I canceled my TIDAL subscription

General Discussions Plex Features
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I toyed around with the TIDAL trial for about two weeks and decided to cancel it. I’ll provide my feedback here for the Plex team.

Prior to the TIDAL announcement, I never used Plex for music. At that time, I was using Google Play Music. I host my personal collection there and also use it for music discovery. I like that you can start a radio of tracks based on genre (Country Radio, Dance Radio, Electronic, etc). I like that when I find a song I like, I can give it a “thumbs up”, and it gets automatically added to my Thumbs Up Playlist for me to find & play later.

I personally prefer an approach to music based on individual tracks or singles, rather than whole albums. I simply have never found a single album from an artist that I like all tracks from. I usually only like just a few tracks from each album.

TIDAL and Plex are both very album and artist-focused. For Plex, this is evident in the way it organizes media: You browse nearly everything by album or by artist. With GPM, I don’t have to do that. I click my “Thumbs Up” auto playlist and can see songs that I like, it’s as simple as that.

I can start a radio from any song and find more songs I like. Process repeats itself.

In Plex, with TIDAL, when I start a mix from a track, only 2 other tracks get added, and both are from my own library… nothing from TIDAL got added. So this is obviously broken. In Plex, I only get a few choices for radio. None of which appear to mix TIDAL and Plex tracks from my library. The Plex interface works well for TV and Movies, but not for music. You are pretty much locked into an interface designed to categorize media in a tree-like format (similar to TV shows) without much flexibility on how you view things. GPM does this well: I can look at collections of tracks, I can look at albums, or I can look at artists. The Music library forces you to start from the “top”: Pick an artist, then pick an album, then play a song. You can’t organize this any differently.

I’d love to spend some time to download all my music from GPM and organize and tag it for Plex and start managing my own music collection, but without seamless integration with some online streaming service, this is pointless since I’ll be stuck listening to the same content over and over with no real way to find new stuff.

Plex has been all over the map lately with their product. The roadmap feels very ADHD to me: Lots of focus on music, TV/DVR, pictures, but everything feels very rudimentary or incomplete, or lacks polish. And based on this reputation I have no confidence that Plex’s Music functionality will ever be able to compete with Spotify or GPM or Youtube Music.

Not jumping ship, but my main feedback to Plex would be to take this very good opportunity to do music right. A lot of folks (myself included) aren’t happy with how Google is handling Google Play Music, and we’re not confident that Youtube Music will be a good replacement. At some point, you’re going to have a whole lot of people looking for a new service to host their own uploaded music.

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To clarify my statements about the structure of music in Plex, I said that Plex forced a certain view on you, this isn’t true: I forgot to mention, I realize that from the drop down menus at the top you can view tracks, albums, or artists. I didn’t mean to imply that Plex can’t do those things. I was trying to say that the way everything is nested in sub-menus, and the different way the view changes depending on how you enter your library (from Home or from the library list) makes it confusing and less intuitive than GPM.

What I think would be better:

  • No “home” integration for music. IMHO, that’s built for TV/Movies. This is basically my media dashboard for my family. We all share TV and Movies, but they don’t care for my taste in music.
  • When you select “Music” library from the Home screen, you get a lot of discovery-type features. This screen should be the main landing page when you click the “Music” library on the left panel (web view)
  • From the “Music” library view (click on the left side in the web player), I want to see another vertical submenu showing Tracks, Artists, Genres, Albums (like GPM). These are first-class buttons in the UI, not stuffed down in some combo box
  • Allow me to start a mix with Tidal + My library based on genre
  • In general, make TIDAL feel like it’s actually part of my library. Don’t give me a “TIDAL” drop down in the server listing separate from my PMS as you do on the Android version of the App (interface and navigation varies across platforms, which is its own problem)
  • Let us use thumbs up / thumbs down for music instead of 5 stars.
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Hey there, really appreciate the feedback and suggestions!

I’m curious why you’re not getting TIDAL tracks mixed in when you start an artist radio from your library (is that what you’re doing?)

The Discovery Radio should be all TIDAL content based on what’s in your library.

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I picked a song from my Music library and played it. This is shown in the screenshot below. I then click “…” and select “Queue Plex Mix”. I get just 2 additional tracks added to the playlist, and both are from my library. None are from TIDAL.

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Discovery Radio is only accessible when you go to Home → Music (dropdown), scroll down then select it under “Stations”. I usually go to “Music” library directly (left side of the web player) by force of habit, but there are no discovery features there and it only allows me to browse what’s actually in my library. I’m sure this is working as it was designed, but that was part of my feedback: It feels unintuitive for me to have the discovery features segregated from the library view. It should all be seamless and one landing page for music instead of two.

When I use discovery radio it feels inaccurate. For some odd reason I get opera music, which I do not listen to. Discovery Radio is a bit too broad to be useful. I would much rather have radios based on genres, such as Dance/Electronic. I pick those based on what I feel like listening to. Those allow me to fine-tune the kind of music I feel like discovering at the time. Overall, there’s a huge shortage of stations to choose from.

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Plex Mix is an older track-driven radio; Artist Radio is what pulls from TIDAL.

It’s generally driven by your recent listens (and by random artists in your library if you don’t have enough of these). So it’ll get better over time as you listen more.

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Thanks for the info. Unfortunately I think this only makes my opinion of the feature worse. What you’re basically telling me is that there are even more ways, perceptually , to do the same thing but with different (older vs newer?) behavior. This just makes it even more confusing to me. I had to dig around a while to find out where in the heck to start an Artist radio. Looks like you can do it from the Artist page. This needs to be more flexible. I should be able to start a Plex+TIDAL radio from anything: Track, Album, Genre, Artist, Playlist, Mood… That way no matter where a user is in the UI, they can do anything.

I think it would be good to simplify and make starting a “mix” or “radio” from a track do just 1 thing: Pull from library + TIDAL (if available). If users want only music from their library, just shuffle the library songs right? That’s basically a library-only radio IMHO.

I’ll continue to monitor any improvements that come for this, if any. I’m honestly worried that Plex will not capitalize on this functionality to compete with GPM in light of a potential shut down of the service this year.

One thing that’s clear to me right away is that I do not want to pay almost $10 a month for a streaming service I can’t use as I personally would like to. I think you guys have started a great concept, it just needs some more polish and UX design improvements. Looking forward to what happens in the next 6 months or so!

Great to see the CTO responding to this kind of stuff! Very promising! Any plans you can share for 2019? Thanks for your time!

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That’s roughly right; the artist radio can pull from shared servers as well. And the library radios are library-only.

Thanks for the kind words and considered suggestions.

World domination?

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