Tidal has updated me to its "FLAC" quality level without charging me any additional money.
This makes me happy because (1) it is very good quality and (2) it's cool they're giving it at the low pay tier.
I am also VERY CONFUSED about whether the label "FLAC" actually means "FLAC" or "some other high-quality compression algorithm we think is good", because they've been misleading about this before!
(Editing this post bc ppl keep boosting it despite it being corrected downthread.)
@mcc it used to all be MQA, but mqa has been shown to be lossy/nonsense. They’re transitioning the catalog to flac, but some tracks only have their best recording available as MQA; until the switch is complete, you’ll see a mix of both
A note: I find one claim on the Internet that Tidal FLAC used to be MQA but now it is literally FLAC. I don't know if this is true, but if it's true, it demonstrates the importance of not literally lying when designing UI. If Tidal had not lied about FLAC before, I would not assume they are lying about FLAC now. https://community.roonlabs.com/t/is-tidal-max-actually-lossless-and-not-just-relabeled-mqa/267092/2
Okay so it appears very likely that in the current Tidal interface, "FLAC" means literal FLAC and not something else. Unfortunately the clearest evidence of this anyone's yet shown me is… a statement in person by Tidal executives at a trade show. https://mast.hpc.social/@fclc/112355440678482810 I remain frustrated with the poor transparency.
(It also appears from the links in that thread that the future of MQA's parent company is in doubt, so Tidal probably has non-technical reasons to transition away from it now?)
@mcc@ross I was curious about what Tidal is and I found this on Wikipedia: "FLAC HiRes 24-bit/192kHz and MQA – 24-bit/352.8 kHz"
Are they trying to create a streaming service for bats or dolphins? 352.8 kHz, heck even 192kHz for the FLAC? Why are they encoding information that has no use whatsoever?
192 kHz an maybe make sense at some points in the production process, to make it easier to avoid aliasing, but there's absolutely no reason to stream that to end users.
@distinct Yes, although to be fair everyone was lying about this in the 80s-90s too (e.g. the Jaguar marketing itself as "64-bit" because it had two 32-bit processors)
Add comment