While I wait for support to respond to my last message (video and terminal output), I wanted to provide a short update.
The problem as a whole still persists, but the specific behavior has changed slightly. When reproducing the errors for support, some songs ended up playing and some songs would not. When testing today, songs that were working are not presenting the problem and a few songs that did not work are playing as expected. I have not been able to determine a pattern to the affected songs. I am testing on MQA Master quality albums currently as well as non MQA albums.
A new behavior seems to be Audirvana unexpectedly crashing while performing normal functions. In the span of 7 minutes, 3.5 crashed twice. Once while selecting the menu option for preferences and another while stoping audio playback during my testing. I am reporting the behavior for informational purposes and I am not sure it is related to anything specific. I’ll be restarting the machine and continuing testing here soon.
For those who are affected and not having the “perfect” experience we have had for a while, I can understand how frustrating it is. Music is obviously very important to us or we wouldn’t even entertain a product like Audirvana. It is difficult when technology does not work as expected, even more so when we seem to lack any agency over its resolution. The support team at Audirvana has been helpful during these issues, especially considering how they seem to be difficult to reproduce on their end as well as not reliably affecting customers as a whole. I will be continuing to go through the process of working with the support team to resolve this issue. I hope once we resolve it, the solution will help everyone else affected.
I’m shaking my head trying to understand why @Damien doesn’t release 3.6 version with the The same Tidal connectivity that Studio has. This would solve ALL tidal issues once and for good.
This is a specific issue for some of our users and I try with Tidal to understand what is going on because there is reason why it does work for some user and does not work on other, the integration between a 3.5 installation and another is the same. I don’t know the reason for the moment but I try to see what could have changed.
When setting up my demo of Audirvana studio (to keep the master quality streams going), I noticed something unexpected with the playback experience with Tidal.
When using 3.5, Anytime I would be playing content from my Tidal subscription, it would pause any playback on any other device that was playing Tidal. This is expected and I assume part of Tidal’s technology to keep me from sharing my account and listening on multiple devices with out multiple subscriptions.
When setting up Audirvana Studio, I had my Tidal App playing on one device while I setup the demo on my dedicated stereo computer. When I connected the Tidal subscription in Studio and started my playback tests, Studio worked as expected and the Master quality tracks played beautifully. What is strange is that my Tidal App also continued to play my music streams on my other device. This is not what is supposed to happen given my other experiences with Tidal.
This leads me to believe that Studio and 3.5 authenticate with Tidal differently. I want to imagine that this would explain why issues are presenting with 3.5 when they otherwise are not showing up in Studio. The difference between how 3.5 and Studio check in with Tidal does not activate their “only one computer playback” policy and I can have two simultaneous streams on two separate devices with the same Tidal account.
I have shared this with my open ticket with Audirvana support. Hopefully it is a meaningful discovery and helps find a solution.
I am a 3.5.50 user and recommend to all 3.5 users with Tidal subscription to change to Qobuz if possible. 3.5.50 works like a charm with Qobuz and from all reports Qobuz offer better SQ than Tidal.
Great advice @matt Is there a free trial available for 3.5 users still? I think Qobuz offers a free trial themselves if not. Only issue that could be problematic is that Tidal has more global coverage than Qobuz.
Well in the time since I last posted I bought a house, moved in, and setup the stereo. I am still experiencing the issue with Tidal.
This prompted me to sign up for the 3 month free trial to QoBuz we get for being 3.5 owners. I can report that QoBuz is streaming just fine with 3.5. Unfortunately, QoBuz is not all upside with Audirvana. There is a flaw with the 3.5 integration with QoBuz when viewing artist pages. The expected behavior would be to view all of the albums by a particular artist followed by Singles, appears on, etc. Unfortunately the integration cannot distinguish these and puts every album/song with a matching artist credit into the album list, making it quite impossible to view the albums by some artists as they get buried in every cover, compilation, or collaboration the artist has done.
It seems more and more that the answer is subscribe to Audirvana Studio, which is unfortunate as I am sure we were all drawn to the original idea of the type of product 3.5 is. There are a lot of great features in Studio that I am missing out on as a 3.5 user, however I am ok with this. The increased integration with these streaming services is nice, but I do not currently use most of them as is. I know that this is just my experience, but it is what detracts me from the payment structure of studio vs 3.5.
EDIT
After playing around with the remote app, I have discovered that it displays the albums from an artist page better than the app it self. It seems to show the Albums of an artist in release order before displaying the other related songs/albums. This solves most of my original issues with the QoBuz Integration as I almost exclusively operate Aurdivana from the remote app. I will keep playing around with it and see how it goes.
