Qobuz: Music & Editorial

I love Quboz! I only have a few minor issues with it. The first being the catalog is not as expansive as I’d like. I have a lot of indie artists I love that aren’t on the platform at all which is a major bummer for me. The other issue is the queue. Quboz has the weirdest queue I’ve ever had to use and I absolutely hate it. If I play a song off an album, just the song, it adds the entire album to the queue. Which would be great if I wanted to listen to the whole album through. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of albums I like listening to all the way through. If you’ve added a song to your queue after you play a song off an album, the song you just queued won’t play until the album has finished. There’s also no easy way to clear said queue without it stopping the song you’re listening to. Sometimes when you add things to a queue, it won’t always play the next song. This is an area that needs a fair bit of improvement. Other than that, the app is great and works well. I like the service but I am very sad to see such a small selection of current indie artists. All in all would recommend, though.

Edit: I wrote the below review and then the buffering-type issue seems to have stopped, I’m guessing they’ve updated it. So I’ve upgraded this review from 3 to 5 stars. Overall I am very pleased and recommend this app to music lovers. My tastes are extreme wide and I the music selection is everything I need. I would like the ability to create my own stations but apparently that’s not the philosophy of this app. The music quality is noticeably better than Apple Music Lossless and the music discovery and curation is excellent for knowledgeable music lovers who want to expand their horizons (far better than Apple Music). For example I get introduced to jazz and classical that don’t bore me to death with their self importance, and don’t get spoon fed faddish indie junk. But it routinely decides to not play songs, and often times will never play them again even if I restart my phone, as if the error is cached in memory. There’s no apparent reason for it, my phone, connection and storage are fine. This really isn’t acceptable considering these often are my favorite songs, clicked off quickly while sitting at a red light or when I need a boost at work. I don’t need the frustration and don’t think I’ll keep this once the trial expires unless someone can help me fix the issue.

As an audiophile, let me start off by saying that the sound quality Qobuz provides is second to none. When I listen to streaming music from Qobuz on my home stereo through Roon, it is practically indistinguishable from a high quality SACD or a Hi-rez FLAC downloaded to my hard drive. Though high quality sound is more difficult to deliver on any kind of smartphone app than it is on a home stereo with good speakers, Qobuz delivers higher quality sound through its iOS app than any of its competitors and I’ve tried all of them over the years. Their iOS app, on the other hand, is buggy and lacks many of the features that would make it useful, especially with respect to Apple CarPlay integration. For example, there is no shuffle button on the vehicle’s screen in CarPlay and the app tends to crash if you attempt to play a track using the menu on the vehicle’s touchscreen rather than your phone (a major safety issue). Another feature that is lacking from the iOS app is the ability to change the sorting order for tracks in a playlist within the app itself. This can only be done using a computer. If these issues were fixed, Qobuz would definitely be the best solution for anyone who wants to listen to high quality music using their iPhone, particularly if Qobuz were to improve their music discovery features as well. As it is, though I would strongly recommend Qobuz to anyone who wants to listen to high quality music, I would be more hesitant to recommend it to anyone who primarily listens to music in their car.