Well, after a series of disappointments with Tidal, I have ended up cancelling our accounts there and sticking with Spotify. I actually found a decent widget in the app store that provides even more functionality than the embedded Spotify widget did. That widget was my biggest beef with Spotify, and what triggered my desire to seek something better.

As it turned out, at least from my experience with it, Tidal’s claims at having millions more songs is a bit deceiving. Sure, they do have more songs, but from what I’ve seen, it’s mostly because they offer most of the same albums and artists’ but add multiple versions of their albums in several different languages as well as the “US/English” versions. This will easily pad their “song count” numbers and I don’t think that’s right.

Tidal’s app and web interface are also a little harder to work with than Spotify, and I don’t have any friends over there either, so the social aspect was lost for me. Like Facebook, there’s advantages to having “everyone” on the same platform, even though this is probably only a minor factor, it does matter.

Kevin was also not a fan of Tidal. He grudgingly accepted the trial, but struggled with how he would get all of his music and playlists onto Tidal.

The “Hi Fi” option, which were included in my trial, was very nice, so I actually noticed little difference between the highest quality setting of Spotify songs on my devices compared to the Hi Fi versions of them on Tidal on the same devices. I’m sure true “audiophiles” can tell, or have much better audio hardware to play it on that reveals the differences, but I just didn’t notice much difference myself.

There are more factors, but I’ll stop there. We kept Spotify–the family plan–and we’re sticking with it. I still just don’t understand why they would drop the widget from their app… just to make the download smaller? To ease the amount of code the programmers had to work with? How much updating is needed for a simple widget that plays your music and playlists? I wouldn’t think it would add much more work, but then again I have no idea what features Spotify has planned for the future… Maybe there’s some new and amazing technology they’re working on that would make the old widget such a PITA to work with or update that they had to make this early cut to focus on what really matters most. I can’t imagine what that might be though. I’ll guess we’ll just wait and see.