My favourite thing about Qobuz is they have a store where you pay money and they give you audio files, like in the old days. So you can pay for your music then keep it without an ongoing subscription.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2025
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While there are many reasons to dislike (or outright avoid) Apple - if you purchase music from them, it’s DRM-free and useable anywhere.
I believe they were one of the first official channels to do this.
Still, hadn’t heard of Quobuz and will check them out!
While true, and I have a lot of DRM-free music that I’ve bought from Apple, the difference is that getting music purchased from Apple onto your computer in a usable format is a bit of a pain, and it’s all lossy. Music from Qobuz can be downloaded directly from their site after purchasing, in lossless FLAC format, and many of their albums are available in high-res 24-bit and/or 96 kHz format as well.
Apple Music in its current form is basically a direct evolution out of iTunes. It's a very old feature.
I know Apple has a music store. But if I use Android and Linux, how do I access it?
Android phones with access to the google play store can download Apple Music, which then has DRM free music you can buy, then you can transfer to your Linux computer.
Alternatively there is an Apple Music website I believe that has direct downloads to computers, I don’t know if it supports Linux files though.
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I feel I should mention Bandcamp, which gives 70% of a sale directly to the artist. In the music world that's a lot. All DRM free and in most audio formats you could want. My process when buying music is usually: bandcamp > qobuz (or similar) > if all else fails... use other means. I'll also skip step one and two depending on the artist :p
Yeah Bandcamp is great. They also do Bandcamp Friday events where all the revenue goes to the artist.
The problem is it's really hard to find any mainstream bands on there. Presumably most of them sign away those rights when they get a label.
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I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it's a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.
Which features does it miss compared to Spotify?
Qobuz's audio quality is a game changer. I had some technical issues with it with glitches short pauses in playback awhile back when I tried it; hopefully those are worked out now. It's great if you know exactly what you want to listen too. It's well known for lacking good algorithms for music discovery. I use Tidal and really like the daily discovery feature, automated Playlists, and the "track radio" that will give you a large list of songs similar to the exact song you are listening to. I've heard similar laments from people looking to switch from Spotify to Qobuz.
The only deal-breaker for me was that the android app doesn't persist its play state, so if I pause and do other stuff on my phone, it usually loses its place.
I mean, Spotify is a publicly traded Swedish company.. but it is worth noting that Qobuz is French and that the original creators still seem to retain both control and ownership
The number one thing I've been missing are Spotify jams. Spotify also has a wider selection of music, but tbh it's rare for Spotify to have something that Qobuz doesn't. Spotify also has lyrics, playlist folders, and audiobooks; though tbh I haven't checked to see if Qobuz has the latter.
Spotify Connect is a feature I use extensively that nobody else even comes close to doing as well (even though the Spotify implementation leaves much to be desired). Why does nobody else support controlling the player on my PC from another computer?
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I chose this service to replace my yt music subscription, and I have nothing but praise for their service, the quality of the music or their ethics.
I’ve preferred Qobuz to Tidal since they were hocking MQA snake oil and lying about being lossless. Tidal eventually stopped using MQA, but I can’t help feel leftover ick at their dishonesty.
MQA was so weird, replacing a perfectly fine lossless open codec that plays on everything with a proprietary lossy codec that plays on barely anything. Also, so many people suddenly telling you that MQA sounds better than FLAC.
I once wrote a downloader for Tidal and always "downgraded" to 16-bit FLAC when I detected the "high quality" version is in MQA format.
I've been using Qobuz for a couple of years and I love it. Great audio quality, has 90% of any music I'm looking for, and seems to be far less morally bankrupt than many alternatives.
Throwing out there that I use qobuz with Strawberry player on Linux and it works great.
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For anyone else who decides to give Qobuz a try, I wouldn't recommend using TuneYourMusic to transfer playlists and favorites. A ton of songs were transfered but just say unavailable in Qobuz. They have a partnership that let's you transfer for free using Soundiiz, so I'd try that instead.
Otherwise I'm enjoying it so far. The UI is nice, and search actually functions, so thats a big plus over Tidal. You can listen to full quality audio in the browser client, which I like since Zen Browser just added a nice media player UI in the side bar.
Edit: Retried my transfer using the free Soundiiz transfer and it worked perfectly, even found a song that TuneYourMusic completely failed to transfer. My only remaining issue is the fact that there's no button to shuffle your favorites tracks. You have to choose one, then shuffle. Minor, but something the other options offer.
Too bad they block VPNs
I use proton for VPN and qobuz works for me! I've had a couple of other bugs but streaming and downloading both work!
I use Proton as well but it won't even let me sign up and explicitly says it's because of the VPN.
I use Surfshark and don't have problems with it 99% of the time. I think you probably just have to have the VPN off for signing up and logging in (I've noticed zero issues when I'm already logged in).
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Qobuz is pretty great for music downloads. Which I think is the real value they have. I'm able to get pretty high quality flac files for new releases from them.
This is great to see. I ended up moving to Tidal from Spotify, and even though there are some nice to have features missing from Tidal (an equivilant to spotify's sync between devices/speakers as well as a better Android Auto experience), it's a far superior experience.
Quobuz is also on my radar, but they've traditionally lacked in the music catalog space. I need to give them a try again now that it's been a few years.
That said, Tidal barely has Linux clients and I don't think I've seen much movement for Quobuz on Linux, unless I've just missed it.
I moved from Spotify to tidal as well. Tidal is fine except for their catalogue mess. They tend to group different artists with same name to a single artist. Here and there I feedback them, they correct it in a week or so but the first next album is wrong again. But I'm glad that at least it pays music owners better and doesn't throw money at shit podcasts and such
i love tidal so much <3 it's lacking a bit in japanese artists compared to spotify but that's not a dealbreaker for me
There is Tidal Hi-Fi on linux, but I suspect that's what you mean by 'barely'
Yep! It's a good app overall, even has some improvements over what is shipped on macOS.
https://github.com/Nokse22/high-tide is new and promising for a better experience overall. I'd always prefer native over electron.
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It works well, what do you want more? Sure, it's not official but the most of the important bits are official since at it's core it's a web app.
Absolutely! It works fairy well. A little clunky since the Linux support is bolted on after, but it's not noticeably worse than the macOS experience. The extra options it offers over what tidal ships to macOS are also nice.
These non-native electron apps are all kinda junky for native music listening anyway. (This is a problem with Spotify's desktop app as well)
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I run Qobuz through a roon server on my Linux pc and it works great. I also have qobuz set up through strawberry, but it's nice to be able to switch the output on the fly between different audio setups in my house (between my office setup and my bluesound streamer in the living room). The interface for roon is nice, but I get that it's kinda expensive and there are cheaper ways to achieve the same thing. I like to stream while I'm biking on my indoor trainer and sometimes it's nice to spin up a few songs and let roon take the wheel to keep the vibe going. I can also stream qobuz through roon to my Google home devices, but it doesn't stream bit perfect.
All that to say, I like qobuz and roon is pretty solid as well, albeit an extravagance and totally not necessary. The writeups qobuz has are also solid.
I do think the qobuz app interface leaves something to be desired.
Oh boy, I have wanted to purchase Roon server for probably 10 years now but haven't pulled the trigger. I haven't really looked at it in a while either. I now wonder how much it's changed since. Wow, it's $829 for a lifetime now! I wanna say it was like $400 when I first wanted it. I knew i should have!
I used to use Subsonic, then it was abandoned and felt like I needed something better. I ended up on a fork of it called Navidrome which is pretty impressive and are doing some great work improving things lately like adding in more tags to the original subsonic API to do more. The best app Symfonium also came out only a few years ago and is incredible now. It offers soooo much it's kind of crazy. It also opted to make use of the new API, which allows more as well. One day I'll move to Roon.
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How is qobuz's music recommendation? I've been wanting to get off of spotify, but I listen to a lot of niche music and spotify's recommendation engine still allows me to discover new music. I also scrobble all my plays to last.fm and listenbrainz, but I don't think either of them have the userbase to get me the recommendations I need
Qobuz is sound quality and being able to buy music without DRM, not discovery. I use my friends to find music for me, instead. It's a good service.
Been using Qobuz for several months now. Pretty happy with it overall so far. You can get full audio quality via browser, which is great since lots of services have poor Linux support.
Same here
I loved last FM when it came out, best recommendation engine in its days. Then they kinda died and reborn into you tube powered.
Moved to Spotify, then the paid bit rate was down graded.
Then moved to Deezer, but the buffering and errors after a few hours play are really annoying.
This week my qobuz trial was over, so I cancelled Deezer and I'm paying for qobuz.
Streaming services are kinda a commodity now, the catalogs are basically the same, except Pandora that had a better coverage for Nina Pastori than others. But this also changed from time to time.
Hope they add a listen with friends feature so i can switch over. Use this too often
thats from an old unused distrokid account. i hid songtitles cuz they are noob songs. Too bad phone has no easy way to just censor the middle column so i can show the entire thing. 1 cent per stream is good. for as bad as google is, Youtube red and youtube are among the best for amount paid. A bunch of services in china, india, africa etc its like 1000 plays for a cent. spotify is also on the cheap side and takes 5 or 6 streams for a cent. There is also often huge variation within the same service. A youtube ad may be 1 cent for a song and then 0.1 cents for the same song. country may play a role.
anyway, havent done it in forever but about to get back in.
i forget what tidal is like and that artist account didnt have anything catch on tidal (nor anywhere else. was probably my least effective artist account ever).
Spotify actually stopped paying anything at all to artists that have less than a thousand streams
The article mentions streaming, but anyone know how much of purchases go to the artist? I'm not interested in streaming, but their store looks attractive.
Also, can I redownload the music later? Or is it a one and done deal? Just thinking about backups.
I only can answer your second question. You can redownload your purchases at any time. Music will remain in your library forever until one day licensing will take it away from you.
Qobuz has been very transparent - when you complete a purchase, they warn and recommend you to download it as soon as you can because license revocation can remove that music from your account. They’re my preferred platform for buying music.
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Unfortunately they're not available everywhere.
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