Balthazar B

Here's how I did it. NB that I use a Soundiiz account to move playlists around, but there's no reason whatever utility you're using shouldn't work. I'm not sure you can do this in the YouTube Music app, so... First of all, go into Youtube Music via a browser (https://music.youtube.com). Click on Library, and click on Liked Music (it's an auto playlist, as you know); As you hover over the first song, you'll see a checkbox. Check it. Then hover over the last song in the list, and shift-click the checkbox, which should check every song; Now right-click on the list, and Save to Playlist. Then move that playlist to Qobuz with whatever utility you use. Did that work for you?

If this is true, I hope it's going to be a photo finish. https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/3/24147887/spotify-hifi-lossless-audio-music-streaming-ui-leak

@Superdad, why not a very inexpensive WiiM Mini, particularly if his amp includes a DAC he likes and supports Toslink? The WiiM Home App supports a useful subset of functions from Qobuz, including creating playlists and adding to them (but not heavy editing, but the Qobuz mobile, desktop, and web apps work for that). And when Qobuz Connect is released, I believe WiiM will be one of the earliest, if not the first platform that supports it. If his amp doesn't include a DAC, and he wants higher audio quality than the Mini's DAC provides, he can get a WiiM Pro Plus, which has an excellent DAC and analog out setup.

I hope you screenshot something and reported the issue through the beta app. That's probably the more effective way to report it to the development team.

Hi, @JCW6. Assuming the iPhone app is similar to the Android app, you'll see under Imports on the Home screen that the breakdown includes Releases (aka albums), Tracks, Playlists, and Artists. If you download a single track, selecting Releases will present the parent album, but not any other tracks from it you haven't downloaded. If you pull up an album and tap the download icon (downward-facing arrow), it will download the whole album and it will show up under Imports/Releases. On Android there are lots of utilities that can provide info on downloaded data, but it's been ages since I've used and iPhone, so I don't know what Apple provides end-users in that regard. There are icons on the Edit screen of audiophilestyle that let you select justification and indentation of paragraphs.

So I'm using Android, but let's assume the interfaces and functionalities are very similar, if not completely identical. Before your travels, create one or more playlists to contain all the music you want to take with you. Find the music and add it to the playlist(s). Then go into each playlist and tap the download icon (downward arrow on my phone). That's it. Then when you're offline, on the Home screen, select the Imports icon -- they should really call it Downloaded -- and play away. You can download at full resolution or something less. Hi-res uses lots of storage, and frankly you won't benefit on earbuds, so CD quality would be sufficient, and really overkill. Run some tests and see if you can distinguish between bitrates on the same tracks. And of course the higher the res, the longer the tracks will take to download.

Feature request In the event Qobuz releases a Radio feature on their mobile apps, it would be very helpful to include a one-button Download function to be used with the selection of tracks assembled for that on-the-fly playlist. "Why?", you may ask. I'd like to take that playlist with me, either using Android Auto, or playing on earbuds while I'm walking around, and not be dependent on a mobile data connection, both for cost and reliability reasons. Other streaming services provide this capability. It makes it easier to go back and explore or favorite some of the tracks that come up. And depending on what the UI provides, it could make it easier to save the on-the-fly playlist as a static playlist afterwards. To clarify "Radio feature", it's just the ability to select an artist, album or track and build an on-the-fly playlist, which could utilize a number of factors (including "mood", "style", "era", "associated artists", etc.) as elements of the tracks selected for the playlist. In one form or other, Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Deezer, and other services have a feature like this, though the overall quality of execution varies considerably between providers.

Thanks for the update, @David Craff! I hope WiiM is right up there as an important brand as well. 😁 Can certainly understand if the Android 14 bitperfect output will take a while, since from everything I'm reading, it's not clear when it will become generally available from Google. And if it will be available on all recent Android devices. But I'm very interested, not least of all because it may make it simple to add to some Android devices that are already or can be connected to home audio systems. Just as some people today use old iPhones as dongle inputs to play bit-perfect Apple Music on their stereos. Because Apple doesn't seem to care enough about developing/releasing a Connect type functionality of their own. 😉

An update: On my Android 14 device (a Pixel 6 Pro), the transitions between the tracks on the playlist play perfectly without gaps. BTW, a few of the tracks aren't available in the United States due to licenses. On my Macbook M1 laptop, ditto. However, interactions between the Android WiiM app/devices and Qobuz streaming have suddenly gotten weird, and this must have started within the last two days. I don't know whether it's something with the WiiM app, the WiiM backend, the Qobuz APIs, or something else, but it's definitely not right. I posted on the WiiM forum to see if it's just me or an issue affecting other users. OK, rebooting all my WiiM devices seems to have resolved the issue. And as with my phone and Macbook, all the transitions played properly without gaps.

Thanks, David. Then it will be interesting to figure out why there's an unwanted gap being introduced during the transition between the 3rd and 4th movements of Beethoven's 5th symphony with the recording that @111MilesToGo reported a few messages ago. It sounds like what I thought might be a possible root cause isn't it. Cheers! FWIW, even though I can't replicate his situation with an iPhone 14, I'll try out the playlist he posted on my own devices (Android, Mac, and WiiM via their app) and will let you know what I hear. But I'm guessing he's experiencing a very specific (and rare, I hope) problem with the way iOS and your app interact. Maybe some config/setting changed?

Well, if the CUE sheet data was properly preserved from the original pressing image of the recording, then, among other things, gap-related information will be available to the playback system. This wiki article discusses the subject a bit. Obviously we don't know how Qobuz (or anybody else) is processing playback/streaming, or even whether the digital source content has been consistently and properly packaged by the various music publishers before delivery to streaming services, but if you're getting true and complete gapless playback though one signal chain, it should be available for other chains as well, so long as every component is not introducing something untoward. The buffering David describes should work well to prequeue the content on your local device, although you may have discovered a situation (large content file) where the gapless transition is interrupted if that large file has not been completely queued at the time it needs to begin playing, in which case it is restreamed from Qobuz after the conclusion of the previous track, causing a gap.

@111MilesToGo, it does seem like Qobuz is buffering the following track when there are gapless metadata flags embedded in the content. Given your observations earlier about when this happens, I'm just curious: How much free storage do you have on your iPhone? I'm wondering about the root cause for the apparent difficulty to completely buffer large following tracks. What's the bitrate/resolution on the Beethoven 5th recording that you tested? What's the nature of your network connectivity? How much bandwidth is available to your phone, and what's the speed of transmission between you and the Internet?

In my experience, more like 99% of the time. With all things mechanical and technical, true coincidences are very, very rare.

No, you didn't do anything wrong. But given the timeline you provide, it points to Apple breaking something with one of their iOS updates. Either across all their hardware, or with the hardware you're using because it wasn't properly tested against it. Or it was and Apple figures anyone who's affected by it and cares can simply purchase a new phone from them if that's where it gets fixed. While I haven't done an exhaustive search, it seems to me that I've seen chatter elsewhere about problems with iOS 17 and audio. But as I don't use Apple devices, it's a little outside the gravity of my motivation to do much focused research. Now if Apple sent around a developer alert well in advance to the effect of, "We'll be making a change in iOS17 that will miserably eff up audio streaming in all kinds of ways for all our content 'partners' and here's what you have to do to fix it because we can't", and Qobuz ignored it, only then the problem's on Qobuz. But somehow I don't think it happened that way.

Why don't you and @jhwalker cross check the sources that are behaving differently for the two of you? It could indicate whether there may a problem with the way different source material was encoded by the publishers before they provisioned the content to Qobuz. Or since your iPhones are of different generations, it could be something with the hardware and how iOS17 interacts with each of them.