Years go by, your favorite songs and playlists accumulate. How can you switch to another music service with as little effort as possible?
For more than a decade, Spotify has sovereignly controlled music streaming. However, its competitors are starting to have cheaper prices and better sound quality, some even both.
In addition, there has been quite a bit of noise surrounding Spotify over the past year. Neil Young urged Spotify to choose either a podcast presenter for his own music or marinated Joe Roganin . Spotify eventually chose Rogan, even though it was a music service.
The decision is easier to understand when you remember that Spotify paid over $ 100 million for the exclusive rights to Rogan’s podcasts. Such money cannot be wasted, even if demanded by an icon like Neil Young.
The turmoil has brought at least one positive phenomenon. Many have woken up seriously to think of alternatives to Spotify.
Spotify options
There is a lot to choose from. The main competitors are Deezer, Tidal, Qobuz, Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music. Most have a one-month free trial.
There is one big problem left. How do I move playlists and collections from Spotify over the years?
There are services online that specialize in transferring playlists with just a few clicks to almost any other music streaming service. These include: Tune My Music , FreeYourMusic and Soundiiz . Of course, you have to pay a few euros for the service.
Mikrobitti magazine decided to give it a try Tune My Music because most music services offer it first.
Transfer playlists
The transfer was easily accomplished by associating Tune My Music with the IDs of the music services used, in this case Spotify, Deezer and Tidal. Once the Output and Destination Services have been entered, the transfer can be initiated. In the test situation, the Spotify account had accumulated 182 playlists with a total of 7,146 songs. The transfer took five minutes.
Dropped off the ride. Tune My Music clearly shows how many and which songs cannot be found on the service being transferred. Kaj Laaksonen
Hit accuracy was much better than expected. 60 of Deezer’s and 184 of Tidal’s were not transferred. The same percentages were 0.84 percent and 2.5 percent. Not bad at all, especially as Tune My Music clearly showed which songs were left untransferred. Almost all of them were such cases that they were not particularly missed.
The transfer should not be made more than once. Tune My Music does not replace old playlists with new ones, but makes copies of them. An error occurred with Deezer and the playlists were moved twice, resulting in 364 playlists instead of 182. It was unclear whether they could be removed other than individually.
Competitors for the test
So how did Spotify’s competitors fare in terms of the listening experience?
The reporter who tests has usually listened to their music on a computer with decent active speakers – or more often with headphones. In a separate home theater room, music should preferably be listened to directly from Denon’s amplifier, whose HEOS system supports most music services. The third way is to listen through the Nvidia Shield Pro media player on your home theater. The phone should be listened to mainly in the car via Bluetooth.
Both Deezer and Tidal offer an app for Android. However, it quickly became clear that they were nowhere near as versatile and polished as Spotify. The biggest problems were how the app can control other devices.
Spotify finds by throwing players on the same network, in this case Denon’s Amplifier, Shield, and Chromecast. The call is simply handled so that when listening to a song, you can choose which device you want to direct the music to from the app.
Neither Deezer nor Tidal found any of the players on the same network. There were also problems with Bluetooth.
A solution to the problem was found in Denon’s HEOS system, which has a reasonably well-functioning Android app. Deezer and Tidal just had to visit to link to it. However, the use is nowhere near as easy, flexible and secure as with Spotify, which was also linked to HEOS, but only in the background, as the use was still done with the Spotify application.
Freckle. All the songs in light gray are on Qobuz’s lists, even though they aren’t really listenable. For transfer services like Tune My Music, it looks like the same songs are on Qobuz, when in reality they weren’t transferred. It’s a really nasty trick for the consumer, because choosing a service can depend crucially on how much of your favorite songs are in the new service.
Both the Deezer and Tidal apps are also available for Shield, but using them is stupid because it requires an image on the display device to use, which is otherwise completely useless when listening to music. Therefore, operation via the amplifier in particular is essential. In that sense, Deezer and Tidal were disappointing after Spotify.
Sound quality matters
Spotify has a lot of curated playlists and the action is made social. With Deezer and Tidal, listening is more private, which isn’t necessarily just a bad thing. They show quite clearly that there are simply a fraction of the number of Spotify users.
The promise of better sound quality kept itching for both Deezer and Tidal. The difference is quickly noticed. Due to Spotify’s low bit rate, the music sounds both unnecessarily pungent and even at the same time. Another observation was that, regardless of hardware, Spotify was included in a larger volume by default than Deezer and Tidal.
The better the equipment, the more comfortable Deezer and Tidal sounded compared to Spotify. So at least on average, because the quality varied quite a bit across all services.
While it’s harder to use Deezer and Tidal, it’s really hard to get back to listening to Spotify.
The story has been done together with Mikrobit. Iltalehti and Mikrobitti are part of the Alma Media Group.
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