to replace my yt music subscription, and I have nothing but praise for their service, the quality of the music or their ethics.
I’ve preferred Qobuz to Tidal since they were hocking MQA snake oil and lying about being lossless. Tidal eventually stopped using MQA, but I can’t help feel leftover ick at their dishonesty.
MQA was so weird, replacing a perfectly fine lossless open codec that plays on everything with a proprietary lossy codec that plays on barely anything. Also, so many people suddenly telling you that MQA sounds better than FLAC.
I once wrote a downloader for Tidal and always "downgraded" to 16-bit FLAC when I detected the "high quality" version is in MQA format.
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