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###TL;DR After two months of using Qobuz every day, I’m returning to Idagio.

Also: If you were hoping for an analysis of the difference in sound quality... Sorry! I’m not qualified to assess that.

###Introduction Actually, I never cancelled my Idagio subscription – the only music streaming service I had ever used until now – but after more than three years of listening only to “classical” (in the wide sense), I was starting to crave some jazz. Hence my testing of Qobuz. And it has been wonderful for soothing that craving. I should be good for another couple of years of only classical.

###Classical offerings #####Comparing the catalogs During these past two months, in addition to jazz, I also explored the classical offerings of the Qobuz catalog. Compared with Idagio’s, there are pros and cons. But in general, Qobuz isn’t satisfactory for me.

One particular case in favour of Qobuz: it has 61 albums from Palazetto Bru Zane. That was easy to find because you can directly consult the list of releases by record label. That’s of no use for big labels like Naxos and DG, because there are just too many albums. But for small labels, it can be very interesting to browse that way. Idagio has very few albums from Bru Zane, it seems. It’s nearly impossible to ascertain exactly how many because there is no index by label on Idagio. (Entering a label’s name in the search field doesn’t work either.) A few times I have searched on Idagio for titles that I knew had been released by Bru Zane and got a hit only twice: Gounod’s Cinq-Mars (which I already had) and Offenbach’s La Périchole, which I was therefore able to listen to, after downloading the booklet. (See the “Booklets” section, below.)

However, overall, it has been the reverse: whatever I searched in both tended to yield more choices in Idagio than Qobuz. I will list some examples in the next section. But please note: At least among those I was searching for, Idagio often had many more duplicates than Qobuz. Two kinds of duplicates, in fact: 1) Idagio often has duplicate entries for the very same album and/or recording (i.e. errors in the catalog), whereas that seemed to be a rare occurrence on Qobuz. 2) Having two or more recordings of a given work is an extremely widespread occurrence on Idagio. In fact, they boast about having 122 versions of Beethoven’s Fifth, and I guess it’s generally viewed as a very good thing by enthusiasts. (Idagio even had a unique feature where you could compare two recordings by instantly jumping back and forth between them as they play synchronously. It looks like they removed that feature, however. I can’t find any trace of it now except in independent blog posts from around 2021.) But having so many versions of given recordings makes comparing catalogs difficult. I got the impression that Qobuz has fewer instances where there are a great many different albums containing the same work, but... that’s just my impression at this time.

#####More examples of my search results from both services

Searched for	Idagio result	Qobuz result
Malcolm Fortsyth (composer)	None	1 album
Byong-Kon Kim (composer)	1 album	1 album ^1
Jimmy López [Bellido] (composer)	None	2 albums
Huang Ruo (composer)	4 albums	None
Lepo Sumera (composer)	10 albums	1 album
Johan Svendsen (composer)	55 albums	2 albums
Isao Tomita (composer, performer)	2 albums	6 albums ^2
Jan Václav Hugo Voříšek (composer)	30 albums	7 albums
William Vincent Wallace (composer)	15 albums	6 albums
Tamar Sagiv (cellist)	1 album	12 albums ^3
Mao Fujita (pianist)	18 albums ^4	10 albums
Belshazar's Feast, Sibelius, J	~9 albums	6 albums at least
Shostakovich “The Shot” + “The Human Comedy” + others	None ^5	1 album
Symphony No. 4, Scriabin, A (aka The Poem of Ecstasy)	More than 40 albums ^6
2 albums
Tri sestry (1998 opera by Peter Eötvös)	2 albums	1 albums

Note: In this table, I did not necessarily cite the exact search string(s) I used in each case.

^1 The same, rare, 1996 release from the Cambria label. ^2 Presented as four “Releases” plus one “Compilation” and one “Other”. ^3 12 solo albums, plus at least 3 mixed albums. ^4 Excluding duplicates but including singles. ^5 This is a recent Naxos CD (8.574590) of some Malmö Opera Chorus and Orchestra recordings, released 2025-09-09 according to Qobuz but 2025-10 according to Naxos. Not yet present on Idagio when search on 2025-10-10. Idagio usually gets Naxos releases quickly, so it will be interesting to see when this one shows up. ^6 Excluding duplicates.

###Other technical aspects #####Multi-track recordings The catalog’s content is not Qobuz’s only negative issue for me. There is also a technical one: on Qobuz, there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily (i.e. in one step) launch the playing of a multi-track recording (i.e. two or more tracks from a given album, comprising one work and excluding the album’s other works). On Idagio, you simply reach the recording’s page and select Play recording. (At first, I thought that Qobuz’s notion of “Release” might be equivalent to Idagio’s recordings, but it isn’t. A release on Qobuz is an album, or a track, or a compilation.) Since I always listen to entire recordings in one go – not individual tracks, nor more than one recording from an album in one sitting – Idagio’s combination of catalog structure and interface features is ideal for me.

#####Search function Idagio’s search function is first-rate; almost flawless. Designed for classical music. Like most, there’s only one input field initially, i.e. no “Advanced search” form. But you often get what you wanted immediately, among intelligently predicted results. However, if your search was for a prolific composer, for example, you’re presented with four lists: albums, playlists, works and recordings. If you select the latter, you can apply any combination of filters to whittle it down to recordings featuring one or more of certain conductors, soloists, orchestras or... works!

By contrast, Qobuz’s search function is limited, unpredictable, finicky and therefore, sometimes, extremely frustrating. For example, even if you type a title exactly as it appears in their catalog, you may get a result of zero. But if you start the same search string with with a double quotation mark, the work may appear, even before you type the closing quote. But for other titles, it will be the opposite: include a quotation mark and you get nothing; remove it and the work appears. The same quirks apply to searches for an artist’s or composer’s name. And when you do get some results, all you can do is sort the albums by release date or popularity. You can’t filter the list in any way, no matter how long it is.

#####Track duration This is one thing Idagio and Qobuz have in common: in both cases, their Web Player keeps showing the total duration of the currently playing track (along with the current position, of course) but their mobile app doesn’t. They show a countdown of the remaining time instead. So if you want to know the track’s total duration, you have to add those two numbers together in your head while they’re both changing. Not super difficult, but annoying.

#####Streaming directly to a streaming device “Qobuz Connect” is very nice. It’s essentially (maybe exactly) the same as what all other major streaming services had already been offering for a long time. It allows your streaming box or speaker to get the stream directly from Qobuz’s server, instead of going from their server to your phone or computer and then by Bluetooth to the speaker, while still using Qobuz’s own mobile app or Web Player as a controller. As soon as it became available for BluOS, I tried it with one of my Bluesound players and I liked it. But it doesn’t bring that much more functionality to what I could already do using the BluOS app.

Idagio doesn’t have the equivalent of “Qobuz Connect” (at least, not for BluOS), but I’ve hardly ever used Idagio’s own app either. I just use the Web Player. (And that has been the case with my Qobuz experimentation too.)

Idagio doesn’t offer any such feature, AFAIK.

#####Synchronization of controllers among devices With or without “Qobuz Connect”, you can run the mobile app or the Web Player on two or more devices at the same time and they will be synchronized together. Well... the timing of the playback in progress can be erratic, but all other information will match. Even if you don’t use two controllers at the same time, the synchronization is very useful to simply pick up on one device where you left off on another.

Idagio doesn’t offer any such feature.

#####Mobile App vs. Web Player Idagio’s mobile app (at least when used on a large tablet in landscape orientation) is almost identical to their Web player, with just about the same layout and features. And they haven’t changed at all during these past three and a half years. (At least, not that I could notice.)

Qobuz’s app is very different from its Web Player. I don’t know how often they get changed, but there happened to be one big change within my first two weeks of this trial: the system-generated playlists called My Weekly Q and My Daily Q were directly accessible from the Web Player when I started, but they were soon removed in a revamp of the service. From then on, I had to run the mobile app to save those as personal playlists, just to be able to use them in the Web Player.

Also, Qobuz’s Web Player only runs if your screen has a certain minimum resolution and only in landscape orientation. So, on a tablet it’s fine, but on a smallish phone it may not run. It doesn’t run on my S23 which, in landscape, does have a little more pixels in width than the minimum required, but the few pixels used by the phone’s navigation bar are deducted from that, leaving too few for Quobuz’s taste. So all I get is a message stating that I should use the app. This is not an issue for me because I wasn’t going to use Qobuz on my phone anyway. I never listen to music when I’m on the go; only at home.

I haven’t tried either Idagio’s or Qobuz’s desktop app because they don’t have one for Linux.

#####Booklets On both platforms, booklets are generally available when the label chooses to supply them.

On Idagio, you can always consult booklets from within the Web Player or the app and the reader works reasonably well. But you can always also download them if you prefer to use a different reader, possibly on a different device than the one you use to play Idagio, or simply because you want to save them for future reference.

On Qobuz, while you can also consult any available booklets, it appears that you can only save them if you bought the album. When consulting, you can only scroll through the pages using a scroll wheel or by dragging the tiny slider in the vertical scroll bar of the embedded reader. The reader doesn’t respond to keyboard keys like arrow-down or page-down, even after clicking on the booklet. Nor is there a way to directly jump to a certain page. It’s nearly unusable booklets with many pages.

###Non-technical aspects #####Remuneration of artists Idagio is the only platform that calculates royalties on a per-second basis rather than per-play, which is more fair to the artists in the case of works in the “classical” genre because those tend to be divided into much longer tracks than works in most other genres. Consequently, you never see Idagio in articles that rate the streaming services based on the amount they remit to the artists. But those same articles have been ranking Qobuz above all others, at least in the past couple of years, in terms of the absolute amount that the artists receive per play. (Leaving aside the fact that such articles never mention that streaming services remit royalties to the rights-holder of a work, which is generally the record label and not the artist(s) directly.)

#####Free usage Amazingly, Idagio can be used for free. When I tried it for one month, three years ago, I found that the expected advertising was in fact merely “promos”, i.e. in-house messages about the advantages of subscribing and so forth. There was only a small handful of different messages, so it got very tiresome hearing the same messages over and over. But they are not inserted before each track you play. They come after a certain amount of time of playing anything, so they may or may not come between two movements of a symphony, for example. Aside from that, you have access to all the same services and features as with a subscription, except for small differences such as being limited to their lowest “audio quality”, which is labelled MP3 192 Kbps, and having a very low limit on the number of personal playlists you can create, etc.

Qobuz offers a free month and it gives you absolutely all the same services and features as with a subscription. (I think.)

In both cases, you have to register. In Qobuz’s case, this includes supplying your payment method (which includes your real name, etc.) even though it’s not used for the first month. On Idagio, registering for a free account can be anonymous.

#####Subscription cost Idagio charges by the month and the first 14 days are free. You can’t pay on a yearly basis (which I would prefer), unless you do it by purchasing a gift card, in which case it can be for three, six or twelve months. But when I looked into it three years ago, it was a little more expensive to do it that way than to pay monthly. I also like the fact that Idagio charges me in Canadian dollars, which avoids the costly currency exchange fee from the credit card and also has the advantage of always costing me the exact same amount each month, rather than fluctuating with the exchange rate. In other countries, they’ll bill you in either USD or EUR.

Idagio also offers a Premium Audio plan and a Premium Audio + Video plan. They don’t differ much from the basic plan from my point of view.

With Qobuz you can pay monthly or for a year in advance, which is like getting two free months per year. And there has recently been a much-discussed promo to opt for three years paid in advance for a much reduced price. Also, they offer discounts for students and on plans that cover two or six accounts on the same plan. (AFAIK, Idagio doesn’t offer any kind of discount or multi-user plan.) Qobuz also charges me directly in Canadian dollars. I suppose they also bill in USD and/or EUR in other countries, but I haven’t looked into that as it doesn’t concern me.

Qobuz also offers the Sublime plan, which doesn’t seem to be any different except for including a discount of “up to 60%” on purchases of albums or tracks.

#####Downloading tracks for offline listening Both services offer the option to download tracks in their mobile app. I have not tried either.

#####Purchasing albums or tracks Idagio doesn’t sell anything other than a streaming subscription.

On Qobuz you can purchase DRM-free tracks or albums that will be yours to keep forever and, apparently, are playable even outside the Qobuz environment. I haven’t tried to buy anything yet, but I’ve checked the prices of some albums. They felt reasonable, even without any discount from the Sublime plan.

#####“Radio” or “Auto-play” mode Idagio uses at least two different terms to refer to the same thing. In any case, I have hardly tried it at all because it obviously leads to the system feeding you only one movement of any given work, followed by one movement from another work, which I can’t stand.

Qobuz also uses “Radio mode” and “Auto-play” to refer to the same thing. There are several ways to invoke it. In the app (not in the Web Player), on an artist’s or a playlist’s page, there is usually a ((∙)) icon that will launch the radio mode (or you can find the equivalent in the three-dot menu). Or you can simply enable “Auto-play” in your account’s settings before starting to play anything. Or – better yet – leave it disabled in your account settings and, in the Web Player, toggle “Auto-play” on or off at the bottom of the play queue panel. (One annoying thing about this, though, is that it tends to re-enable itself sneakily whenever you start a new queue, so you have to remember to check it every time and disable it if you want it to stop after playing all the your queue’s content.) Since I was using Qobuz to listen to jazz, I did use the radio / auto-play mode a few times and I liked it a lot. I let it go for quite a while before it started drifting into a rather unrelated style.

#####Personalized, system-generated playlists Both services generate playlists for you after you’ve listened to a few things. (It doesn’t take much, but don’t expect to find them during the first few days.)

Idagio does it weekly. (It used to be on Thursday, now it’s on Saturday.) You get three playlists based on what you’ve listened to during the past week. (I don’t know what it would do if you didn’t listen to anything for a week.) I find them pretty good for discovering works or even composer I had never heard of before. However, since I almost never want to hear something more than once, I soon realized that I should keep a precise list of what I do listen to and, when I check the week’s three playlist, I save them as personal playlists and prune them by removing works I’ve already listened to. (You can’t edit a system-generated playlist directly.) The number of tracks in each system-generated playlist varies quite a bit. Each one comprises anywhere from about 12 to about 30 tracks, and it doesn’t seem to be based on a target playing time either. But there’s a catch: only the first 6 tracks of any given recording is included in these playlists. So, whenever I come across a recording for which there are exactly 6 tracks in a list, I make sure to check the recording’s page to see if it actually contains more and, if so, I add the missing tracks to the playlist I started from. This is quite tedious and was getting frustrating, but this whole scheme of mine only worked for the first couple of years anyway, because it eventually got to the point where I was removing most of the content of those weekly playlists, keeping only the very few works that were new to me. So, eventually, I started doing the opposite: not saving most system-generated playlists at all, but rather just taking note of any new works they contain, for later consideration. Some weeks, I get nothing “new to me” at all. But that’s OK; I still have a backlog of several dozens of saved playlists to listen to.

Qobuz creates one weekly and one daily playlist for you. As I mentioned elsewhere, they used to be accessible from the Web Player, but now you have to use the app to get to them. Each playlist contains exactly 30 tracks. Since I’ve been listening only to jazz, these playlists therefore add up to about 2½ to 3 hours of play time, and I don’t know how it would handle classical works. (I strongly suspect that it would include only one track from any given work, unlike Idagio’s policy of including up to the first six tracks.) As with Idagio, you can’t directly edit a system-generated playlist, but you can simply save it as a personal list.

In both platforms, another advantage of saving a system-generated playlist as a personal one is that you can then access them directly from an outside platform (e.g. BluOS or Sonos).

###Conclusion I’ll probably keep Qobuz for a few more months, while I continue listening to the entire Billie Holiday – In Chronology series (I’m half-way through the 16 albums) and the 40-some other albums I’ve marked for consideration. Maybe also for some of those Bru Zane operas. After that, if I still keep it, it would be for the mere whim of having access to a quite comprehensive catalog that I can search for song titles or artists from the 1970s and 80s when I read or hear about them and they trigger memories from my youth. For example, recently and by total coincidence, I suddenly remembered the one and only time (it was over 40 years ago) when I phoned in to a radio station to ask about the song they had just played, because I had missed both times the host had said the title and the name of the group. I remember that I intended to buy the 45-RPM because the song was so good. But I didn’t find it in the store that week (it was by a flash-in-the-pan local band) and never heard the song again... until I found it on Qobuz. The song isn’t very good after all. But it was exciting just to find it.