Moving from Spotify to Qobuz

For a while now, I have been planning to move away from Spotify as I could no longer accept their sponsoring of far right podcasts, AI generated music and low artists payments.

I have finally made the jump at the beginning of this month. I have picked Qobuz as it is apparently the platform paying artists the most and it is approximately the same price. I was not listening to podcasts (I use AntennaPod and subscribe via RSS) nor audio books so I am not missing those from Spotify.

Migrating favorites

The migration of favorite artists, albums, tracks and playlists via Soundiiz (Qobuz offers new subscribers a one month subscription) got me really close, but it failed to migrate 27 / 1378 artists (2%), 183 / 1197 albums (15%) and 362 / 4849 tracks (7%), which is unfortunately quite a lot to manually migrate. Thankfully, you can download the result of the migration for each one of those category to a CSV file so I will be able to process those, progressively, at a later time. From an initial quick look for the albums, it boils down to small naming differences between the two platforms, thus the failure. It feels like something the Soundiiz service should be able to fix. I have not (yet) found any album missing on Qobuz that were not also missing on Spotify already.

Native apps

There is no native app on Linux but using the web interface works sufficiently well. The Android app is reasonably good. Quite close to what Spotify used to be at its best (before they started pushing podcasts and audio books). The Strawberry music player app on Linux is apparently capable of playing tracks from Qobuz but it requires an Application key and I have not looked into that yet. It might be an interesting option as it can also play music from servers exposing a Subsonic API and I have a Navidrome instance that I specially keep running to be able to listen to all the music that can not be found, played, or were removed from the streaming platforms.

Connected speakers

Unfortunately my Triangle AIO Twin connected speakers, that I really like, do not support Qobuz Connect. Triangle’s support told me it requires new hardware so they can not add support via a software update. Playing music via the Triangle app works and this is the option that offers the best quality but the interface of the Triangle app is barely good enough for that as it has a lot of quirks. The other option is to use bluetooth but that comes with lower (but certainly still acceptable) quality and slightly more friction as it is not the default on the speaker, which requires manually selecting the mode every time it is started. So well, that will do for now. I am trying out Qobuz’s Hi-Res settings but honestly, I am incapable of hearing the difference between the CD and the higher quality presets.

I will likely buy another device to use as source and stop using the smart function of my Triangle speakers. I have been looking at WiiM (but apparently those do not support Qobuz Connect), and Octavio Stream G2 (review in French) which apparently does support Qobuz Connect.

Alarm’s clock

Unfortunately again, Google’s clock app on Android is only capable of streaming music from a Spotify playlist for programmed alarms, so I am not completely Spotify free until I find a solution for that and so far, my searches did not yield any interesting results. I will probably have to download the songs from my morning playlist on the phone and find an alarm app that can read music randomly from the phone as alarm sound.

Dynamic playlists

The feature that I am currently missing the most is the dynamically generated playlists from Spotify that are based on my liked tracks mixed with some frequently listened ones from other artists or albums. I discovered a lot of artists using those, especially not really well known ones. Qobuz offers curated discovery playlists so maybe I will look at those in the future.

Worth it

But so far, in the end, I am not regretting my decision and it feels worth the trouble of switching services. Let’s see in a few months!