[BUG] Tidal streaming quality

Plex Labs
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Using Plexamp 4.10.1 AppImage, I’m noticing many tracks/albums are showing as ‘AAC 96’ rather than the expected ‘FLAC 44/16’. While I assume that the ‘streaming quality’ setting under ‘playback’ is intended for Plex libraries, it’s set to maximum nonetheless. Thinking this could just be a misapplied codec tag, I checked the cache in ~/Library/Caches/Media (also, why not use ~/.cache/plexamp?) and found a mixture of flac & aac, where using ffprobe confirmed:
Audio: aac (HE-AAC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 44100 Hz, stereo, fltp, 96 kb/s (default)
Please fix this. :slight_smile:

EDIT: I’ve also noticed the same behaviour on your Android app. I’ve checked Tidal directly & the albums I’ve noticed tonight are available in both flac 16/44 and 24/96. An example: TIDAL

EDIT 2: It’s also the same on Windows (gasp). Could this be a result of the recent Tidal changes (i.e. HiFi now getting high-res)? Or at least be why I never noticed it before? It always said FLAC until recently (and that’s all I had access to on HiFi). Either way, flac 16/44 is still available for these albums & I would much rather that than aac 96.

Off-topic: Are there any plans for Tidal’s high-res offerings? Not that I can hear the difference, but I do like it when the lights on my DAC change colour. :wink:

Edit 3: Added [BUG] to title.

1 Like
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AAC 96 usually comes from Tidal albums in Atmos (or similar surround/spatial) format

for whatever reason, in Plexamp this AAC 96 version sometimes appears in the list of albums on a Tidal artist page … if you instead search directly for the album name, you’ll usually find the 44/16 FLAC version

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You’re certainly on to something there. If I search for the artist in my example above, the album will play AAC 96. However, if I search for the album I get 16/44 FLAC. This would provide a reasonable workaround if I didn’t listen to the recommended playlists, which result in a mix of the two audibly different streaming qualities.

Using the official Tidal app on Android or Windows shows a ‘MAX’ stream of 24/96 and I can’t see any mention of Atmos/surround/etc, or any alternate releases for that matter. Furthermore, using alternatives such as Bubble UPnP to upmpdcli doesn’t present this issue, so it’s presumably not insurmountable (it actually plays in your choice of quality).

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