I really wanted this to work.

I was ready to make the switch.
Canceled Spotify. Subscribed to Tidal.

First disappointment: Tidal doesn’t work on Amazon Echo devices (at least here in Germany). A bit of a bummer, but fine—I mostly listen on my phone with headphones or on my Hi-Fi anyway. Yes, I know about the unofficial workaround skill. It works… ish. The UX is a nightmare, and since you can’t control playback on one device from another (which, by the way, I just learned was announced four years ago?!), it’s a hard no from me.

Then the app started crashing on my phone (Google Pixel 7a). Multiple times. Sometimes when skipping songs, twice while playing via Android Auto, and a few more times because of a completely unspecified “Network error.” Cool.

I thought, alright—plan B. I’ll just use it on my laptop and Hi-Fi system.

The MacOS app? Actually pretty good. Spend a couple hours clicking together my playlists.

Now for some actual listening.

I connect to my receiver (Denon AVR-S750H) via Tidal Connect. Sounds great - except Dolby Atmos wasn’t working for some reason, but whatever, I'm fine with stereo. Then I skip to another song.

The stream pauses. I tap the new song again. It starts playing—but on my MacBook. Not the receiver. So I switch the output back to the receiver. I skip a song. It disconnects. Again.

Every. Single. Time. I. Skip. A. Song. I have to reconnect to the device.

What the fuck is this absolute dumpster fire of an implementation? I don't need features left and right, I just want to be able to listen to music.

And now here I am, seriously contemplating crawling back to fucking Spotify, because at least that worked.

I'm sorry, I know that I'm probably on the wrong subreddit to rant, I just needed to let off some steam.