Tidal App discussion

It might not be ready for all users but i am using it now since 8 months daily.
here is a how-to that should help you to overcome possible limitations and be happy with the current stage

Tidalplayer

working features:
it is possible to install, login, search and play music, create locally stored playlists

not implemented:
managing playlists, play videos, offline mode

initial start

on first startup you will be lead to settings page
click on login
login should lead you to tidal page where you can enter e-mail / pwd
on succuess you get guided to link you device page
click on continue leads you back to app
(either settings page or personal page)

after login, you might see a crippled Personal page
navigate to settings

  • disable new homescreen
  • select add to playlist & play as default play action

restart the application
ALLWAYS after start wait untill all the loading is finished, means all the turning circles goes away
this can take 30 seconds.

usage

personal page

similar to home page in android tidal player
you can customize the shown sections via settings page
(e.g. i do not show faw tracks and pop playlists)
each section e.g. Top Artists is clickable and toggles a filter field to simplify navigation to your fav artists, albums etc.

search
search page allows you to search tidal
search is rather slow, again wait until all data was received and turning circles do disappear

remark: currently search breaks after 3/4 search requests. you can recognize this when no turning wheel is shown after click on search
currently only restart of app does solve this issue.

i use search only to find new stuff and then use favorite (the star icon on album / artist / playlist) to add this to my personal page
personal page get only loaded on start, means marking e.g. artist as favorite will be shown on next app start

playlist
shows the current playlist
when ever you click play (e.g. play artist, play album) the songs are added to the playlist.
(+) does add songs to playlist
(>) play replaces the content of playlist
both buttons (on album and artist page) should give you a haptic feedback

playlist can be stored, via pull down menue: saved playlist and also loaded from there

player
can be shown via pull down menu: show player
clicking on song name toggles the size of the player
next to (>) play button is the fav (*) button to mark songs as favs

known issues:

connection issue
there are multiple events that can cause player to stop, which are currently not handled:

a) every now and then tidal does change the URLs of songs
b) token expires and needs to be refreshed
c) network connection switches

in all cases you can navigate within the playlist, but the player does not react on the changed song.
player seems to get out of sync with playlist index.
playing, forward buttons do now work.

there are two options to get tidal-player work again:

  1. do some navigation on personal page until you see a notification that login failed.
    then navigate to settings page and click on re-init session.
    a notification that login was successful should be shown and turning circles should indicate a re-init of the player.
    click on e.g. song 1 in your playlist, if player gets updated you are ready to go.

  2. restart player

failure during login

in case you do not get the login page but sfos page loaded there are two possible root causes

  1. tidal api has changed, this is not recoverable, you will need to wait for an app update.

this happened once in the last 8 months

  1. not sure if captive page is the correct term to use here, but it did happen in the past that the initial login would fail (re-authentication on start works stable) and either you cant see the page to enter pwd, or to connect device.
    in such cases, only reboot of device does help

my working configuration:

ā€˜old’ homescreen
add to playlist and play
low audio quality
auto load last playlist

fav tracks on home disabled
stay logged in activated

https://app-share.mailbox.org/appsuite/api/share/08d2625f05be49658fff5385be4940fe88af23762efe5f9b/1/8/MTYz/MTYzLzQ5MzQ

the link works on my laptop but not in sfos browser :frowning:

6 Likes

Cool - now it works! :heart_eyes: Thanks a lot, one less Android app!

3 Likes

So, how do we update the one in chum?

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now that the rpm build did work locally, i wanted to update the folder names in \external to be version independent.
once that is done, we could go for chum.

i did contact @contra few days back about my plan but have no response yet.
once he confirms i will do it and wait for his merge.

then it’s chum time

6 Likes

Sorry for being only silent reader. First, many thanks to pawel.spoon!! for working on the app and giving support :slight_smile:

That is really great. I plan for this weekend to have a look.

5 Likes

i was facing one more issue:
as last test i did uninstall tidalplayer, cleaned .config and .local, installed the app, everything works but loading and storing of playlists locally not.
installation does not recreate .local

i took the install from chum (which requires all priviliges) and after installation there is .local .. tidal aplyer. if i uninstall and install my current version, then playlists are working. and funilly the last current is visible.

there was an error in .desktop file:
Permissions=Internet;Audio
but missing
OrganizationName=oarg.pawelspoon

Update:

i am now using harbour-tidalplayer as orgname

have added support for mybackup which should be able to restore your local playlists

and removed 2 imports of nemomobile.mpris (while we depend on amber..)

here is the last pre-chum version i hope :smiley:

link removed. chum contains the latest version

4 Likes

Many thanks for the work!
Working much better now than ever before.

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Thanks pawel for your work. I was stuck with openrepos version and with the testing version not being able to log in. Version from the link above works really great as far as I can tell. Thanks a lot!!! Good work!!

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I just got my github repos up-to-date and with conrad’s latest build file it builds properly: Release Latest Build Ā· poetaster/harbour-tidalplayer Ā· GitHub

I’m testing on chum, now.

EDIT: I tagged incorrectly, so I’ll do that again, but also:

  1. Doing a clean git clone and git submodule update --init --recursive I can build and deploy properly with the sdk
  2. Login and device link work correctly, yeah!

Good work @pawel.spoon and @contra

Sadly, it still doesn’t actually play audio on the rephone/volla 22. I’m going to test on the xperia, but it’s always giving me:

onTriggered:1104 - TidalApi: Resetting trackPlayInProgress flag (timeout)

when I try to ā€˜play now’ on a track.

EDIT: just tested on xperia 10iii from chum (0.3.0, tagged correctly) and it starts but I don’t get a proper login … the web auth redirects to the jolla page. I’m running 5.0.0.68 on that phone.

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Ok, I can’t get it to work on either phone, although login does work correctly on both phones. i get backend errors (ā€˜item’) on the xperia but don’t see those errors on the rephone. In any case, the chum build seems fine.

I will test it then
Check the errors later

I was wondering if it’s only because I don’t have a paid account? I only have a trial account for tidal….

Uninstalled, did not clean directories
Installed from chum testing.
Crash on first start.
Runs on second and plays :slight_smile:

Jolla page on login means : exception during loading

When that happens, only restart phone did help me.

aah that could be that is a variation i never did test

maybe a feature on homescreen is not available and fails

1 Like

Ok, I’ve pushed it to chum. There are NO changes from me in 0.3.0. I just updated the github build file.

Sounds like it should work for most people? Good thing I mostly listen to ā€˜records’ on a ā€˜turntable’ :slight_smile:

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When I refresh Chum it finds no new updates, when I check Tidal it says it’s up-to-date.
Was this still Chum-Testing, or? I’d like to try the new version! :blush:

Yes, it takes some time for it to get from chum testing since I can’t push directly. rinigus or piggz will do that.

If you want to try the new version, go to chum settings and enable ā€˜testing’. After installing tidal, don’t forget to put it back to normal so you don’t pull a bunch of stuff from testing.

1 Like

All in all, a great update! I think it might make sense to state (in the read me?) what conditions you’re testing under. I’ve never been able to actually use the app, but see that others use it, so it’s a question of what conditions, I would guess.

In any case, the build is really clean now with dependencies managed by you so I’m happy to do the little bits for distribution:)

2 Likes

i was not aware that there is even a free account, did create one. can log in, get items error.
i have disabled all but popular lists on homescreen and still get the error.

i can search, can navigate to album, can click play, this will populate the playlist

playing does not work

so perfectly reproducible

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Same error as for me. After having a full account (and the new version), everything was fine.

1 Like