aa[argh]ron on Nostr: I signed up for the Tidal 30 day trial today - they offer it as standard when you ...

I signed up for the Tidal 30 day trial today - they offer it as standard when you create an account, it's not a time limited offer. There's an opportunity to make it a 60 day trial for £2/local equivalent. Student pricing is available at 50% off.

At the end of the setup process I was offered use of a transfer service to get my tracks out of Spotify but I'd already signed up to Free Your Music at £13.99 a quarter - I did it before I realised Tidal were going to offer theirs and wouldn't recommend it because the cancellation process was a *total* pain; however the free options in all the transfer services seem to be limited to 500 tracks.

Most things transferred over, I lost about ten tracks that weren't found and had to re-match a few. Mostly the rematches were classical pieces which had a different orchestral arrangement, some obscure hip hop pieces and one artist with a plus sign in their name.

The Tidal layout is VERY similar to Spotify so I didn't find it hard to navigate. Likewise recommendations are also good and don't seem quite as mainstream as Spotify, but it's harder to find playlists curated by other users so if you like that you might miss it (I was signed up to a few from Drift Records which are lost now).

I'm moving from Spotify for a few reasons: I didn't like that they canned Andrew Tate for breaking their policies but had to make it clear it had nothing to do with people wanting them to do it. I hate the way they treat artists. I didn't like it when they started login policing the premium account I was paying for and my mother lost access to her account because we're not in the same household - Tidal allows six people on their family plan to use the account provided they're in the same _country_ at the point of registration, not the same house.

The quality on Tidal is better too - that's their selling point - I tried a few tracks (Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite #1 via Yo-Yo Ma, Bullshit Baby by Ms Henrik and I Prefer Your Love by St Vincent) and every single track had a better aural range than the Spotify version. The mobile app is also similar to Spotify but with better audio options.

As far as I can tell there are no audiobooks, podcasts or other fuckery on Tidal. If there are I haven't found them - and I prefer not to pay for things I won't/can't use anyway so I won't miss that noise. They do push video content quite hard but it's easy enough to hide it.