Tidal Releases Apple Watch App With Offline Playback and More

Tuesday May 25, 2021 8:50 am PDT by Joe Rossignol

Tidal this week released an Apple Watch app, allowing subscribers to stream music and control playback directly on their wrist, without an iPhone nearby. The app is available through the App Store on watchOS.

apple watch tidal
Tidal on the Apple Watch provides access to tracks, albums, playlists, and downloaded content that can be listened to offline from anywhere without internet connectivity. Apple Music also offers offline playback on the Apple Watch, as does Spotify starting last week, so this feature is consistent with other streaming music services.

Launched in 2014, Tidal has a catalog of over 70 million songs. One of the platform's unique advantages was high-fidelity audio, but Apple Music will start offering lossless audio to subscribers in June at no additional cost.

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Top Rated Comments

MauiPa

68 months ago

Cool so you can hold how many lossless tracks on the Apple Watch, 5?

None. It connects via Bluetooth silly

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

dasmb

68 months ago

We'll see how the catalog pans out. With higher-than-CD quality audio, you need to go back to the original masters (most of the tracks on musics services are the equivalent of ripping CDs). This is a costly, physical process requiring expert technicians and recording engineers.

Tidal's actually got a fairly decent and ever growing library of "Master" quality albums -- in part because they are incentivized by subscribers to continuously add to that library.

When services bump up quality "for free," you have to assume they won't be actively seeking out these masters (because who would go out and do more work for the same income). I suspect on Apple Music we'll see albums that had SACD releases and maybe new releases on high def audio...but that we won't see the weekly releases of back catalog high definition remasters we've seen on TIDAL.

Anyhow, all this high def audio talk doesn't bode well for Tidal. As a music app and service it's just not as good. I pay for the increased audio quality and the EXCELLENT albums notes and credits...but eventually it won't make sense to continue doing so, as I also pay for Spotify (family plan + excellent AI curation)

Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)

nutmac

68 months ago

We'll see how the catalog pans out. With higher-than-CD quality audio, you need to go back to the original masters (most of the tracks on musics services are the equivalent of ripping CDs). This is a costly, physical process requiring expert technicians and recording engineers.

Tidal's actually got a fairly decent and ever growing library of "Master" quality albums -- in part because they are incentivized by subscribers to continuously add to that library.

Nice write up but I suspect that's essentially what Apple is doing with Hi-Res Lossless. They are probably based on "High-Resolution Masters" from Apple Digital Masters ('https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf') program. This program does not mandate 24-bit 192 kHz, however. But with about 70% of the songs in Apple's 70 million+ songs created with Apple Digital Masters, I suspect Apple will quickly surpass Tidal's Master Quality Audio (MQA)'s library of about 30,000 songs.

Edit: MQA is very controversial. 3 key points: (1) MQA is not lossless, (2) MQA adds distortion, and (3) MQA does not always use high sample master. It's essentially a scam ('//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc').

Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)