Qobuz: Music & Editorial

I’ve used Qobuz as a download store for many years. They’ve had the best catalog of non-DSD content for the past decade, and now they’ve added some DSD128 too! If you know what you want, they’re great. The Sublime subscription is great value if you buy a lot of content. However, as a streaming service only, they leave a lot to be desired. Their playlists are terrible — the worst. So much so that they offer free subscriptions to services to import your Spotify (and other) playlists into Qobuz (which works well and is a good solution, but _another_ step). Their search function is really bad. And the app… it’s the worst of the lot. It hangs. It caches music you’ve streamed, but then doesn’t let you play the cache when you’re offline; you have to explicitly download your music. It intermittently logs you out. It disconnects from AirPods. Occasionally it pauses music every time the Lock Screen locks — but most of the time it works fine. Using Qobuz through Roon is so much better than using it natively. You also get better playlists and search. But this solution is limited away from home and a non-starter when offline. A great music store; an okay streaming service; a bad app.

The sound quality is beautiful. However has some software or server issues. All the time “unavailable to stream track…” Shame…

Quality but around £20 per month is a little high unfortunately

Apart from it being slow at loading songs (not my signal as it’s the same on my high speed broadband) I also got logged out after only using the app for about 5 days and it would let me log back in. When I finally managed to log back it it wanted me to pay £16.99 despite only being 5 days into my 1 month free trial.

Qobuz has to be one of the most frustrating music apps I use. Shuffle only available if you create a playlist first. Albums disappear then reappear so I end up with “unavailable” albums even though the same albums exist under a different ID. Tracks pause for no reason, despite a strong internet connection. If I wasn’t using Qobuz via Roon the service would be unusable. It’s such a shame as the sound quality is excellent. I’m hoping Qobuz will be bought out by a company that’s committed to providing an excellent customer experience over the “it’ll do” attitude that seems to the case now. Finally, the cut and paste developer “responses” here demonstrate how little Qobuz value their customers. Two stars for sound quality and a reasonable catalogue.

The app is ok but not being able to ask Siri to play a given album while working or driving is a bid downer for me

I was a long term Spotify user, and was reasonably content with my lot. I then upgraded my turntable, and begun to find depths of music that I hadn’t heard before. Streaming the same music via Spotify now felt like listening with ear muffs on, like someone had poured treacle in my ears. The hifi dealer I bought the deck from recommended Qobuz, which he uses for his high-end installations, and I haven’t looked back. I’m loving the quality, the interface, the ‘sleeve notes’, the whole package. Now I only use Spotify for podcasts.

The features in the app are so dated. For example, I searched for top 40 UK singles and in brought up 2012 as the most current setlist. I personally don't think you need a magazine tab. The main reason I came to Qobuz was purely for music quality but everything else lacks for me. I gave previously subscribed to Apple Music and Spotify, these both have much better user interfaces.

The interface is just what I want and minimal bloat, sound is unparalleled from most other apps.

Upgraded from 1* to 2* since my last review. A slight ‘tweak’ on a recent app upgrade, allows me to choose artists I’m ’following.’ My main gripe (and it’s mentioned on so many forums) why on earth did you remove the A-Z scroll bar from the right hand column of the app? Do your app designers actually use this app for their own music. Everything was great then in your quest to improve and continually tweak, you broke it. Try selecting a saved favourite artist towards the back of the alphabet, ZZ Top for example. You either have to scroll through hundreds of artists to get there or head to the search bar. Please, please return the A-Z scroll bar. As I’ve said, the music, the quality, the choice is tremendous. And before you recommend I contact you, I have done, numerous times